ROOTS & BRANCHES

As advertising gimmicks go, my invitation the other week from genealogy genetics testing firm Living DNA to find out my percentage of “Viking ancestry” was a pretty good one.

Since I was already a Living DNA customer, having done the basic autosomal test some 3 years ago, getting my Viking on was only going to cost $20 more.

I spend $20 on many frivolous things so I went ahead with the test.

And found out—drum roll, please!—that I’m officially 35 percent Viking and that my Vikings are supposedly from the Eastern European cluster (as opposed to the British, Norwegian, or Swedish/Danish clusters).

According to Living DNA, this so-called “Viking index” represents the amount of DNA that I share with ancient Vikings. “First, the genetic similarities between your DNA and the DNA obtained from ancient Viking and non-Viking samples are computed,” the information reads. “This allows us to estimate how much DNA you share with each group. In order to then interpret and contextualize this calculation we compare your value to that of all other Living DNA users. This yields your Viking Index score.”

So my Viking Index of 35% means that my DNA is more similar to Viking DNA than 35% of all Living DNA customers.

Living DNA’s introduction to all this plays on mythology of the Vikings (the most popular being their horned helmets, at which scholars weep since the horns are supposedly a figment of Hollywood imagination).

 “While all Vikings were Norsemen, not all Norsemen were Vikings. These raiders were in fact only a subgroup of the Norse population; they all they desired the opportunities and wealth that foreign lands could offer, whether through conquest or through trade and settlements for better farming and fishing,” according to Living DNA.

The second part Living DNA’s schema was saying that my 35% was mostly closely associated with the Vikings of Eastern Europe, showing a map straddling the borders of today’s Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.

Living DNA says it used a total of 446 Viking samples were used for the analysis. “Ancient human remains from the Viking Age were excavated in a diverse set of 80 archaeological sites within the current borders of the United Kingdom (including mainland Great Britain and the Orkney Islands), Ireland, Iceland, Denmark (mainland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland), Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia,” according to the company.

Based on known migration patterns before the Viking age (which spans from the AD 700s to 1066), it was people from what it now Sweden who went eastward, traveling along the Volga and Dnieper rivers until they reached the Black and Caspian Seas. On this journey these Vikings became known as “Rus” or “Varangians” by the Slavic people they encountered, and they became lords of the area from the Baltic to the Black seas, including Kiev.

Which sounds like my Vikings were affiliated with Ukraine, which makes me proud today!

Now I have a college friend who’s of close Norwegian descent and I’ve thrown down the gauntlet to—she’s always calling herself a Viking … so I’m expecting a 100 percent Viking index!