Do you think pretty much anyone from the UK or Ireland has at least a small amount of Norse heritage or only certain individuals? Not only did they rape and pillage but they also founded Dublin and ruled large parts of the UK at various times during the Middle Ages. So I would be surprised if the Norse influence on the genome of the Isles is pretty much non-existent, and not surprised if it was quite large.
There is certainly a lot of Scandinavian influence but to be honest, we are a true mongrel nation. (And that is a good thing, hybrid vigour and all that.)
Waves of immigration over thousands of years and hundreds of years at the centre of the trading world mean that I couldn’t tell you what sort of genetic heritage I have. I should imagine I’m a bit of everything.
Plenty of people from the UK will be able to trace all their ancestry to, as an example, the Indian sub-continent. It is a culturally and ethnically diverse nation.
Seeing as virtually every Western European is a descendant of Charlemagne, then IMHO the probability that any native Brit or Irishman has at least some Scandinavian ancestry is at least 99%. Likewise anyone with any French, German, Polish, Russian, Italian, Balkan and probably Turkish ancestry.
Do the math.
It would be quite large (remembering that Norman ancestry would also be ultimately partly Scandinavian) but varied by region. And I’m not sure we should count rape as a huge factor, I doubt many women would actually keep the child of rape when they had other options.
Well the Y chromosome of an early Norman would definitely be Norse, as they were Rent-A-Yobs to stop their relatives swamping the place.
As for rape, I suspect that a female would be a bit miffed if she didn’t manage to snag a decent rapist - a viable survival strategy during an invasion.
Mind you there were plenty of other early blends in Britain and Ireland, all quite eager to play the hide then harry trick on invaders - basically hide in the marshes and nick their livestock by night.
I’m pretty sure that Idris Elba doesn’t.
It seems that you are unaware of how many foreigners have moved to the UK in recent decades and recent centuries. See Wikipedia: Modern immigration to the UK
These.
France is also a very diverse nation in terms of origins. Celts (Gauls, Bretons), Romans, a few Greeks, some Jews, Normans (Norse), Franks (i.e. Germans), some Berbers and Polynesians through the overseas French territories, and probably a smattering of a dozen other ethnicities. Stir au français, serves 65 million.
The fact that France ended up primarily speaking a Romance language and the UK ended up primarily speaking a Germanic language doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the end mix except that perhaps the ethnicity whose language “won” may have had slightly more members and/or members with more political or social prestige.
Spain is also a pretty diverse country. Celts (Celtiberians), Romans, Visigoths (Germanic peoples, related to Germans and Norse), Basques, Greeks, Berbers, Arabs, Jews.
Also note the huge Norse influence on the English language. Most people know about the heavy French influence, but there is also a heavy Norse one as well. Just like there are Anglo/French doublets in English like child/infant (Fr. enfant, which can included preteens or even teens), cow/beef (Fr. boef), pig/pork, doom/judgment, first/primary, help/assist, and work/labor, there are Anglo/Norse doublets like hide/skin, shirt/skirt, and ship/skip. Note that in some cases, the words diverged in meaning in English after people realized that they didn’t need two words that meant exactly the same thing.
There are even Norman French/(Modern) Parisian French doublets in English due to multiple borrowings - e.g. warden/guardian (both meaning a protector, just from different French dialects), and wage/gauge (both of them referring to some sort of measurement),
Would you consider someone who immigrated “from” somewhere else to be “from the UK”? Or are you being pedantic?
id consider their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren as being from the UK. There are large sections of the British populace whose genetic heritage owes nothing to any Scandinavians.
Exactly my point. Thank you.
Britain has been a melting pot for wave after wave of immigration for at least a thousand years. There are over three hundred languages spoken in London alone. Anyone who’s family has been here for more than a few generations almost certainly has a few surprises in their genome. As a few neo-nazis discovered a few years ago, to their horror, when they had their DNA analysed. Idiots.
When you say “owes nothing,” you are probably forgetting how far east the Scandianvians went (Rus’, anyone?) and how many centuries ago that was. I think chances are decent that a 100% Bangladeshi family has at least one Norse ancestor, though how you’d prove it outside of mathematics or why you’d care is beyond me.
The Vikings were very fond of putting in at Warrenoint, which is very near my family seat.
As my Great-Aunt put it:
Oh yes, the they’d come down a’viking, and think they were winning, and think they were winning, and think they were winning. . . until suddenly they found themselves plowing an Irish field and taking the name of their Irish girl’s father. Sure they couldn’t resist a Mc**** woman any more than any other man can. :
:
On my family’s land there is a 3,000 year old souterrain, and inside was found the remains of a formal Viking sword. (The sort that would have been passed down from Father to Son, not a daily weapon.)
So yeah, we kept a few, but more because we liked them.
Of course, another distant cousin had the DNA read, and found he was part Ashkenazi Jew. So anything is possible, really. We are discussing islands, after all, and there was substantial sea trade, which leads to mixing of all sorts.
Exactly. If you were born here, you’re ‘from’ here. Any any other way to define the term ‘from’ quickly falls apart, or turns into racism.
Plus Franks (the term was used through the Middle Ages to describe any travelers from norh of the Pyrinees), a surprising amount of Brits, the occasional lost Viking, Italians, Tyrians… and of course, any of those could have ancestors from a dozen other places.
There’s loads of recent retirees from the UK distorting your property market, but were there many who stayed after the Peninsular War, do you know?
Idris Elba was born of Sierra Leonian and Ghanaian parents. Sierra Leone, like Liberia, was a colony partially settled by freed slaves (many of whom have ancestries involving European forebears), Ghana has a long history of intermarriage between local people and the British and other colonisers. The British “Who do you think you are” has a repeated trope of the discovery of white ancestry in Brits with African genetic history.
It cannot be assumed that he has no European or Scandinavian genetics.