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I am not sure why they used this title for this study as that is not the important part. We already have known Viking was a job description, thats been known fo

I am not sure why they used this title for this study as that is not the important part. We already have known Viking was a job description, thats been known for hundreds of years. We also knew that viking settlement was widespread. This study used DNA sequencing to settle the debate on if vikings from certain areas went to certain areas, and if they mixed. It seems to confirm the theory that the norse did NOT mix, and traded, raided and settled different areas separately.

jsdkkdkdkedj 8mo ago
[flagged]
beloch 8mo ago
The title is indeed odd. The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.
- bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
  maybe you hate your neighbors more than you hate the exotic foreign visitor? hmm, of course current news would rather undermine that theory, but maybe today's exotic foreign countries are about as close as neighboring countries were back in Viking times.
  - beloch 8mo ago
    It's a distasteful, but relevant, aspect of vikings that they were slavers as well as raiders. If you went viking, a large part of the booty you brought back walked on two legs and had genes to pass on. Perhaps the Norse liked their neighbours just enough not to make many of them "visitors".
    - bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
      doubtful given histories of the area, however maybe they disliked getting retaliation for a raid.
    - henrikschroder 8mo ago
      I think the explanation is much simpler, we know the Norse were a bit afraid of the Sami. They viewed them as a weird non-threatening neighbour people who had a weird language and weird magic. So you traded with them, you respected them, you said please and thank you, and then you were happy to see them gone because you didn't want them to curse you. (And I would assume the Sami were very happy to foster this belief since they were much weaker militarily) Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.
      - vintermann 8mo ago
        The Norse had a big fear of curses, the evil eye, the "strength in weakness". I think there's a wide theme in Norse legends, which is about spite and betrayal, but it doesn't work quite like we're used to. In Rigsthula, the social origin myth of the Norse, the first king is suggested to have taken the inheritance of his wealthier brothers by force - possibly by murdering them. And in the Norse creation myth, the gods also arguably seize the world from its original owner (and creates the world as we know it from his corpse). So the theme is that all power is illegitimate, or at the very least seized/stolen, and the robbed want it back - and they will get it back eventually. All hubris will fall, not just for the individual non-god as in Greek mythology, but for the whole world and the gods themselves. The world three has tree roots, one to the well of the norns (fates), one to the poisonous worm Nidhogg who gnaws on the root and will eventually kill it, and one to Mimir's well, the well of wisdom, where you can maybe learn secret tricks of gods and rulers to postpone the inevitable. So spite, or nid, dark power to break rather than to rule, is the ultimate danger to kings and rulers. To invite it by acts of cruelty, especially against the weak, is to bring ill luck upon yourself. Your followers, too, believe deeply in this, so they may abandon you if you seem to "draw in bad karma". But those who are weak, and have nothing to lose, can dip into the power of spite and hate, and do things which would be unwise for a ruler to do, such as poisonings, betrayals, or vicious cruelty. They aren't evil for doing so, it's just the way the world works - if you run afoul of this, it was your own fault for inviting their hate. Even demand for safety can be scornful, and "nid". Kings are supposed to trust in their own strength, and to some degree accept living with threats hanging over their heads. King Nidhad, in the story of Volund, listens to his wife's advice and hamstrings Volund. It's arguably self-defense since Volund certainly hates them, but it's still a scornful, cowardly act - which Nidhad and his family end up paying dearly for. So yes, with respect to the Finnish and Sami neighbors, they would have feared them because of potential curses, but it wasn't because they were a magical people as such, it was simply were weak. But Christianity complicated things. Odin, like the other pagan gods, is himself subject to the laws of fate and must be wise for his own sake, but the Christian God is almighty. You do not have to fear dark curses if He is with you. As a practical matter, they were a lot more willing to build walls and engage in other "cowardly" acts of self defense, and they could get away with it because their Christian followers didn't worry (much) that this would invite fate backlash. They were also a lot less afraid of things like public executions. It made possible much higher concentration of political power. And no, the Norse didn't view that as simply fat idiots ripe for plunder. They admired all the great walls and splendor which concentrated political power had managed to build in Europe - things they had very little of at home. They did plunder, yes, but that was like a fox eating hens in a henhouse - he's still worried about the farmer.
- vintermann 8mo ago
  A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other. After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way. But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time. Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time. Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..." Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.
  - 8mo ago
groundzeros2015 8mo ago
The used that title because more people will see and remember it.
tdb7893 8mo ago
You say "we" knew but the vast majority of people don't. It's not exactly common knowledge among people I know so it's unsurprising a title for general audiences uses it as a hook.
- jeltz 8mo ago
  Scandinavians and historians? This study did not reveal anything which was not taught in school in Sweden in the 90s when I grew up. I guess useful to verify what we knew with even more sources, but there was no new discovery here.
libraryatnight 8mo ago
I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.
- lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
  People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture. It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.
  - throw4847285 8mo ago
    I highly recommend reading Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters. It's a fascinating work of sociology that defines this exact phenomenon and explains its origins.
  - samaltmanfried 8mo ago
    I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume. A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked: "Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" - mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)

jsdkkdkdkedj 8mo ago

[flagged]

beloch 8mo ago

The title is indeed odd. The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.

bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
maybe you hate your neighbors more than you hate the exotic foreign visitor? hmm, of course current news would rather undermine that theory, but maybe today's exotic foreign countries are about as close as neighboring countries were back in Viking times.
- beloch 8mo ago
  It's a distasteful, but relevant, aspect of vikings that they were slavers as well as raiders. If you went viking, a large part of the booty you brought back walked on two legs and had genes to pass on. Perhaps the Norse liked their neighbours just enough not to make many of them "visitors".
  - bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
    doubtful given histories of the area, however maybe they disliked getting retaliation for a raid.
  - henrikschroder 8mo ago
    I think the explanation is much simpler, we know the Norse were a bit afraid of the Sami. They viewed them as a weird non-threatening neighbour people who had a weird language and weird magic. So you traded with them, you respected them, you said please and thank you, and then you were happy to see them gone because you didn't want them to curse you. (And I would assume the Sami were very happy to foster this belief since they were much weaker militarily) Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.
    - vintermann 8mo ago
      The Norse had a big fear of curses, the evil eye, the "strength in weakness". I think there's a wide theme in Norse legends, which is about spite and betrayal, but it doesn't work quite like we're used to. In Rigsthula, the social origin myth of the Norse, the first king is suggested to have taken the inheritance of his wealthier brothers by force - possibly by murdering them. And in the Norse creation myth, the gods also arguably seize the world from its original owner (and creates the world as we know it from his corpse). So the theme is that all power is illegitimate, or at the very least seized/stolen, and the robbed want it back - and they will get it back eventually. All hubris will fall, not just for the individual non-god as in Greek mythology, but for the whole world and the gods themselves. The world three has tree roots, one to the well of the norns (fates), one to the poisonous worm Nidhogg who gnaws on the root and will eventually kill it, and one to Mimir's well, the well of wisdom, where you can maybe learn secret tricks of gods and rulers to postpone the inevitable. So spite, or nid, dark power to break rather than to rule, is the ultimate danger to kings and rulers. To invite it by acts of cruelty, especially against the weak, is to bring ill luck upon yourself. Your followers, too, believe deeply in this, so they may abandon you if you seem to "draw in bad karma". But those who are weak, and have nothing to lose, can dip into the power of spite and hate, and do things which would be unwise for a ruler to do, such as poisonings, betrayals, or vicious cruelty. They aren't evil for doing so, it's just the way the world works - if you run afoul of this, it was your own fault for inviting their hate. Even demand for safety can be scornful, and "nid". Kings are supposed to trust in their own strength, and to some degree accept living with threats hanging over their heads. King Nidhad, in the story of Volund, listens to his wife's advice and hamstrings Volund. It's arguably self-defense since Volund certainly hates them, but it's still a scornful, cowardly act - which Nidhad and his family end up paying dearly for. So yes, with respect to the Finnish and Sami neighbors, they would have feared them because of potential curses, but it wasn't because they were a magical people as such, it was simply were weak. But Christianity complicated things. Odin, like the other pagan gods, is himself subject to the laws of fate and must be wise for his own sake, but the Christian God is almighty. You do not have to fear dark curses if He is with you. As a practical matter, they were a lot more willing to build walls and engage in other "cowardly" acts of self defense, and they could get away with it because their Christian followers didn't worry (much) that this would invite fate backlash. They were also a lot less afraid of things like public executions. It made possible much higher concentration of political power. And no, the Norse didn't view that as simply fat idiots ripe for plunder. They admired all the great walls and splendor which concentrated political power had managed to build in Europe - things they had very little of at home. They did plunder, yes, but that was like a fox eating hens in a henhouse - he's still worried about the farmer.
vintermann 8mo ago
A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other. After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way. But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time. Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time. Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..." Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.
- 8mo ago

groundzeros2015 8mo ago

The used that title because more people will see and remember it.

tdb7893 8mo ago

You say "we" knew but the vast majority of people don't. It's not exactly common knowledge among people I know so it's unsurprising a title for general audiences uses it as a hook.

jeltz 8mo ago
Scandinavians and historians? This study did not reveal anything which was not taught in school in Sweden in the 90s when I grew up. I guess useful to verify what we knew with even more sources, but there was no new discovery here.

libraryatnight 8mo ago

I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.

lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture. It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.
- throw4847285 8mo ago
  I highly recommend reading Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters. It's a fascinating work of sociology that defines this exact phenomenon and explains its origins.
- samaltmanfried 8mo ago
  I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume. A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked: "Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" - mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)