Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Of Slavs, Slaves, Vikings, and Genetics

Of Slavs, Slaves, Vikings, and Genetics

Last updated on: April 21, 2017 at 6:39 pm by Philip Jenkins

Of Slavs, Slaves, Vikings, and Genetics 2017-04-21T18:39:09-04:00 Philip Jenkins

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I recently had a DNA test to help trace my ancestry, and the result surprised me. The larger story might shed light on one of the grimmest and most forgotten horrors of European history, an era of brutal slave trading.

By way of background, my known genealogy is very straightforward indeed. It shows close to 100 percent Welsh – not just Welsh, but one specific bit of south Welsh. That means mainly West Glamorgan, within a few miles of the city of Swansea, although with a couple of English guys in the 17th-18th centuries (In Wales, we call that “diversity”). I can identify all my ancestors through all lines back to about 1840, and far beyond that in some lines.

Hence, I am near pure 100 percent Welsh on all sides. However, through the years, I have faced a nagging question. Welsh people are stereotypically short and dark, which I am not. (I am 6’2”, and not dark). Nor were my uncles and aunts, who were all pretty tall people. At least they were on my maternal side, and I’ll explain in a moment why that distinction matters.

When I am in Europe, people all over the continent often have me marked as German, and address me as such. They greet a line of tourists like this: “Good morning sir!” “Good morning sir!” Then they come to me: “Guten Tag, mein Herr!” In Norway, the locals assume I am Norwegian.

What on earth is happening? Something was amiss. I was amiss.

Hence my inspiration to take the DNA test, and the result is fascinating. (I used FamilyTreeDNA). In total contrast to the genealogy, the DNA gives me as 90 percent British Isles origins and eight percent Eastern Europe, plus a smattering from south-east Europe. Now, it never pays to take such percentages precisely, but this is suggestive. And I can confirm that Eastern Europe linkage from another source.

More specifically, I had my mitochondrial DNA done, which only traces descent in the female line – mother to daughter to daughter, so that I cannot pass it on to my children. We measure this by the MtDNA haplogroup, of which there are a couple of dozen world-wide, and each is given a capital letter, so that for instance M is found among people in south east Asia, D in Japan, O in China, etc. There are also lots of subsets of those larger families. British Isles haplogroups are often J or T. The main MtDNA hapologroup in Wales is H.

My haplogroup, though, is none of the above, it is U, and specifically U4. It is in fact a striking (and quite rare) U4a1a, which points to Eastern Europe or the Baltic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_U_(mtDNA)#Haplogroup_U4

In the available commercial databases online, most people with that haplogroup tend to be Swedish, German, Danish, Polish …. Now, that statement is a bit slanted, as these databases only include people who have paid to get their DNA results done, so that would lead to a massive over-representation of wealthy northern Europeans. In no sense are these reliable scientific samples, nor do they say anything definitive about the actual distribution of U4 across Europe. Even so, U4 is not too common as a Welsh (or British) pattern. The furthest I can go back in my own female line is my great grandmother, and like all names on my chart, she was definitely south Welsh, with not a Pole or a Ukrainian in sight.

I should say by the way that I am not uncritically relying on these findings, which might be erroneous. But I have good reason to accept what I was told. In the paternal line, the results suggested individuals to whom I might be related, and I happen to know that those people and I share relatives with common surnames multiple generations back. There is no way a company could have cooked up such obscure, and uncannily accurate, findings. By extension then, I tend to trust the mitochondrial results.

My genealogy says one thing. My genetic information suggests something radically different.

Making life more difficult, in order to find the root of this genetic pattern, we would have to locate a woman, as only women carry MtDNA. We could not for instance assume an earlier woman in my ancestry who had a fling with a wandering Hungarian hussar in Napoleonic times. Nor, more seriously, can we invoke the many documented examples of skilled European workers traveling to Britain in early modern times, especially in pioneering Welsh industries like coal and iron. As far as I know, these visitors or migrants were all male.

So where does that U4 come from? I have an explanation – not the right one, necessarily, but an interesting speculation.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow place a woman from the Baltic/Slavic regions in South Wales in the pre-modern period, preferably very close to where my maternal family originated? Surely, that is a very tall order. Oddly enough, though, there is a historical window in which we can do something very much like that, and with remarkable geographical precision.

Over the past two centuries or so, my maternal family simply has not moved around much (Nor has my paternal line, but that is a different story). They have in fact remained within that small area of West Glamorgan, around Swansea and Neath, never really moving more than twenty miles or so in any direction. For the sake of argument, let us then assume they have in fact been in that small part of south Wales for centuries. Aha, but then we find an interesting connection. What we know about that area is that it is right next to one of the key regions of Scandinavian settlement in the British Isles in the Viking era, the ninth and tenth centuries.

The most important Scandinavian center in South Wales was Sweyn’s Inlet or Island, “Sweyns-eye” – that is, Swansea. It’s an open question whether Sweyn or Sveinn refers to a famous Norse king of that name, or just a lone adventurer. Near Swansea, Scandinavian names occur across the region of lower Gower, but not upper. The wonderful coastal landmark of the Worm’s Head in Gower is actually the head of the Ormr, Norse for a great Serpent (and it really looks like a sea serpent). A lot of the islands around the Welsh coast have pure Norse names like holm or -ey, as in Caldey. Flatholm is the Island of the Fleet. Such names scatter all across the coastal map to West Wales places like Tenby, another Scandinavian name.

Not only did the Norse name such places, but they and their descendants remained long enough to ensure that other people adopted and remembered the names. These areas were not just temporary camps: they were important enough to be real settlements, over decades or generations. At least along the coasts, the Vikings were there in force.

So what was the gender balance of these Scandinavian ventures? We tend to think of chiefs and raiders as all male communities, seizing local women, but there was more to the story. As settlements became more established, they might have brought wives or prospective (free) marriage partners. Over the years, archaeologists have recognized ever more examples of Scandinavian women buried in Britain. Now, one of these free women might just possibly have brought the specific U4a1a type direct from Denmark or Sweden.

But other, more sinister, factors were also at work, involving slave women. As I say, we are looking at the 9th-10th centuries. At this very time, one of the world’s largest slave trading operations was centered on the Baltic Sea, particularly seeking out slaves from the Slav and Baltic peoples. The word “slave” comes from “Slav,” but Finland was another great center for slaves. There is a huge scholarly literature on all this.

Recent scholarship suggests that slavery and slave trading were a major incentive for the whole Viking enterprise, from the eighth century onwards. In a polygamous aristocratic society, lower status men found it hard to obtain wives within their own communities, driving them to seek women elsewhere, by force. Initially, they did this in Baltic lands like Estonia, but then mightily extended their reach. Following the rivers, some pushed deep into Russia, while others ventured into the Atlantic realms, but the basic goals remained the same. Reporting one major raid in 821, the Irish Annals of Ulster note that the heathens “carried off a great number of women into captivity.”

Gradually, isolated slave raids evolved into a transnational business operation that ranged across Europe, and took many slaves to the Islamic lands. Captives would have been kidnapped and taken to one of the great Swedish slave markets at Birka or Gotland, or Denmark’s Hedeby. Scandinavians did much of the raiding, while Arab traders served as financiers and middlemen, and the distribution of these slave markets is indicated by the hoards of Arabic coins, dirhems, in trading centers like Birka.

A great many of those captives and slaves must have had U4 MtDNA. As we look at the map of lands where the U4 MtDNA pattern is most common, we also see the regions most heavily raided for their slaves precisely around this time.

Slave trading was thus a very large part of the economic life of the Viking world. Among other things, their enterprises ensured that large numbers of Irish and British slaves (thralls) ended up in early Iceland, where they have left a large genetic mark on the modern population. It would have been very natural for a Viking, maybe even the Sweyn who founded Swansea, to have had some slave girls along, whether as bed partners or as inventory for sale. In Iceland at least, some unfree women achieved the higher status of an acknowledged concubine, a frilla. Or possibly, a freeborn Norse woman brought along her unfree serving women and maids, even her nursemaid or her lady’s maid. A female slave, by the way, was usually called an ambátt rather than a thrall. Over time, slaves might be freed and join the mainstream community.

Let us suppose that those unfree women had daughters, who intermarried with local Welsh men – perhaps married, or else they were sexually exploited without their consent. They might have been sold, traded, or used as gifts. Whatever the exact process at work, any of these interactions would explain the importation of the U4 lineage into Wales.

Life for these slaves was as miserable as you might expect. In Norwegian law, slaves and thralls were described in the neuter gender: they were “it” rather than he or she, and were classified as just slightly superior to cattle. This is very much confirmed by the horrible portrayals of thralls that we repeatedly find in the large literature of the Icelandic sagas. But that observation leads to a major point about the nature of our historical evidence. Material evidence for free or aristocratic Scandinavian women is easy enough to find in the archaeological record, because they were deposited in substantial graves and accompanied by possessions such as brooches or other jewelry, or even weapons. Slave women, in contrast, owned nothing either in this world or in the grave, and their humble burials left very little for archaeologists to identify. You just did not bury rich grave goods when a slave woman – an “it” – died. We will likely never find material remains of Viking slaves in Britain. All they might have left – just conceivably – was their genes.

So could Baltic or Slavic girls have brought their MtDNA to South Wales? Very easily. Might my own maternal family even be descended from one of Sweyn’s slaves or concubines, someone from what we would now call Poland or Lithuania? I can’t prove it, but it is plausible. If not Sweyn himself, there were lots of other comparable chieftains, who might have had girls recently imported from Birka or Gotland.

My suggestion, then, is that “Slav-raiding” and slave-trading are the main means by which U4 MtDNA found its way to the British Isles, and perhaps to other parts of Western Europe.

I am still puzzled by that eight-plus percent figure for my own East European blood, which goes far beyond a single woman a thousand years ago. And as I say, that element must have entered the bloodline well before the mid-nineteenth century. (Modern Wales has plenty of later migrants from that region, but they are not the explanation). I wonder: maybe those Vikings in Wales imported other slaves from the Baltic and eastern Europe, whose descendants merged completely into the local genetic mix. Their descendants perhaps became local Welsh families, called Jones or Evans, or Williams, or even Jenkins.

Even a handful of slaves leaving offspring could make a sizable genetic impact in such a tiny overall population. How many people did the whole of Wales have in, say, 1000 AD? Barely 100,000 in all? And perhaps 5,000 in West Glamorgan? Those were very small genetic pools.

What I can say confidently is that those Slavs or Balts did not originally migrate of their own accord.

For the regional context, see Michael North, The Baltic (Harvard 2015). On Viking society generally, see Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (Penguin 2001). Kirsten A. Seaver has a chapter on Viking women slaves in her “Thralls and Queens,” in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph Calder Miller, eds., Women and Slavery (Ohio University Press, 2007), vol. 1: 147-167. See also Ruth Mazo Karras, “Concubinage and Slavery in the Viking Age,” Scandinavian Studies, 62 (1990) 141-162.

I have not read it yet, but Alice Rio has a forthcoming book on Slavery After Rome, on the period 500-1100 AD (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Previous Post

April 20, 2017

Please Stop Talking About “The Mother of All Bombs”

Next Post

April 24, 2017 Remembering the Armenian Genocide

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims Piracy pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public Executions Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month November 2026 October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What does the Bible say about rest?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Only rest when you're old Avoid rest Rest is evil God rested on the seventh day