In September of last year, the journal Nature published the article “Population genomics of the Viking world,” by Ashot Margaryan and a horde of colleagues.
The authors of the DNA study reported on their nearly decade-long research project sequencing the genomes of 442 individuals in more than 80 archaeological sites from the Bronze Age (c. 2400 B.C.E.) through the Early Modern period (c. 1600 C.E.) across Europe and Greenland, including Viking Age individuals in Scandinavia and across Europe and Greenland that were buried in Viking style or with Viking grave goods. They analyzed the results in conjunction with data from 1,118 ancient and 3,885 present-day individuals.
“Vikings in the glow of the midnight sun” (c. 1914) by William Frederick Ritschel (American, 1864-1949) [Public domain]
Margaryan, a special consultant at the Danish National Genome Center, is quoted by the University of Cambridge Research website: “We carried out the largest ever DNA analysis of Viking remains to explore how they fit into the genetic picture of Ancient Europeans before the Viking Age. The results were startling and some answer long-standing historical questions and confirm previous assumptions that lacked evidence.”
The relatively wide temporal scope of the data enabled a mapping of genetic change within specific areas over time. By examining the genetic material of not only the Viking Age, but also earlier and later populations, the authors were able to draw conclusions about increasing diversity during the Viking period.
As Tara Wu writes in Smithsonian Magazine, “The results showed that Viking identity didn’t always equate to Scandinavian ancestry.”
“Communities with mixed ancestries”
Genetic information from Viking Age individuals in Denmark and Sweden shows that they had “greater affinity” to inhabitants of Anatolia – the Asian part of modern-day Turkey – than their local Iron Age predecessors did. Together with evidence of East-Asian and Siberian genetic material appearing in Swedish, Norwegian, and Baltic groups, this shows “subtle differences in ancestry and gene flow from both the south and east” coming into Scandinavia during the Viking period, which saw the first appearance of individuals with greater than 50% South European ancestry in Denmark and Sweden.
Comparing the Viking Age individual genomes to those of modern populations, the authors found “affinities to present-day Saami populations” and evidence of “genetic contacts between Saami groups and other Scandinavian populations.” As Science summarized the results, “several individuals in Norway were buried as Vikings, but their genes identified them as Saami, an Indigenous group genetically closer to East Asians and Siberians than to Europeans.”
The DNA study showed Viking inclusion of western peoples as well as eastern. Individuals buried “in Scandinavian fashion” in Orkney, Scotland, during the Viking Age were found to be “genetically similar to present-day Irish and Scottish populations” with no Scandinavian ancestry at all or with mixed Scandinavian and Pictish ancestry.
When examining “Viking genetic legacy in populations today,” the authors found limited Scandinavian ancestry outside of Scandinavia, including up to 5% in Poland and not more than 6% in England. On the other hand, North Atlantic ancestry – such as that of the Vikings with Pictish ancestry buried in Orkney – is still found throughout the Nordic countries; today’s Norwegians have 12 to 25% and Swedes have 10%.
More isolated inland and northern areas of Scandinavia show less genetic diversity than the more populous maritime trading centers, where diversity increased throughout the course of the Viking Age.
The high genetic heterogeneity in coastal communities implies increased population size, extending a previously proposed urbanization model for the Late Viking Age city of Sigtuna (which suggested that more-cosmopolitan trading centres were already present at the end of the Viking Age in Northern Europe) both spatially and further back in time.
The Viking Age’s urban areas, where people from varied backgrounds met and mingled, show a “strong genetic variation” in comparison to the “relatively homogenous” areas with limited outside contact.
Remarking on the intermingling of genetic material in the Viking Age individuals, the authors write, “It is likely that many such individuals were from communities with mixed ancestries, thrown together by complex trading, raiding and settling networks that crossed cultures and the continent.”
At this time, a firm conclusion can’t be made to fully explain the finding of greater frequency of black hair in Viking Age individuals as compared to present-day Danish individuals, but one possibility suggested by the authors is that it may be due to “more ethnic diversity in the Viking Age sample.”
The study concludes by noting that many of the Viking Age individuals examined “have high levels of non-Scandinavian ancestry, which suggests ongoing gene flow across Europe.”
“A shared culture but not a shared identity”
Study co-author Martin Sikora from the University of Copenhagen is quoted by the University of Cambridge’s Research saying, “We found that Vikings weren’t just Scandinavians in their genetic ancestry, as we analysed genetic influences in their DNA from Southern Europe and Asia which has never been contemplated before. Many Vikings have high levels of non-Scandinavian ancestry, both within and outside Scandinavia, which suggest ongoing gene flow across Europe.”
“It’s pretty clear from the genetic analysis that Vikings are not a homogenous group of people,” said Eske Willerslev – professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, director of the Center of Excellence in Genetics, and leader of the Viking genome study – to National Geographic.
Many of them are “mixed individuals” with Scandinavian and Southern European or Saami ancestry. Some, such as individuals “buried in Scotland with Viking swords and equipment” are actually “genetically not Scandinavian at all.” The Viking identity “has its origins in Scandinavia, but it’s spreading out and associating with other groups of peoples around the world” in a way that is demonstrably diverse.
“This study changes the perception of who a Viking actually was,” Willserlev told Research. “No one could have predicted these significant gene flows into Scandinavia from Southern Europe and Asia happened before and during the Viking Age.”
Reflecting on the genetic diversity shown in the study’s Viking Age individuals, Baylor University assistant professor of history and archaeology Davide Zori told National Geographic, “People can adopt and adapt to dominant cultural modes of survival.” Becoming a Viking “was one of the primary modes of surviving and being successful economically and politically.” For example, the genetically Pictish individuals in the study appear to have become Vikings without genetic relationships to the groups they joined; they were accepted into Viking circles despite having no Scandinavian ancestry.
The study also underscores the wide practice of intermarriage and integration during the Viking Age. Study co-author Jette Arneborg of the National Museum of Denmark told Science that DNA from Greenland burials “shows a mix of Scandinavian men from what is now Norway and women from the British Isles.” The non-Scandinavian women seem to have been subsumed into the Viking way, as both burials and burial goods are completely Scandinavian. Arneborg says that the women in Greenland “have British genes but we can’t see them in the archaeology.”
“Scandinavian diasporas established trade and settlement stretching from the American continent to the Asian steppe,” study co-author Søren Sindbæk of the Moesgaard Museum in Denmark told Research. “They exported ideas, technologies, language, beliefs and practices and developed new socio-political structures. Importantly our results show that ‘Viking’ identity was not limited to people with Scandinavian genetic ancestry.”
Kiona N. Smith of Ars Technica writes that the study’s genetic evidence underscores a Viking identity as “people who set sail to raid, trade, fish, and settle” and who “saw themselves as members of distinct groups, with a shared culture but not a shared identity.” The greater genetic diversity in Viking Age urban centers “indicates that Vikings mingled pretty freely, and on a large scale, with the people they encountered on their travels. They were also willing to welcome outsiders into their own culture.”
Cat Jarman of the Oslo Museum of Cultural History told Science, “These identities aren’t genetic or ethnic, they’re social. To have backup for that from DNA is powerful.”
Erin Blakemore of National Geographic begins her article on the genetic study by pointing out that
there remains a persistent, and pernicious, modern myth that Vikings were a distinctive ethnic or regional group of people with a “pure” genetic bloodline. Like the iconic “Viking” helmet, it’s a fiction that arose in the simmering nationalist movements of late 19th-century Europe. Yet it remains celebrated today among various white supremacist groups that use the supposed superiority of the Vikings as a way to justify hate, perpetuating the stereotype along the way.
“A Viking-flavored religion”
Unfortunately, this Romantic nationalist narrative is found in various versions of Ásatrú and Heathenry in the United States today. Multiple American strains of the new religious movement that seeks to revive, reconstruct, or reimagine the ancient polytheism of Northern Europe embrace the idea that the multivalent old Germanic paganism – and especially the Viking Age version of it preserved in poetry and fiction of medieval Iceland – is the indigenous religion of an imagined Northern European people.
“The Ride of the Valkyrie” (1890) by William T. Maud (British, 1865-1903) [Public domain]
It’s not only the neo-völkisch versions of Heathenry that fixate on “our glorious forefathers” as “Arch-Heathens” who shared a worldview that contemporary American practitioners of post-1972 Heathenry must honor as a sort of aspirational Platonic ideal. There’s a widespread obsession with origins, with antiquity as a marker of authenticity, and with supposedly undiluted purity of the long-ago time as more “tru.” Scandinavians of the Viking Age are hailed in ritual as ancestors who fought wicked Christian invaders – an oppositional narrative sometimes veering into condemnation of “desert religions” that shares rhetoric with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
Common American Heathen practices such as assuming Viking aliases taken from the historical fiction of the Icelandic sagas underscore the embrace of pseudo-Nordicity on this side of the Atlantic. Practitioner emphasis on “garb” sometimes spills over into the costuming of historical reenactment. “Viking” beards and tattoos are common markers of belonging, as are various forms of Viking-inspired jewelry. Indeed, Viking-ness is so strongly embraced that Jefferson Calico of the University of the Cumberlands Department of Christian Studies termed American Heathenry “a Viking-flavored religion” and titled his book on the modern religion in the United States Being Viking.
If Heathenry really is “the religion with homework,” if practitioners are truly committed to modifying their practices in the light of new scholarship, and if the worldview(s) of ancient practitioners are worthy of emulation in this new religious movement, then the results of this new academic study should lead to a basic reformulation of American Heathenry’s relationship to wider U.S. culture.
Self-proclaimed “inclusive” Heathen organizations, despite a multitude of public statements about inclusion, continue to have problems with infiltration by racists and white nationalists as membership and leadership continue to be all-white or close to it. There has long been a common cry of “we don’t do missionary work,” even as official envoys are sent into prisons and recruitment tables are set up at Pagan Pride events. The elders tell us that “the gods call their own” in mass market paperbacks with contact information for Heathen organizations in the back. The result has not generally been to create notable ethnoracial diversity within these organizations.
Modern people in a modern religion
We’re now faced with a deep study that shows the extent to which Vikings welcomed non-Scandinavians into their culture. Not only did they welcome them, they went out and met them where they lived, brought them into their Viking parties, married them into their families, and buried them as their own. The rural folk who never left their local farmlands may have remained more homogenous, but the Vikings who lived in the thriving trading centers and voyaged out into the world embraced diverse peoples and engineered their own social and genetic diversity.
The DNA study documents how far the Vikings welcomed non-Scandinavian people into their ships, towns, settlements, families, and burial grounds. Within systems of belief and practice that made little distinction between the secular and the religious, this necessarily meant that they also welcomed them into what we would call their religion. This pokes yet another hole in the nonsense ship of racialist neo-völkisch Ásatrú, but it also shoots a shot at other forms of American Heathenry that remain fundamentally white despite their protestations of inclusivity.
It’s long past time to stop pretending that we don’t recruit people into the religion. Of course we do. Whether in social media groups, at public events, or in private conversation, we talk to newcomers and help them over the hump from newbie to practitioner. We are modern people in a modern religion that looks to the past for inspiration, so let’s be honest about what we do, embrace this direct message from the past, and turn from inclusivity to diversity.
There are many ways to build diversity, but the simplest is to do what the Vikings did. We must leave our comfort zones and safe spaces, go to where the rest of the world lives, and welcome a diverse range of people into this thing we do.
There has been a concentrated effort to poison the phrase “affirmative action,” and I’ve seen prominent promoters of “inclusive” Heathenry revert to white nationalist talking points when these two words come up together. Yet we mostly all agree that this is a religion of deeds, and I hope we agree that affirmative deeds are preferable to negative deeds. Let’s move past the propagandistic rhetoric and focus on direct engagement with our neighbors that builds diverse communities in our religion.
Over the past decade, American Heathen organizations have made clear efforts to make themselves more welcoming to LGBTQIA+ individuals, including reassessing their theologies and ritual practices. The result has been that a broader representation of sexualities and genders are now publicly visible in these groups, including at clergy and leadership levels. With that experience of positive organizational change leading to welcome demographic change, what can U.S. Heathen organizations do to emulate the Vikings as we now know them and embody an ethnoracial diversity that lives up to the promises of this nation? What changes can be made to what we say and do that makes Heathenry more overtly welcoming to a more broadly defined range of people and more celebratory of their presence?
The strength of the United States is in its diversity. Let’s embrace that strength instead of running away from it.
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