Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  When we began to use the brushes to collect DNA, we would often help the volunteers by doing it for them. However, we have now had to stop this, and volunteers must do it themselves. This is not for fear of breaking new Health and Safety regulations but for a far more delicate reason. False teeth. It was at the Shetland Science Festival that I learned this painful lesson. An elderly lady, eager to join in the project, opened her mouth to allow me to rub the inside of her cheek with the brush. No sooner had I begun to guide the brush across her cheek than it suddenly stopped moving. I let go. I looked at her. She blushed and turned away. After regaining her composure, she returned with the brush and the explanation. I had inadvertently dislodged the top set of her dentures, which had dropped down and clamped the handle of the brush to the lower set. After this, we let people do their own brushing.

  The Science Festival was also the scene of another humiliation. One of my obligations in exchange for the display space was to give a public lecture during the Festival, to which I was happy to agree. As usual I spent the previous evening preparing my talk and organizing my slides. With five minutes to go before my talk, I went over to the screened-off section of the hall that had been set aside for public lectures. There was no one there. I checked the time on the Festival programme. This was definitely the right time, and the right place. I waited, but still nobody came, so I thought there must have been some sort of rescheduling that I had not got to hear about. As I was unloading my slides, a lady came in and sat down. I asked if she had come to hear my lecture. She had. Having no audience is bad enough. Having an audience of one is far worse. Unable to slink quietly away, I was honour-bound to give the lecture, all forty-five minutes of it, slides and all. The sole member of the audience sat there quietly, paying attention and, when I had finished, she picked up her handbag and, without a word, left the area. Field work is full of surprises.

  One last reflection of Shetland came from talking to men and women at the Festival. I wanted to know whether they felt closer to Scandinavia or to Scotland. On this question, the answer was clear-cut. It was Scandinavia without a doubt. Very few felt any connection with Scotland, let alone with the new Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. It was as if they even preferred to have their affairs governed from Westminster than from Edinburgh. This allergy to Scotland extends to their own individual desires for a Viking ancestry, especially among the men. Where there was any uncertainty, and most people did not know where their ancestors had come from, they wanted to be Vikings. Scots came a very poor second and, to my surprise, an Irish ancestry was even worse.

  I know hardly anybody from among my friends and colleagues who has been to Shetland. Only one, who is on the maintenance staff at the Institute where I work, visits regularly. He goes there to witness the festival of Up Helly Aa. This annual event is held on the last Tuesday in January, in the depths of winter darkness, and is a very real reminder of Shetland’s Viking affiliations. The day begins with the year’s elected Jarl, or leader, and his fifty-seven-strong retinue of guizers marching through the streets of Lerwick dressed in scarlet velvet, wearing winged helmets and carrying elaborate shields and heavy war axes. Becoming the Jarl of Up Helly Aa is a great honour for a Shetlander. It is the culmination of an induction and selection process that can last twenty years and that begins as a teenager with a minor role in the pageant. The Jarl assumes the name Sigurd Hlodvisson for the day and receives the freedom of Lerwick for the duration of his twenty-four-hour reign. The culmination of Up Helly Aa is the ceremonial torching of Sigurd’s galley Asmundervag, specially made for the occasion. The real Sigurd Hlodvisson, also known as Sigurd the Stout, lived from 980 to 1014. Sigurd was the Norse Earl of Orkney and divided his time between visiting his overseas dominions, in Ireland and the Isle of Man, and summers spent raiding the Hebrides and the Scottish mainland. His reign as Earl of Orkney came to a sudden end when he was killed at the battle of Clontarf when, as you may recall from the last chapter, Brian Boru finally forced the Vikings out of Ireland. Maybe that is why the last thing a Shetland man wants to be thought of is Irish.

  We left Shetland after a busy week. The take-off was as alarming as the landing. In certain wind conditions the elected runway faces south, straight at the cliff of Sumburgh Head. I thought we were taxiing to another part of the airport, when the engines went to full throttle and we accelerated down the runway–straight towards the cliff! Needless to say we banked sharply as soon as we left the ground. We had with us over 600 DNA samples, a magnificent total.

  We realized that we had the best chance yet of finding genetic evidence of Viking settlement in the Northern Isles. If we could detect the signal anywhere it would be in Orkney and Shetland. And if we could only identify Viking DNA in the Northern Isles, we could look for it elsewhere. According to everything we are told about the Vikings, and which is reinforced by re-enactments like Up Helly Aa, this was a society dominated by warlike chieftains and their blood-thirsty acolytes, raping and pillaging their way around Europe. These being men, it seemed only sensible to begin our search for Viking genes with the Y-chromosome. If these stories were true, then that would be the place to look. Recalling the Irish results, where almost 100 per cent of men with Gaelic surnames are in the same Y-chromosome clan–that of Oisin–what is the paternal clan make-up of Orkney and Shetland? The answer is, very different from Ireland. Although there are still plenty of Oisins in the Northern Isles, the proportion is very much lower than it is in Ireland. Even so, Oisin is still the major clan in both Shetland and Orkney, with just under 60 per cent of men in this paternal clan. That is a very big difference from the situation in Ireland, so this was a very promising start. Almost all the remaining 40 per cent was made up equally of the two clans Wodan and Sigurd, with just a smattering from the minor clans Eshu and Re.

  Even without delving any further into the detail of the Y-chromosome genetic fingerprints, it was clear that Ireland and the Northern Isles had a very different genetic history if we listened only to the version told by men. But it wasn’t completely different. Oisin still dominated, as it did in Ireland, but nowhere near as much. Our first thought, when we saw these results, was to draw the conclusion that in the Northern Isles Oisin represented the descendants of the indigenous Pictish ancestry, while the men in the clans of Wodan and Sigurd had Viking ancestors who had come from Norway. That would put the ancestral proportions in present-day Shetland at roughly 65 per cent Pict and 35 per cent Viking. The indigenous Pictish ancestry would still be in the majority but with a big slice of Viking male ancestry.

  The first test of this theory was to see what things were like in Norway. To prepare for this comparison, two of the team, Jayne Nicholson and Eileen Hickey, had already been collecting in Norway. Thanks to the co-operation of the Norwegian Blood Transfusion Service, we had 400 blood samples from all over the country, from Finnmark in the far north to Rogaland in the extreme south. If Norwegian Y-chromosomes were all either in the clans of Wodan and Sigurd, with no Oisin, then it would back up this first conclusion–at least to the coarse level of detail embraced by simple clan membership. However, as it turned out, there were plenty of Oisins in Norway as well. Altogether, nearly a third of Norwegian men were members of the clan of Oisin. The straightforward link between Oisin = Pict and Wodan and Sigurd = Viking that we had begun to hope for in our first run through the Shetland Y-chromosomes had obviously been an oversimplification.

  However, when we looked at the clan make-up in the different regions of Norway, the concentration of Oisins in the western provinces, the traditional homeland of the Vikings, was much lower than in other parts of Norway. Around Bergen, on the south-west coast, only 15 per cent of men had Oisin clan Y-chromosomes. The other two thirds of Norwegians were split between the clans of Wodan and Sigurd, with Wodans outnumbering Sigurds by roughly two to one.

  We were faced with two questions before we could be sure of interpreting our Shetland results correctly. The first was this. Were the Norwegian Wodans and Sigurds genetic
ally similar, at the more detailed fingerprint level, to the men in the same clans from the Northern Isles? In other words, did we find the same detailed Y-chromosome fingerprints in Norway and the Northern Isles within each of the clans? We checked each one, looking for matches in the Norwegian men. To our great relief, we found exact or first-generation matches to almost all the Sigurds and to about two thirds of the Wodans. This certainly looked like a good indication that most, if not quite all, of the Y-chromosomes in these two clans had arrived from Scandinavia. But how about the Oisins? Here again there were matches between the Norwegian and Shetland samples, but nowhere near as many. There were far more Shetland Oisins whose Y-chromosome signatures were unmatched in Norway than in the other clans. We expected some similarities, since the Viking ships would not have distinguished between genetic clan when choosing their crews and there were plenty of Oisins in Norway. When we took this into account it was clear that our initial estimates of Viking ancestry had been a bit low. Some of the Northern Isle Oisins had almost certainly come with the Vikings. Including them pushed our estimate of Viking ancestry in men from Shetland up to 42 per cent. The proportion of Orkney men with a Norse Viking ancestry, which we estimated in the same way, was slightly lower, at 37 per cent. But please do not concern yourself with exact proportions; just take from this that the male Norse ancestry of Orkney and Shetland is substantial, but was never complete.

  I began our interpretation of the Northern Isles DNA with the Y-chromosome because of the Vikings’ reputation, but I also wanted to see what the maternal DNA told us as well. At the time we were analysing the DNA from the Northern Isles we had just completed a study with Agnar Helgason, an Icelandic anthropologist, on the genetic ancestry of his native land where we had asked a similar question about the paternal and maternal input. The histories of Iceland and of the Northern Isles were quite different in that, when the Vikings began to settle Iceland from around AD 860, it was uninhabited. The few Irish monks who had settled there in the quest for a life of contemplation sensibly left as soon as they saw the first sails on the horizon.

  Over the next fifty years large numbers of Norse settlers arrived in Iceland, most from around Bergen but some from Viking settlements in Britain. This was large-scale, planned immigration to a land with no indigenous opposition and by the beginning of the tenth century there were 60,000 people living in Iceland. The population has grown to 250,000 today, but there has been no recorded large-scale immigration since the original settlement. Agnar and I wanted to find out whether this had been a predominantly male-driven settlement, with females brought in from elsewhere, or whether roughly equal numbers of Norse men and women had arrived. There have been persistent stories that Icelandic men raided the coasts of Scotland and Ireland for wives. Agnar and I thought we could check these stories by comparing modern Icelandic Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA with the equivalent DNA from Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland. By going through the Icelanders’ DNA results one by one, we assigned their most likely origin from comparison with British, Irish and Scandinavian samples.

  We discovered that roughly two thirds of Icelandic Y-chromosomes were Scandinavian, while the remaining third were from Ireland and Scotland. However, the origin of maternal DNA was reversed, with only a third from Norway and two thirds from Ireland and Scotland. This confirmed the stories that, while most of the men had settled in Iceland from Norway, they relied heavily on women imported from Ireland and Scotland. It doesn’t necessarily mean they were taken there against their will, as the results could not distinguish between settlers who had arrived straight from Norway and the male descendants of Vikings who had spent a generation or two in Scotland. Even so, it is hard to account for the Gaelic origins of a third of Icelandic Y-chromosomes without contemplating that these men were taken to Iceland as slaves. The Iceland study gave us a very interesting result, and also helped us to develop the way of assigning the Icelandic DNA to a Norse or Gaelic/Pictish origin, which we then used for Orkney and Shetland and then, in modified form, for the rest of the Isles.

  When we tried the same treatment on the Northern Isles, expecting a similar result to what we had found in Iceland, we were in for a major surprise. The maternal clans in Norway and in Orkney and Shetland were superficially quite different. Katrine was common in Norway but rare in Orkney and Shetland, and the same was true for Tara. But when we looked more carefully at the detailed sequences, the matches leapt out. Within each of the seven major clans, and the minor ones too, the similarities in detailed sequence were remarkable. I had initially expected to find hardly any Scandinavian mitochondrial DNA in either Orkney or Shetland. I had imagined that the Viking reputation for rape, pillage and general destruction recalled in Up Helly Aa, in atmosphere if not in fact, would have had the expected genetic consequence–kill the men and keep the women. When it came to permanent settlement, these same women, I had expected, would have become the wives of Viking men. That is the usual pattern of conquest and settlement that I have seen many times throughout the world. It is all too obvious in the genetic consequences of the European colonization of Polynesia and South America, where European Y-chromosomes are extremely common, while European mDNA is virtually unknown. This is a record of great success for the incoming Y-chromosomes at the expense of the indigenous, but with no effect at all on the aboriginal mitochondrial DNA. Orkney and Shetland had all the right ingredients, but the genetics said otherwise. Amazingly, there was as much Norse mitochondrial DNA in the Northern Isles as there were Norse Y-chromosomes. This could mean only one thing–anathema to the Jarls for the day of Up Helly Aa and their retinue of axe-wielding guizers. The Viking settlement of Orkney and Shetland had been peaceful! The Scandinavians had brought their women with them.

  The 60 per cent of Orcadians and Shetlanders who do not have a Viking genetic ancestry are most likely to be the descendants of the indigenous Picts. However, there is a proviso. After the islands were eventually ceded to Scotland in the fifteenth century there was a substantial immigration of Scots, which would have diluted the genes of the islanders, whether of Viking or Pictish ancestry. Since we had been successful in identifying Viking genes, both male and female, the next question was whether we could do the same for the Picts, and for that we must head south to the heart of Pictland.

  Close by the small town of Dunkeld, a few miles north of Perth on the banks of the River Tay, is the site of the Abbey of Scone. It was here that Kenneth MacAlpin was crowned as the first king of a united Scotland in 843. The area around Dunkeld was the central stronghold of the Pictish kings and Kenneth, a Gael from the west, deliberately chose Scone for his coronation to symbolize the unity between Pict and Celt which his reign proclaimed.

  Beneath the coronation throne lay Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny, a rectangular block of sandstone. It is said that Lia Fail could talk and that it spoke the name of the next king. The Stone itself has a mythical history linking it to Egypt, Spain and Ireland, reminiscent of the Irish origin myths of Mil. However, geologists who have examined the Stone say it comes from the neighbourhood of Scone itself. But there is an explanation for that. The kings of Scotland continued to be crowned above the Stone of Destiny until 1296 when Edward I, always aware of the power of symbolism, carried off the Stone and installed it in Westminster Abbey. But, according to the legend, he was duped. Monks from the abbey, warned of the approach of Edward and his army, hid Lia Fail nearby and replaced it with a slab of local sandstone. It was this replica which Edward took back to England while the real Stone lies hidden somewhere close by.

  This neatly explains the geological similarity of the Stone to local rocks, and also why there continued to be a long succession of Scottish kings even when the Stone was lying in England. It could hardly be expected to speak the name of the next king of Scotland if it was installed in Westminster Abbey. Why didn’t the monks recover the Stone from its hiding place once Edward had departed? For fear of retribution once he knew he had been tricked is the rationalization of the myth. B
y the time it was safe to bring it out of hiding, the monks had forgotten where they put it. In the eighteenth century there was a local legend that, after a violent storm, a farm lad discovered an underground cavern which had been exposed by a landslide triggered by the torrential rain. The lad entered the cavern and found a stone covered with inscriptions, as indeed the original Lia Fail was recorded to have been. Thinking it of no importance he did not speak of it until years later when he heard the story that the monks had switched the stone. Alas, when he returned to the spot, he could not find the cavern entrance, presuming it to have been once more covered by a landslide. This all sounds very unlikely, but stranger things have happened and I am reminded how the prehistoric caves at Lascaux, in the Dordogne, the walls of which are covered with the ancient paintings of bison and reindeer that our ancestors hunted 20,000 years ago, were discovered by accident by another farm lad at about the same time. So perhaps Lia Fail really is still there, waiting to be rediscovered.

  Meanwhile, the Stone in Westminster Abbey remained resolutely where it was, beneath the coronation throne for every English monarch since Edward II, up to and including the present Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. That will be the last time, for in 1996, 700 years after it was taken to London, Lia Fail was returned to Scotland. In an elaborate procession along the Royal Mile, lined by 10,000 people on St Andrew’s Day, the Stone was taken from the Palace of Holyroodhouse to its new home in Edinburgh Castle. To the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute from the castle ramparts, the Stone was laid to rest in the Great Hall. The strength of feeling which energized the campaign to return Lia Fail to Scotland after 700 years was formidable. The ceremony which attended its return was in many respects the assertion of an ancient Pictish connection, in the same way that Up Helly Aa celebrates the Norse identity in Shetland.