by Karin Bojs
Some researchers have questioned whether the Black Death of the fourteenth century was really caused by the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, which was described in the nineteenth century and continues to cause outbreaks in Asia and Africa. They have suggested all kinds of alternatives, including various viral diseases. However, in recent years DNA researchers have been able to show clearly that the plague microbe was the cause of the Black Death. Two research teams have examined victims found in mass graves dating from the years around 1350. They have exhumed remains in churchyards in Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands and England. Both competing research teams have succeeded in isolating traces of the plague bacterium. Thanks to DNA analysis, they have also been able to reconstruct a genealogical tree with different strains of the plague microbe, enabling them to confirm that the disease originated in Asia, as reported in a number of historical sources.
No one can now deny that the plague bacterium really was a terrible scourge in mediaeval Europe. And it looks as if similar outbreaks of disease struck Europe far earlier, way back in the Iron Age.
Around AD 540 – just a few years after the long Fimbulwinter – the historian Procopius described a major outbreak of the plague in Constantinople. This outbreak is usually referred to as the Justinian plague after Justinian I, the emperor of the eastern Roman Empire at that time. There are far fewer written sources from the sixth century than from the Middle Ages, and historians have been even more divided on the subject of this epidemic. There has been controversy over both the nature of the Justinian plague and whether it reached the lands north of the Alps. For a long time, it was conventional wisdom among Swedish researchers that the plague had not had any noticeable impact on Sweden during the Iron Age. But Per Lagerås, an archaeologist from Lund, has dated clearance cairns, the heaps of stones that farmers gathered together when breaking new ground in preparation for cultivation. He has also drilled down into the soil and carried out pollen analyses. This has enabled him to show that many farms in the uplands of Småland were abandoned at the time of the Fimbulwinter and the Justinian plague. His findings suggest a rapid decline in population.
And a few separate research teams have now been able to demonstrate that the Justinian plague really was the plague, caused by the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, just as in the Middle Ages. However, the Justinian plague represented a separate branch on the bacterium’s genealogical tree. DNA mapping shows that the disease jumped from animals to people on at least two separate occasions. One such transfer caused the Justinian plague in the sixth century, while the Black Death of the fourteenth century was caused by another transition from animals to humans.
One of the carriers was the black rat. This animal probably came to Europe from Asia at the time of the Romans and thrived in our granaries, which were often in lofts in family homes. The black rat’s fur harboured fleas that passed the germs on from animals to people.
But black rats and their fleas are not the whole explanation. Other rodents can also act as hosts, and plague germs can also spread from one person to another. The strain known as pneumonic plague, in particular, is an airborne disease, which can easily be spread without any animal involvement.
The churchyard where researchers can now identify victims of the sixth-century Justinian plague is in Germany. This means no one can now claim that that outbreak was confined to the lands south of the Alps. Just like the Black Death, the Justinian plague had a major impact on Europe’s development. It probably killed a large proportion of the population, especially as people’s immune systems were completely unprepared and the societies in which they lived were already vulnerable, owing to the failed harvests of the Fimbulwinter.
Clearly, the population gradually recovered from the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Per Lagerås’s view is that these outbreaks of disease, seen with the benefit of hindsight, were not an unmitigated disaster in every respect. He describes them as dealing ‘the coup de grâce to feudalism’, the social system under which the poor worked like slaves, under slave-like conditions, for richer farmers and landowners. According to Lagerås, outbreaks of plague were followed by labour shortages, obliging landowners to pay better wages and provide improved working conditions.
Just a few decades after the Fimbulwinter that began in 536 and the Justinian plague of 540 the population began to recover. A few centuries later came the last stage of the Iron Age in Scandinavia, which we know as the Viking Age. In many respects, the mores of this time were reminiscent of the Indo-European lifestyle that had already arrived in Sweden by Bronze Age times.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Am I a Viking?
In reading up on the Viking era, I am struck by a palpable contrast. Books by Scandinavian authors emphasise the attractive aspects: trade, wood carving, iron-working, the art of boat-building, poetry, feasts, mead, costume, jewellery and, in more recent times, women of high status who wielded a good deal of power. Books by British authors have a different angle, tending to focus more on terror, raids, blackmail, abduction and slave trading.
This gives me pause for thought. During my years as a science journalist, most of my reporting has focused on research in the natural sciences. Results in these disciplines rarely differ according to scientists’ country of origin. I am reminded that history and archaeology have developed in close connection with ideological and national interests. The link between nationalism and historical research was much stronger in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. In some parts of the world, archaeologists and historians still face political pressure to purvey conclusions favourable to the interests of the powerful. But even researchers who are fortunate enough to be able to work freely and independently of political authorities assess information in different ways, depending on their own point of view.
All the books I read on the Viking era and the exhibitions I visit are of a very high standard. Authors and curators alike take a scholarly approach and reference their sources. It’s just that they have a slightly different angle and focus. Such differences, though small, are enough to convey radically different views of the Viking Age, one being the aggressors’ view of events, the other the victims’.
What I want to know is this – which side were my own ancestors on?
***
The dual perspective begins with the word ‘Viking’ itself, which can mean several different things. Initially, it referred to a phenomenon, not a person. The Old Norse expression ‘fara í víking’ (‘to go on a Viking voyage’) meant to engage in piracy – to take ship, sail to a place some distance away, together with a number of companions, and grab whatever you could, be it valuables or the human spoils of war.
The word is also used, including by professional historians, in the expression ‘the Viking Age’, which refers to the last part of the Iron Age. A common definition is that the Viking Age began with the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne (Holy Island) in AD 793, and ended by about 1100, by which time Christianity had become the dominant religion in Scandinavia.
To confuse matters further, the word ‘Viking’ is often used in a very general sense to describe a person of Scandinavian origin living at the time of the Vikings. The stereotype is a red-haired, bearded strongman quaffing mead from a large cow horn and sporting a horned helmet. This cliché is common in popular culture; it often turns up in advertising and among supporters at international matches.
Professional historians have a somewhat different view of the Vikings. The notion that they had horned helmets is a complete misconception. Most of the population of Scandinavia at the time of the Vikings lived on farming, hunting and fishing, not from piracy.
The attack on the Lindisfarne monastery has come to mark the beginning of the Viking Age, mainly because it is described in such detail in writing. The ecclesiastic Alcuin described the raid in a poem and several letters. He tells of how ‘the pagans’ desecrated God’s sanctuary, how blood ran around the altar and how the bodies of saints were ‘t
rampled […] like dung in the street’. In all probability, there had been violent raids from Scandinavian shores in earlier times, but they were not documented in any written sources preserved for posterity.
There have been trade and exchanges between the British Isles, the Atlantic coast of Europe and the Scandinavian lands at least since the Bronze Age. Such encounters could be violent. The Danish Hjortspring boat from about 350 BC was quite clearly built for war, given its symmetric design and the various weapons and shields found nearby. There have been sophisticated rowing vessels ever since the Bronze Age. It was nothing new for dozens of athletic men to be able to row long distances, but the Vikings were also able to sail. They learned the art late by comparison with Mediterranean seafarers. However, once the Scandinavians started to combine their well-crafted clinker-built vessels with their oarsmanship and woollen or linen sails, they had the upper hand for a while. Their tactic was to strike from the water, and they were smart enough to choose victims who were unable to put up any armed resistance.
Moreover, the Vikings were not inhibited by a taboo that placed restrictions on other European warlords. Not being Christians – at least not to begin with – they had no qualms about raiding monasteries and churches.
Swedish-born Anders Winroth of Yale University claims in a new book that the Vikings were not really any more brutal than other contemporary European warlords, such as Charlemagne in France. The difference was that Vikings often raided monasteries and churches, inhabited by priests and monks who had mastered the art of writing. This means their depredations are unusually well documented, at least as regards western Europe. Consequently, we know a good deal about the brutality of bands of Scandinavian pirates who attacked monasteries, churches, farms and towns in the British Isles, along the Atlantic coast of Europe and on the major rivers of France.
Conversely, historians are less well informed about the voyages to the east, to regions where literate people were more of a rarity. The best-documented encounters are those with Arab writers. Findings from historical and archaeological sources show that there was extensive trade in the east as well. The Scandinavians traded mainly in furs and slaves. They purchased – and plundered – all sorts of luxury goods, including silver and silk. Their networks extended as far as central Asia.
Early on in the Viking era, Scandinavians also began to stay on and settle down in new places. Sometimes local rulers encouraged them, a settlement of armed Scandinavians being viewed as a good defence against raids by other Vikings. Scandinavians colonised Iceland and, for a while, even Greenland, where walruses with valuable ivory tusks were plentiful. From Greenland, they undertook expeditions to Canada to fetch timber. It is very likely that they also took women.
Voyages to regions that the Icelanders called Helluland, Markland and Vinland are described in mediaeval sagas. Archaeologists have confirmed that these places may have been in North America. The remains of a Viking-style settlement have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland. Geneticists, too, are now helping to discover what happened when Scandinavians visited America – several hundred years before Christopher Columbus strode ashore.
A number of today’s Icelanders bear in their DNA the evidence of a voyage to America. These people have mitochondria belonging to haplogroup C1 and are descended from the same woman. Calculations show that she came to Iceland around AD 1000, very probably from America. Haplogroup C1 occurs almost exclusively among the indigenous population of America. The woman’s living descendants in Iceland belong to a subgroup that has not been found in modern-day America. Either the researchers have missed it in their analyses, or the whole group has died out everywhere except Iceland. Admittedly, one might come up with other, more tortuous interpretations, such as that haplogroup C exists in Siberia – and could thus have occurred in individual Scandinavian settlers. But the most reasonable explanation is that the woman sailed to Iceland from Canada, via Greenland.
Most male settlers came to Iceland from Scandinavia – mainly Norway – in the early ninth century. This is clear from written sources, linguistic research and modern Icelandic men’s Y-chromosome DNA. About 80 per cent of modern Icelandic men’s Y chromosomes indicate Scandinavian origins. But it seems likely that the remaining 20 per cent come from Ireland. Icelandic researchers see a link between this part of genetic make-up and mediaeval sagas that tell how Icelanders took Gaelic slaves from the lands that are now Scotland and Ireland.
Many such slaves were women, according to the written sources. This is supported by genetic evidence. The Gaelic input in modern Icelanders’ maternal lineage is even greater than that in their paternal lineage. More than half of today’s Icelanders are descended from women with roots in Scotland and Ireland. That is clear from their mitochondrial DNA.
Of course, Viking Age Scandinavian colonies across Europe also included some women who themselves came from Scandinavia. Some feature in the mediaeval sagas, and some of them were both rich and powerful. New DNA studies reveal a pattern. The nearer to Scandinavia the colonies were, the higher the proportion of Scandinavian women. In the case of the Shetland and Orkney Islands, entire families seem to have sailed from Norway, with their domestic animals, in order to settle and start a life as farmers. We can tell this because both Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA show a large proportion of Norse ancestry.
However, the further away the Vikings moved from Scandinavia, the fewer women there were from their native land. The share of mitochondrial DNA of Scandinavian origin declines with increasing distance. Nearly half the people living on the Shetlands today have Scandinavian ancestry, and the proportion is roughly equal in the maternal and the paternal lines. Among the inhabitants of the Orkney Islands, about one third of forefathers and foremothers alike are from Scandinavia. On the Hebrides, however, Scandinavian forebears account for a smaller proportion of people’s ancestry, and can be seen only in the paternal line. This means that most of the incoming Scandinavians were male Vikings.
The Vikings left a relatively small genetic footprint elsewhere in Britain, according to analyses of nuclear DNA. But there are some traces. The Y chromosomes of some modern-day British men show where the Vikings arrived and sowed their seed.
Some DNA research companies in Britain have been criticised for making too much out of people today being ‘Vikings’, just because they have some DNA from Scandinavia. Such ‘Viking’ claims are misleading, of course. The British men concerned are a mix of ancestors from different places, just like the rest of us. However, they are descended from Scandinavians in the paternal line – which may be interesting to know. When private individuals like these have their DNA tested, they help the rest of us to find out more about the voyages and the dealings of the Vikings.
One circumstance that complicates this research is the fact that there had already been a major wave of immigration to the British Isles from Denmark and Germany during the time of the Great Migrations, around AD 500. Some of these Anglo-Saxons came from roughly the same Germanic groups as some of the Vikings a few centuries later. This means very detailed DNA analyses are needed to enable researchers to distinguish the patterns of movement specific to the Viking Age. Earlier analyses, conducted by both academic researchers and firms providing services to family history researchers, were not sufficiently high resolution. But today the more sophisticated tests sold to private individuals have become sufficiently detailed.
As a result, amateur genealogy researchers are now constructing ever more detailed genealogical trees showing the travels of the Vikings. It can be clearly seen how men from Norway had sons in Scotland and northern England. The colonists in south-east England more often came from Denmark and southern Sweden – which is in line with what archaeological finds and documentary sources can tell us.
Private individuals researching their family history are also working on mapping the Vikings’ travels in the east. One example is a special project involving men who believe they are descended from Rurik – the man who, accor
ding to written sources, was brought from Scandinavia in the ninth century to found the east Slavic state of Kievan Rus’. Research suggests that Rurik’s Y chromosomes belonged to a particular subgroup of N3 that is particularly common in Finland.
Peter Sjölund, who uses DNA to research genealogy, has worked together with some of his Russian counterparts, identifying about 10 men in Russia and Ukraine who belong to a particular subgroup of I1a and have a paternal lineage that appears to originate with Scandinavians living in eleventh-century Kiev.
These findings support historical theories that Scandinavian Vikings – Rus or Varangians, as they were also known – played a key role in founding the first Russian realm.
Two haplogroups of Y-chromosome DNA are generally regarded as clear markers of Viking ancestry. One of them is I1a. The other is R1a – the very haplogroup I know my paternal grandfather Eric belonged to, thanks to Uncle Anders’s DNA test. Might my forefathers have been Vikings who sailed eastward and westward, capturing slaves, trading in furs and bringing home treasures of silver? Might I, in fact, be a Viking of sorts?
***
My paternal grandfather, Eric Bojs, was a kindly, humorous man. Trained as a primary school teacher, he eventually went on to teach at a teacher training college in Kalmar. Alongside his work, he devoted himself to two absorbing interests in his free time.
One of them was radio. With a wind-up tape recorder on the back of his bike, he cycled around recording reports for the radio. For many years he single-handedly ran what was later to become Swedish Radio’s Kalmar department. He interviewed Olof Palme as a newly appointed minister and the last soldier recruited under the Swedish ‘allotment’ system, and every year, on Christmas Eve, he reported on the weather in Kalmar for national radio. On a number of occasions he also took on the role of a reporter for Swedish Television. His items included an interview with the brother of a suspected pyromaniac on the neighbouring island of Öland.
