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The study, which is led by Danish DNA researcher Eske Willerslev, has been on site for preliminary research findings for more than a year. Now it’s reviewed and ready and published in the journal Nature. In addition to the short summary, there is a 177-page appendix with more details. The material is likely to greatly affect our writing of history.
A large part of the 442 people surveyed come from excavation sites in the area we now call Sweden: from Varnhem on the outskirts of Skara, from Skämsta in Uppland, Ljungbacka in Skåne, Karda in Småland, Öland and Gotland.
Other individuals come from a vast area where the Vikings had their roads, from Ukraine and Russia in the east to Greenland in the west.
Several Swedish names are part of the international research group. Including Maria Vretmark in Skara, Caroline Arcini in Lund, Kristian Kristiansen in Gothenburg and Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson in Uppsala.
A main conclusion of the study is that the Viking world was quite geographically divided. Men along the Baltic coast in present-day Sweden set out eastward to the Baltic and present-day Russia. In present-day Norway, they traveled west to Iceland, Greenland, Ireland, and the Isle of Man.
And the Danes moved to England.
This general pattern is largely consistent with earlier archaeological finds. This is also in line with the genealogical data using male Y chromosome DNA, as reported by DNA genealogist Peter Sjölund and I in our 2016 joint book “Swedes and Their Fathers: The Last 11,000 Years.”
The southwestern parts of present-day Sweden, such as Varnhem outside Skara, should be counted in this context as Denmark, rather than as a unit together with eastern Sweden.
Inland forests separated people. The water, on the other hand, united.
DNA results show for example, that the Viking-era people of Öland and Gotland lived in close contact with neighbors across the waters: present-day Denmark, the Baltic states, and Poland. The DNA of Ölanders and Gotlanders testifies to a mixed and varied origin.
In other places, for example in central Norway, people seem to have lived much more isolated.
Although the general pattern shows a geographical division of the Viking roads, there were several exceptions.
DNA researcher Mattias Jakobsson, who was not involved in this study, tells, for example, of a runestone on the outskirts of Uppsala, in what was until recently his own garden. The text loop says that Stärkar and Hjorvard had the stone erected after “their father Gere, who sat west of the mound”.
Eske Willerslev and his co-authors also admit in their Nature article that Viking trains had partially mixed origins. The study includes, for example, a mass grave in England, Ridgeway Hill, with some 50 young Vikings who have apparently been brutally executed. They seem to come from all sorts of places: northern and southern Scandinavia, northern Iceland, the Baltic states, and even present-day Russia and Belarus.
DNA analysis it also bears witness to an influx of people to Scandinavia, which began as early as the Iron Age long before the Viking Age. Several individuals from southern Sweden, for example from Öland and Kärda in Småland, appear to be of southern European origin.
A particularly interesting factor with Kärda, around 1000 AD is that all individuals there are buried according to Christian tradition, while other simultaneous burial sites only 30 km away are pre-Christian.
And in Varnhem, which is described in detail in the appendix with some thirty individuals analyzed with DNA, people were buried in a Christian way as early as the middle of the 10th century. Men north of the church, women south of the church, the richer and healthier in the middle and physically exhausted slaves at the other end.
