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It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.

Sounds rather far-fetched. “Viking” only started getting used as an ethonym in the 19th century. In the sagas it it only used in the meaning of raider, pirate or outlaw. The etymology of “vik” (bay) is much more plausible.

The first part of the word viking, or vik simply means "bay" in nordic languages

Yes, but similarity alone is not a guarantee that words are related. The words val and [h]val are not related in Swedish, even though they ended up with the same pronunciation and spelling in the modern language. Sometimes, words can end up as "fossil words" because the main usage of the word was lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word

This can also happen to word roots. Because this is about a historical word, it's interesting to look at the broader Indo-European language tree for clues about the original meaning.

The even firster part "vi" means "we" though.

And vi was an outgrowth of ex, which was an improved version of ed, which in my experience, roughly translates to ‘ugh’.

In old Norway, the best vi hacker was crowned as vi king every midsummer.

Argghhh! When all ye got is a 300 Baud connection and a ASR-33, then ye be thanking your lucky stars for ed! And pray that the ribbon ain't worn out, and that the paper tape don't jam!

A pox o' chads on your house, ya mewlin' landlubber!

I don’t think -kingur is a suffix in old norse. It is not a suffix in modern Icelandic, and I can’t think of any suffix like that.

In fact I don‘t remember a suffix which attaches to a pronoun. In modern Icelandic at least we like to introduce more pronouns or conjugate them rather then to suffix or prefix them.

If the word was broken as vi-kingur, I think the modern Icelandic would be við-kingur (or við-lingur), which is simply not a word in the language.

webay hmm. they started a trend

Do we have any historical source of people referring to themselves as vikings?

I don’t speak old norse but I speak Icelandic natively. Víkingur simply means Bay-er, that is somebody from a bay. As an Icelander living in America I experience the English word “viking” as an Exonym for my identity. In Iceland we use “Nordic” or “Scandinavian”, both terms are inclusive of Finns, Sámi, and Greenlanders, so strictly speaking this is not an Enthnonym.

In Icelandic, at least to my knowledge, we have never used Víkingur as an ethnonym (well maybe during a sports game, or among right-wing nationalists). It has always meant raiders. In 2007 there was even a new word dubbed Útrásarvíkingar meaning businessmen who made a bunch of money doing business abroad (buykings would a clever translation of the term).

EDIT: I just remembered that the -ingur suffix can also be used to indicate a temporary state e.g. ruglingur (confusion) and troðningur (trampling [n.]), and was used as such e.g. að fara í víking (to embark to a viking) so víkingur could also mean, a person that embarks to a bay.

I am not sure why they used this title for this study as that is not the important part. We already have known Viking was a job description, thats been known for hundreds of years. We also knew that viking settlement was widespread. This study used DNA sequencing to settle the debate on if vikings from certain areas went to certain areas, and if they mixed. It seems to confirm the theory that the norse did NOT mix, and traded, raided and settled different areas separately.

The title is indeed odd.

The new (to me, at least) idea here is that the different regions of Scandinavia didn't mix as much, "on the job" or genetically, as I thought they would have. They each carved out their own territories and mixed with the local population, but not with each other to a significant degree. It's surprising to find that more genetic material was making it's way back to parts of Scandinavia from those far-flung regions than from neighbouring Scandinavian countries.

A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.

After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way.

But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time.

Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.

Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..."

Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.

I don't give much credence to the theory though, having grown up in a part of Sweden where every village have their own "language"(we call them mål, which is like halfway between dialect and language, they're not officially recognised as minority languages, but they're more than just dialects: villages as little as 30km apart can't understand eachother at all, and one of them, Älvdalsmål, is notoriously more similar to Icelandic than it is too Swedish)

These are Swedish communities, as opposed to Sami ones, they've been integrated into the wider Swedish society since their founding, yet these languages are still alive today(though some are critically endangered)

There are degrees of integration. People from Älvdalen, should they choose to, could move to Stockholm and change their dialect (one of the ways you know it's a dialect, is that they understand you much better than you understand them). It's been that way for a long time.

And from what I understand Älvdalsmål is, like all dialects, getting rounded at the corners and getting more understandable to other Swedes.

Even dialects that sound incomprehensible at first, if you're a native speaker you'll get used to it quickly. The difficulty of Älvdalska is superficial, it's actually very close to what you're used to, so you'll learn to understand them and they already know how to understand you.

Sami is completely different. It takes a long time to learn. Go back 150 years, and very few Sami would be able to move to the capital and pass as Norwegian or Swedish, their accent would give them away even if they did know the majority language. Go back another 50 years, and they may simply not have been allowed to even try to pass in many places (as I recall, the first Sami priest in Norway, Anders Porsanger, was rejected by his Trondheim congregation. He was simply too weird for them, even though he was highly educated and of course spoke excellent Norwegian).

Älvdalsmål is critically endangered. You have the parallel existing älvdals dialect, which most people living in Älvdalen speak. Last I checked there was something like 5 living people who can speak älvdalsmål.

I'd argue that the reason locals understand you more than you understand them is, in these cases, that they're effectively bilingual. If they want you to understand then they'll switch to Swedish and you'll understand just fine.

There hasn't been anyone speaking only Mål in a few generations, in my estimate. You either speak both mål and Swedish, or only Swedish.

And no, you don't pick these up easily. I grew up in Rättvik. My grandmother used to speak rättviksmål on occasion (she was bilingual with Swedish) I can understand rättviksmål somewhat. I used to date a girl from Malung, who spoke Swedish usually, but exclusively Malungsmål with her mom. 3 years together and I still couldn't understand a single word she said to her mother. Mål is often conflated with the dialects of the same area, but they are 2 distinct things. Skånska is a dialect,I can understand it fine, even I have to focus a bit more than usual. Dalarna has a dialect too, the one Gunde Svan speaks on TV, it's easy to understand. Mål is separate, and much, much harder.

Rättviksmål is considered the easiest to understand for native speakers of Swedish. Here's a reference text for your perusal: https://shfstor.blob.core.windows.net/rattvik/uploads/images...

This Wikipedia article is also interesting.

They're essentially separate languages springing from the same roots, and therefore have some similarities.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egentliga_dalm%C3%A5l

You're right that Sami is harder though. It does not share a common root with Swedish, so there are basically no similarities. Even German would be easier for Swedes as they're both Germanic languages, but they've diverged long enough ago that similarities are sparse these days.

> 3 years together and I still couldn't understand a single word she said to her mother.

Well, maybe they both did not want you to... ;-)

“Mål” literally just means language, there’s nothing special or particular to Swedish regional dialects about it. You have the word “språk” from German “Sprach”, likely via Low German.

The term “dialect” is very fluid, and intelligibility is not a requirement. It is often a negotiated term that has more to do with culture or politics.

In China, they even call Cantonese and Hakka “dialects”, which is linguistically absurd, but serves a political purpose.

Saami were sparsely populating large areas - so they did not exactly live side by side with other people. And the more people came to live where Saami were herding their reindeers, the less space they had left to herd them. Throw in to that climate change into that as well. But to the contrary to what you are claiming here, Saami did assimilate into Norwegians and Norwegians also put a lot of effort in assimilation of Saami - mainly during the times, when religion was dominant form of identity, so it was done with good intentions - like all the major crimes against humanity.

Vikings were a product of mixing people of different origins. And that is a consistent result across whole Europe. The same thing applies in Western Europe, just as in Eastern Europe. And that applies to Norwegian vikings, even if they had a chance to colonize some empty lands - they still also took wives from other places than just Norway.

They were not that much more sparse than their neighbors. They typically moved with the seasons, so maybe they needed a little more space (a summer place and a winter place at the very least), but not radically more so. After all, the Norse had summer pastures in the mountains too.

Reindeer herding is younger than people think, as I said. Until the major predators were exterminated, it wouldn't have been possible to have herds of the sizes we're used to. Land wasn't the limiting factor for herd size. Until eastern Norwegian immigrants came in the 1750s on, and settled inland - a crazy thing to do according to locals since of course you wanted to live by the sea where the fish, the money were, and it was cold inland - there wasn't much land use conflict.

There were no centrally organized assimilation efforts until von Westen at the earliest. And while he was zealous about rooting out superstition and customs which he saw as pagan, he was also protecting the language, teaching people in their own language (for a generation after Westen, Sami were said to be more educated than other northerners, and you see it in the censuses!) and certainly wasn't putting people into encomiendas or otherwise forcing them to change their material way of life.

> If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.

Yeah, they had completely different lifestyles that were reliant on completely different biomes. The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra. Neither could live where the other lived, they spoke languages from completely different families, they had completely different cultural traditions. Neither side had much that the other side wanted. Of course they didn't assimilate, how could they?

But when the industrial revolution came and iron ore was discovered up north, suddenly the desire to assimilate them (or genocide them...) appeared, because now they had something that the people in the south wanted very, very much.

> Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.

My understanding is that the Norse respected the Sami as a people different from them, and were a little bit afraid of their "magic", because they didn't understand it. They were perfectly happy to live apart, and do a little bit of trade in goods and services. Why go north to raid the Sami, when you could sail south and raid the fat and rich English or the French instead?

> The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra.

This is a common stereotype, but it's simply not accurate. Intensive reindeer herding didn't become a thing until the major predators and the wild reindeer were wiped out. Sami lived very similarly to the Norse - a bit more semi-nomadic, and a bit more adapted to use marginal land maybe, but they held sheep, fished and farmed just like their neighbors. And once intensive reindeer herding took off in the 17th-18th century, still it was a minority who lived from that.

There were raids done against Saami as well, though it is right - more profitable raids were better down south. In much later times there were also slavery raids done that included Saami people, though this cross over into times that were past viking Age as well by cultures that evolved from vikings, where there are different opinions what can be defined as vikings.

maybe you hate your neighbors more than you hate the exotic foreign visitor?

hmm, of course current news would rather undermine that theory, but maybe today's exotic foreign countries are about as close as neighboring countries were back in Viking times.

It's a distasteful, but relevant, aspect of vikings that they were slavers as well as raiders. If you went viking, a large part of the booty you brought back walked on two legs and had genes to pass on. Perhaps the Norse liked their neighbours just enough not to make many of them "visitors".

I think the explanation is much simpler, we know the Norse were a bit afraid of the Sami. They viewed them as a weird non-threatening neighbour people who had a weird language and weird magic. So you traded with them, you respected them, you said please and thank you, and then you were happy to see them gone because you didn't want them to curse you. (And I would assume the Sami were very happy to foster this belief since they were much weaker militarily)

Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.

The Norse had a big fear of curses, the evil eye, the "strength in weakness". I think there's a wide theme in Norse legends, which is about spite and betrayal, but it doesn't work quite like we're used to. In Rigsthula, the social origin myth of the Norse, the first king is suggested to have taken the inheritance of his wealthier brothers by force - possibly by murdering them. And in the Norse creation myth, the gods also arguably seize the world from its original owner (and creates the world as we know it from his corpse). So the theme is that all power is illegitimate, or at the very least seized/stolen, and the robbed want it back - and they will get it back eventually. All hubris will fall, not just for the individual non-god as in Greek mythology, but for the whole world and the gods themselves. The world three has tree roots, one to the well of the norns (fates), one to the poisonous worm Nidhogg who gnaws on the root and will eventually kill it, and one to Mimir's well, the well of wisdom, where you can maybe learn secret tricks of gods and rulers to postpone the inevitable.

So spite, or nid, dark power to break rather than to rule, is the ultimate danger to kings and rulers. To invite it by acts of cruelty, especially against the weak, is to bring ill luck upon yourself. Your followers, too, believe deeply in this, so they may abandon you if you seem to "draw in bad karma".

But those who are weak, and have nothing to lose, can dip into the power of spite and hate, and do things which would be unwise for a ruler to do, such as poisonings, betrayals, or vicious cruelty. They aren't evil for doing so, it's just the way the world works - if you run afoul of this, it was your own fault for inviting their hate.

Even demand for safety can be scornful, and "nid". Kings are supposed to trust in their own strength, and to some degree accept living with threats hanging over their heads. King Nidhad, in the story of Volund, listens to his wife's advice and hamstrings Volund. It's arguably self-defense since Volund certainly hates them, but it's still a scornful, cowardly act - which Nidhad and his family end up paying dearly for.

So yes, with respect to the Finnish and Sami neighbors, they would have feared them because of potential curses, but it wasn't because they were a magical people as such, it was simply were weak.

But Christianity complicated things. Odin, like the other pagan gods, is himself subject to the laws of fate and must be wise for his own sake, but the Christian God is almighty. You do not have to fear dark curses if He is with you. As a practical matter, they were a lot more willing to build walls and engage in other "cowardly" acts of self defense, and they could get away with it because their Christian followers didn't worry (much) that this would invite fate backlash. They were also a lot less afraid of things like public executions. It made possible much higher concentration of political power.

And no, the Norse didn't view that as simply fat idiots ripe for plunder. They admired all the great walls and splendor which concentrated political power had managed to build in Europe - things they had very little of at home. They did plunder, yes, but that was like a fox eating hens in a henhouse - he's still worried about the farmer.

doubtful given histories of the area, however maybe they disliked getting retaliation for a raid.

You say "we" knew but the vast majority of people don't. It's not exactly common knowledge among people I know so it's unsurprising a title for general audiences uses it as a hook.

Scandinavians and historians? This study did not reveal anything which was not taught in school in Sweden in the 90s when I grew up. I guess useful to verify what we knew with even more sources, but there was no new discovery here.

The used that title because more people will see and remember it.

I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.

Many Americans who are Italian and Irish do the same thing.

People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture.

It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.

I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume.

A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked: "Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" - mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)

Does it really bother you that people care about their heritage? US culture is a culture that assimilates, people remember where they come from. It's almost mean-spirited that yall fault them for this. Better than forgetting. I remember where my ancestors came from because they came here from somewhere they were not wanted.

What I would ask you is why does it irk you, why do you care? Is it some hindance to my culture that I want to learn about it and try to "cosplay"? What would you prefer that we act as though we're here sui generis? Is somebody's culture lesser because they're not in that country at that time?

People of Italian ancestry in the US did not forget everything about their past, in many cultures that transition is even more recent; I remember my immigrant grandmother. Comes off as gatekeeping people who would otherwise be your relatives.

It's massively irritating because it's the usual US blend of total ignorance and massive arrogance.

I used to do re-enactment in the UK, and after almost every show I'd have some idiot wander up and say "I'm a Saxon!" and blather shite at me about what that meant about their identity and culture.

If I asked if that meant they weren't American, then obviously they'd react in horror at the suggestion.

The idea that my culture, my history, can just be co-opted as part of someone else's cosplay identity, is tiresome at best. But then they walk up to me and expect me to recognise them as a fellow Saxon? No. Fuck off you annoying fucking wanker.

And I notice that none of them claim to be English or even British. Oh no, too much Braveheart and The Patriot for that.

The weirdest part is that they stop tracing back the second they hit someone interesting, as if nothing interesting happened before that person. If their great-great-grandfather was Scottish, they then assume everyone before him was 100% super duper Scottish, and that that has conferred "cultural traits" through some weird-ass blood magic or something.

But Europeans are diverse mutts as well.

I'm Swedish. But my last name is 100% German, easily recognisable as a German name, super common. Because my paternal ancestor immigrated from Germany in the 1600's and brought the name with him. My mother's maiden name was Czech, also very easily recognisable as such, and my uncle and my cousins have that name as well.

But I would never in a million years call myself German. I am not German. I am not Czech. My cousins aren't Czech. All of our parents were born in Sweden. All of our grandparents were born in Sweden. The vast majority of our great-grandparents were born in Sweden. We are all 100% Swedish.

The idea that I would call myself German because of my last name is completely ridiculous, but that is exactly what these cosplaying Americans are doing, even though they don't speak German, and I do. My dad speaks fluent German. My maternal grandfather spoke fluent German. I have so much more claim to "German-ness", whatever that is, than these cosplayers, and I wouldn't dream of doing it.

And then they bleat about how their great-great-whtaever was German, and because of that they "feel so connected to the Alps".

What's funny about those Europeans gatekeeping European ethnic identity from Americans, is that their tune will change immediately if we ask them if an African who has been there for 5 years is English or German.

See the response from marcus_holmes about "Irishness" in this thread. It's essentially the position of ethnic nationalist parties like Restore Britain. But in a different context he'd be ranting about civic nationalist parties like Reform UK or One Nation...

Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever, you can use a purity standard close to the Nuremberg laws to exclude them. But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.

The AussiemBerg cultural test ain't that hard cobber .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drkcOzCjuuU == 100% True blood Aussie.

> those Europeans gatekeeping European ethnic identity

No no no, no-one is gatekeeping ethnicity. If you have Irish heritage, you have Irish heritage. That's a fact.

We're gatekeeping cultural identity and nationality, because these cosplaying Americans seem to think that their ethnicity confers culture and nationality by weird blood magic or something, and that's not how it works.

> if we ask them if an African who has been there for 5 years is English or German.

Someone who is not ethnically German, but has immigrated to Germany and speaks the language, is way more German than a cosplaying American whose parents and grandparents were all Americans, doesn't speak German, knows nothing about German culture, has never lived in Germany, but who has one ancestor who came from Germany.

If you're a first-generation immigrant, you get to choose what you identify as. If you speak the language of your new country and if you've become a citizen, sure, you can call yourself that. I don't think a lot of people will object to that.

Because, and this is the fuel for this clash, we care the most about culture and nationality, instead of heritage and ethnicity.

> Basically, if an American is claiming to be whatever

Because they're not, their culture is American, their nationality is American, they're American.

> But an Indian or African who arrived 5 years ago is a true blood Aussie mate, because saying anything else would be doing a racism.

No they're not, no it's not, and my what a lovely strawman you made up there.

It's not Americans doing these things. I've met plenty of Europeans with exotic identity claims, romanticizing some past culture instead of the living culture around them - Viking metal rather than folk music, to put it like that (there are also of course responsible ways to enjoy exotic metal genres).

By making it into Americans vs. Europeans you're doing a bit of what you're criticizing yourself. Yeah sure, we all agree someone walking up to you and saying they're Saxon is embarrassing, but that sweet old lady from Minnesota who's done rose painting (a national romantic fad around the time her ancestors immigrated) for 20 years is part of a living culture, which isn't simply "American", even if she has outrageous Norwegian pronounciation and otherwise isn't someone you'd like to identify with.

> that sweet old lady from Minnesota who's done rose painting (a national romantic fad around the time her ancestors immigrated) for 20 years is part of a living culture, which isn't simply "American"

I 100% agree with you.

Men hun er faen meg heller ikke norsk.

Hvis hun ser på seg selv som norsk, så har ikke jeg noe problem med det.

If she sees herself has Norwegian, I have no problem with that.

We should let people identify with whatever they want. Identity is deeply personal - that's kind of the whole thing with identity - and as long as you don't use your identity to argue for something that's objectively wrong (such as rewriting history to suit it) then it's fine. If someone wants to identify as the same kind of thing as me, I may be flattered or embarrassed or worst case offended, but let's go for the facts, not with the identity.

top post, end thread

haha, great point about the language. An Irish friend of mine would speak Gaelic to any American he met who claimed to be Irish. Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question.

Wow. So I guess that the 60% of Ireland's population that don't speak any Gaelic are't Irish ether. And neither were the 94% that couldn't speak any (beyond "craic" & "uisce") 10 years ago. Please tell your friend that the majority of Ireland's population is English, not Irish. After all, if they were Irish, they'd speak the language, right? And not just in school when they're forced to.

WTF is wrong wth you people?

Maybe because our family were forced to flee from Ireland to survive. My irish grandmothers (on my mom's side) arrived in the US child orphans (their families died on the boats) and were adopted by German families. God they are losers for not keeping up the linguistic tradition, right? We should give up any connection to the past because those little orphan girls ended up speaking english. So superior, your Irish friend, over people just trying to have some sort of connection to the world. You are some hateful petty ass people that you come at people just trying to connect.

Edit: Funny I replied the answer to "Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question."

Why did you just move on? You should be happy to have your 'great question' belittling my family answered. It's because of death, and survival, and scraping by to survive, lots of pieces got lost. That was your ownage. That our families were broken people just surviving and sometimes language was one the the pieces we lost. Pieces we are excited to maybe explore when we visit europe, (until we run into people like you). I have an old family bible with Gaelic that my family wrote in it. But that isn't a connection, right?

Stop straw-manning, no-one is denying your heritage or your connections. Your grandmothers were Irish.

But you're not. You're American, with Irish heritage. You were born in America to American parents. You are super welcome to learn about Irish culture, about your heritage. You are super welcome to visit Ireland, visit the place of your fore-mothers and other ancestors. You can enjoy Irish culture as much as you want. Learn riverdancing and blast Michael Flatley all day long. You can even enjoy the bastardised commercialised version that is the totally fake US retail holiday "St Patrick's day". Wear some tacky green beads, put on a green hat, drink fifteen pints of Guiness! Sláinte! Have fun!

The one thing we're specifically asking you not to do, is to call yourself Irish. That's the only thing we're gatekeeping. You're Irish-American. You have Irish heritage. You have Irish ancestors. You have Irish family heirlooms. But you're not Irish.

Why the hell is that so important to you? I'm personally a lot more annoyed with faux "Norwegian" paraphernalia (a lot of which I see every day, because I live in a tourist town which wants to sell them what they want) than what people call themselves.

Because it encourages the weird cosplayers, who will then claim to be "more Italian than the Italians", which is complete nonsense.

Because it's weird fetishisation of European cultures that are both seen as superior to American culture, but also at the same time as inferior.

Because it's rooted in weird beliefs in blood magic; that DNA somehow confers culture.

No, the word people use to describe themselves does none of these things. It's just a word.

Replying to ""Obviously none of them spoke the language, and he'd ask why not? Great question." with the reason is straw manning?

Don't worry long ago I had my naivety removed by folks like you and no longer feel any fondness or interest for ireland or irishness, and passed none of it down to my kids. Ireland has never been brought up for a vacation destination where as I convinced my mom to gift me a trip to all of the UK upon graduation. Hopefully you will be relieved of the burden of having to deal with Americans with feelings of common bonds (like I used to have) after my generation passes.

I'm sorry your people have had to endure this wanting to connect from Americans and them trying to figure out if the weird/quirky things their family did come from your culture.

"Fine, I won't connect then!1!!"

What's wrong with you, you're responding to literally the opposite of what I said? You are free to connect, to seek your roots, figure out weird quirky things from the culture of your ancestors, and nurture as much fondness for Ireland and Irishness as you please. No-one in Ireland (Note, I'm not Irish!!) is gonna object to any of that.

The one thing, the ONE FUCKING THING we're asking you not to do is to call yourself Irish, because that will guaranteed piss off everyone you meet in Ireland.

How is this difficult to do or understand? We're asking one thing.

Everything else is up for grabs. You can appropriate as much culture as you please, real, fake, stereotypical, exaggerated, whatever. Grab it, use it, do it, perform it, that's fine. You don't need to excuse yourself or justify yourself or claim ancestry or heritage or anything. Absolutely no-one will gatekeep the culture. Enjoy it, all of it! Do this one thing, and real Irish people will be super happy to share their culture with you.

Dude. The vast majority of Irish people can't speak a word of Gaelic. 10 years ago when I went to Ireland, the bilingual population was 0.1%!!!!! How many people use Gaelic in their daily life in Ireland? Less than 100 000. Guess the rest of you are just English, pretending to be Irish, eating fish & chips & going to Tesco's...

The only thing I ever heard from Irish people that they hated about being "Irish-American" was the idea that Ireland was a magical pixie world full of leprechauns and gold.

Do you think when my friends say 'you are mexican now' I'm negatively taking something away in that interaction? Somehow we both lose something? Or 'you are indian now'? Do you think I literally think I am now those, and stealing from them?

Thanks for giving me permission to appropriate what my family has kept as core identity. So magnanimous of you to give me your box I'm allowed to fit in (totally non judgemental and friendly with the ' fake, stereotypical, exaggerated, whatever.').

The reason we go to Ireland is to find something, to feel something, and you want us to deny that desire inside us while we are there. Why not save us all the hassle and just... not do any of it? Like I said, I didn't build that desire up in my kids. You should be HAPPY about that. You win. There isn't anything inside of them telling them they are connected to Europe because you euros have decided they aren't, should not be, and are awful people to be made fun of for feeling some sort of connection to you.

The world is small and way kinder than whatever it is you euros want to enforce over there. Irish Americans go to Ireland looking for something, and the Irish don't want to deal with Americans looking for that something. Why would I push it and force myself into the box they define for me? There's amazing surfing and kindness in Costa Rica and they don't complain I'm co-opting their Salsa Lizano. Amazing camping and kindness in Canada. Ironically Germans welcoming and happy to talk about family recipes. The coolness that is Shanghai. Why go to a place where the people there hate the reason you come and talk shit about your deep felt personal motivation as if it's fake? And if you deny that internal feeling and treat Europe just like a cool living museum, believe it or not, Euros also say that's the rude American thing to do. Ireland, the UK, France, Italy hate the inconvenience that Americans feel they have a special relationship, be happy/relieved that most of that dies with my generation and we have no connection to each other going forward. And my kids won because they much preferred the beach trips. Everyones happy and new traditions created so that Irish/Euro ones are no longer somehow made smaller by Americans excited to share in them.

I don't think anyone has a problem with saying "my family came from Ireland", or even "my family was forced to flee Ireland because the British are bastards". Or even "Irish American" would be OK.

The problem we all see is that you're saying that you are Irish. If you weren't born in Ireland, your parents weren't born in Ireland, you don't speak Irish, you don't pay taxes in Ireland, you can't vote in Irish elections, you wouldn't join the Irish military, you don't understand Irish culture, or know anything about Irish history, then in what way are you Irish?

You're not. But you have redefined "Irish" to mean something else. And that's what pisses people off. There are actual Irish people out there. Invent your own identity.

So, if you are living in London and not paying taxes(to Ireland), you are not Irish? Dude, you are clearly mixing ethnicity and nationality. Plenty of Irish in UK, that does not know Gaelic - same situation in Ireland. There are in fact more Irish Gaelic speakers living in USA/Canada than in Ireland.

And Americans are claiming ethnic ancestry - not national ancestry. And many Irish migrated out of Ireland, when it was not a country - and paying taxes is irrelevant in this gatekeeping of identities.

That is your right to not claim your German ancestry, as generally it is a viable solution to just not stand out and blend in with crowd, but frankly that is also your right to claim your ancestry and seek refuge in German speaking countries, if things go south in Sweden and Caliphate is established there or some Finns invade and makes your life impossible, so generally - this is not your gate to keep, as these can be considered as an open choices. And I would think that current age of open borders that we have now might end and claiming different identity might be the only viable option to migrate somewhere else.

Holy racism, Batman!

> But Europeans are diverse mutts as well.

Speak for yourself, because

> If their great-great-grandfather was Scottish, they then assume everyone before him was 100% super duper Scottish

That is, indeed, the correct assumption to make. I would recommend having a look at the work done on population genetics at Oxford University’s People of the British Isles project[1]. Even their homepage should relieve you of some misconceptions:

> The People of the British Isles (PoBI) project was initiated by Sir Walter Bodmer in 2004, in an effort to create the first ever detailed genetic map of a country. The United Kingdom’s history bristles with immigrations, wars and invasions, so the PoBI researchers faced a tremendous task in investigating how past events impacted the genetic makeup of modern British people.

> Results included a map (image below) showing a remarkable concordance between genetic and geographical clustering of our samples across the United Kingdom.

[1] https://www.peopleofthebritishisles.org/

Ethnicity and nationality are not the same, though they have until very recently overlapped to an enormous extent. Someone might well be of anglo-saxon ethnicity and be American.

Being British myself, I find it fun to tease the yanks about all manner of things, but actual animus of the kind you’re displaying just looks like a massive chip on the shoulder.

Sorry when your ancestor's ran mine out we survived and chose to keep a bit of identity, some concept of self. You're right, we should have surrendered every right to it, every notion of those that came before us. Ungrateful us not to have submitted in a second way (the first was not submitting and, you know, surviving).

You became American.

Identity doesn't work that way. Doesn't change where my family came from, my families traditions, what identity bits my family chose to hang onto, or how we try to understand the world.

Good job keeping up your culture of being petty judges of us though. At least when your ancestors did it we were your neighbors and you had good cause (we were the wrong religion or whatever your ancestors hated in us and your family got to live and stay and mine had to flee and die). It's kinda pathetic to care after you ran us off to still try to tell us how to be and to define us instead of letting us define ourselves.

Wild to see you so proud to be petty, small, and hateful of people that did nothing to you all but want to be friendly.

It irks me because it usually manifests as embracing cartoonish stereotypes of the most superficial aspects of the culture: "I'm 1/64th Italian, so I like pizza. I'm 1/16th German, so I like beer. etc."

It doesn't keep me up at night, but I think it's tacky and vulgar.

It might usually manfiest as that or you're picking out the most superficial parts of people's identity to criticize. It's just not how I and others view it when we think about where the people who made us come from.

Or, to put it another way: your criticism is tacky and vulgar. Perhaps what you're describing is "cosplaying" but that's not how immigrant communities see themselves. I do in fact know the perecentages of my national makeup but pizza and beer aren't how I celebrate that. Nobles know their ancestry down to the smallest detail, is somebody really tacky for knowing that technically they are 1/4th Italian? I don't think attacking somebody's identity is ever fair; it costs you nothing but is everything to them.

I think that a lot of people are irked by the sheer inconsistency of the American culture: celebrate your immigrant heritage at the same time you protect “your” American land and keep those pesky immigrants out. Not personal.

There's a depth to what you're saying that I don't think you're truly aware of..."flooding the block" -- or the mass importation of immigrants to build a political machine -- has been part of my country's politics since the Tammany Hall days (political machines). Tale as old as time in the US and it's one of the reasons why there's so much skepticism. Like what you said here, we KNOW how this works because at some point we were the Irish\Italian\or Mexican that got shipped in. We're not blind to party politics and ginning up house delegates or patronage politics.

Really so its okay if a Canadian, Australian or New Zealander does it?

It wouldn't be. But they never do it, so I don't have to worry about it.

???? I live in Canada and people say this all the time. Always have.

Had a friend growing up from an Italian-German family. Ate schnitzel, watched soccer, corrected us on our pronunciation of 'pasta.' Didn't speak any language other than English and his parents were 2nd generation Canadians, who also spoke nothing but English.

My family came from Ukraine & Ireland 4 & 3 generations ago, respectively. Family gatherings always included halupschi, perogies, and Ukrainian pastries. Never spoke Ukrainian or heard any word of Ukrainian except for the names of the food & of some of my older relatives.

Can easily go on and on about the vast majority of people in Canada.

So I dont think you know what you're talking about.

Like many Americans, I am from a European immigrant background. For what it's worth, I have spent a lot of time in x-land, and I speak x-ish. But I am an American. My ethnicity is mixed. I grew up in America. You would never know my heritage unless I told you, which I probably never would. Because I hate hearing the "Me too! I'm x-ish too!" spiel from another American who can't even pronounce their own surname correctly.

> that's not how immigrant communities see themselves.

Whoa, who's talking about immigrant families? Immigrant families came from somewhere else. That's their identity, because it's where they came from. But if your family has been here for a few generations, then I have news for you: you're not immigrants!

> I do in fact know the perecentages of my national makeup. Nobles know their ancestry down to the smallest detail, is somebody really tacky for knowing that technically they are 1/4th Italian?

The game of percentages is absurd to begin with. It's one thing to know you have some ancestors from Japan. It's another to say "I am 12.5% Japanese!" What the hell does that even mean? When noble families recognize their ancestry, first off, they don't make ridiculous claims of percentage. No nobleman says "I am 1/16 Catalonian". They'd laugh at you. "You mean to tell me your culture is 1/6 Catalonian?" Second, they don't identify with the culture of an ancestor if it has no presence and reality for them. The British royal family has German roots (and like all European royal families, a complicated web of ancestry spanning virtually all of Europe in some way or another), yet they don't claim to be German or Hessian. It would be absurd. They're the British royal family, and much of them have been the British royal family for some time!

(I do recognize cultural identity as complex, of course, more complex than how many people see it, but it's complex when the cultural dimensions are actually real, not fabricated by the imagination.)

> I don't think attacking somebody's identity is ever fair; it costs you nothing but is everything to them.

But it's not their identity. It's a pretense. If some distant ancestor's cultural origin is everything to someone, then you're proving the absurdity of of the whole thing.

Like I say, it's a socially-accepted form of cosplaying.

The percentages come from their ancestry (their GRANDPARENTS), not culture.

> Does it really bother you that people care about their heritage?

I'm making an observation. It's not a unique observation. People in countries of ancestry find it ridiculous when Americans far removed from their culture visit and claim to be "one of them", or worse, like a member of "the family". I'm sure you don't enjoy people who make fraudulent claims about themselves either, especially when it is an attempt to establish a false camaraderie with you.

I think the mid-century pressure to assimilate into corporate American culture, along with all the tactics used by the state to disrupt ethnic neighborhoods and communities like scattering them across newly-created suburbs to hasten assimilation, left people disoriented, traumatized, and feeling culturally homeless. There's a nostalgia for the ethnic neighborhood that was lost (in the case of Italian neighborhoods, you can see it reflected in movies like "The Godfather"). Assimilation - and synthesis - would have happened on its own, eventually, but this was an engineered process of rupture.

I also question your characterization of the phenomenon as "caring about one's heritage". It's one thing to take an interest in one's ancestry. That's perfectly fine and perfectly normal, but that's not what is at issue. I can look at my family tree and note whatever ancestors of other ethnic backgrounds there might be. It's another to claim as heritage and as identity some culture that your family shed generations ago. Culture is lived in a society, not a gene you inherit.

(Incidentally, this is why some Black Americans dislike the term "African American". Black Americans have been in the US longer than most Americans of European ancestry. They aren't "African". They're a cultural group that emerged in the America South. The case is similar with Jamaicans, Barbadian, St. Lucians, etc.)

> What I would ask you is why does it irk you, why do you care?

How about: why are you so bothered by this observation? It seems quite personal to you, which should perhaps be something bracketed if you wish to be objective.

> People of Italian ancestry in the US did not forget everything about their past

The most you can claim on the basis of these residual bits of knowledge and culture is Italian influence. Just because the Boston Brahmins know their English ancestry, or have English ancestry, doesn't mean they're English.

An "Italian American" generations removed from Italy is not the same as an "Italian", and so on. That's not a denial of influence or origin. It's just factually incorrect to say they are the same. Culturally, they are not.

> Comes off as gatekeeping people who would otherwise be your relatives.

It's interesting you call this gatekeeping. I am not the cause of such facts, and so I am not the one drawing up the boundaries of reality. I am merely recognizing them.

It seems, that people do not know that in USA there exists American ethnicity of relatively small population(for USA) - about 20 million that identifies themselves as Americans, so the quote is not correct.

However large majority of Americans have background of immigrants and they have right to claim their ancestry(though DNA companies are selling them as ancestry lineage their relatedness, which is not the same). You and other people that wants to gatekeep this have no right to decide for them what they want to identify as, just as Europeans nowadays are mixing up national identity and ethnic identity, which are not exact match even in Europe.

Not to mention that it shows an extreme ignorance of the fact that USA & Canada are not 1000's of years old. Of course people have a tie to ancestors who came here a few generations ago, and brought aspects of their culture with them.

I find that Euros dont really know anything about the USA. Im Canadian and when I travel I routinely shock Europeans by reminding them that the USA is a huge country of over 300 million people. They seem to think its about the size of Britain.

I dont know why it irks you guys. Canada does this too. It's because, unlike Europe, we haven't been here for thousands of years. My grandfather was from Dublin. He came to Canada and didn't want to go back to Ireland, ever, because he hated religion so much. But he still passed on aspects of Irish culture to us, and not because he wore green on St. Patricks day once.

I highly recommend reading Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters. It's a fascinating work of sociology that defines this exact phenomenon and explains its origins.

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The no-mixing part is what got me. If "viking" was just a job open to anyone, you'd expect genetic mixing in the burial sites. But Swedish groups went east, Danes south, Norwegians west — distinct genetic clusters throughout.

So it was a job, but one you apparently got by being born in the right place

Don’t take “job” literally. It wasn’t centralized in any way. It just meant if you had the resources you could build a ship, hire some henchmen, and go raiding. It is not surprising Swedes went East, Nowegians Northwest etc - just look at a map.

The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.

“Make the tall girl join the women’s basketball/volleyball team.”

The title is rather confused, because DNA cannot show how people understood a certain word. Historical sources like the sagas show how the word was understood.

So who are vikings?

I think the two most common answers are "people before in Denmark" or "people before in Norway". There may not be an easy distinction here the more we step back into history, but personally I am leaning more towards the "old danes". It just seems to fit more.

No, vikingr is an old norse word meaning pirate, raider, or outlaw. Not everyone in the Nordics were vikings, just like not ever American were a cowboy.

That's a misconception TFA is talking about.

"Farming is hard, let's go viking"

Farming in Scandinavia has got to be harder than farming somewhere further south.

Maybe the climate and landscape turned them Viking?

'It is the great north wind that made the Vikings' as Will Antonio Zeppeli told Jonathan Joestar.

I don't believe in it. Tomorrow they will say Software developer was just a job and they were not intellectually superior race who brought alien technology like NodeJS.

It's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.

99%.

Poor Sven just liked maps but they kept making him come along on their “excursions”.

By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.

I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.

What's gonna bake your noodle is, Viking raids were the VC-funded startups of medieval northern Europe. Norse kings were very generous with their kingdom's treasure, to the raiders with the most fearsome reputations.

This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.

It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.

The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.

It was both.

The OG founders.

Well said.

Never trust the headline. From the article:

> And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.

The article is just really confused in its terminology. But historically, vikingr meant raider or pirate. It was only hereditary in the sense it might be a family tradition to go viking. But if you dont go raiding you are not a vikingr whatever your ancestry.

Yeah, and the Norse also called non-norse raiders Vikings. It was just a word meaning raider or pirate.

I feel like this is common in most (at least western) empires. Vikings from Sweden would take over territory as far as Poland or even Italy and recruit new soldiers. Eventually some of them would end up in warrior style graves. What's actually more interesting in my mind is that they didn't bring people back, and so the gene pool in Sweden remained more or less unchanged

The slave trade only went south.

I suspect this is an example of us seeing history through a mdoern lens and making false assumptions. For example, the idea that a nation project or an empire is genetically homogenous is a relatively modern concept. The truth is that empires incorporated various ethnic groups and those ethnic groups survived for long periods of time.

The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.

The British Empire spanned the globe.

In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.

Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.

> Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.

I think this is the articles point. We would not consider being Roman a job, but we would consider being a Legionary a job.

The article is arguing “Viking” is more “Legionary” than “Roman.”

The entire point of the article is that they called themselves collectively Norsemen. Going 'viking' (raiding) was an activity done by 'vikings' (raiders).

And they didn't use emacs, because they were Vi-Kings

Later the vimkings pushed them out. Then they were suppressed by the vs-igoths, but modern day enthusiasts still call themselves neo-vimkings

I have come out of lurking here. But that pun was so good/awful I just sent it to Richard Stallman for his collection of puns.

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If you are referring to the “Vikings”-show, you should be aware it is fiction and the roles sadly are played by professional actors, not genuine vikings.

Look at that user's handle please.

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> rather than Scandinavian

Strange, being in North America, I've yet to meet anyone identify themself as having viking blood, but we refer to Scandinavians as being of viking ancestry all the time.

I grew up in Minnesota and have literally never heard anyone ever say this about me or any other person of Scandinavian origin.

You've never heard of your NFL football team?

Sport team names have nothing to do with declaring ancestry.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Las Vegas Raiders?

Do you think the LA Rams have that name to claim ancestry?

You're absolutely correct.

"They are named after the Vikings of medieval Scandinavia, reflecting the prominent Scandinavian American culture of Minnesota."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Vikings

This is not the zinger you think it is, my dude.

I've heard it, but only in a tongue-in-cheek context, at least the way I've always interpreted it.

Ugh, consider yourself lucky then. Can easily meet a new one each week if your social circle isn't too selective. Usually someones cousin that tags along. At least they can't survive long without the rest of the tribe, so they don't become regulars.

pretty common on twitter, esp these days where there is strong anglo-saxon white nationalism crowd

they do romanticize their ancient past as one of conquest and domination over others.

btw, even without the viking aspect, norse law was pretty strange in that it allowed murder for a fine. there is definitely a savage aspect to white tradition as there is to any modern culture, but there is a lot of whitewashing thats done to present anglo saxons as racially superior, highly civilized culture.

> pretty common on twitter

All sorts of strange things are common on twitter that are completely absent in real life. It shouldn't be used for any measure of reality, especially if you're judging the people of a continent.

White ethno-nationalism is not exactly irrelevant to current U.S. news & politics.

and that is thanks to amplifying fringe and/or fake junk from twitter!

Restorative justice isn't that unusual in the world. Blood money has roots all over the place. Paying victims or their family/clan/tribe for deaths or injury is not unusual especially if the perpetrator is of higher status than the victim.

...so a common meme for bots

It's common among usian nazis of the David Lane strain, and on Facebook you can find quite a lot of "viking" groups mainly populated by usian dinguses, some of whom claim some scandinavian ancestor or other.

Also funny things in black metal like American bands using german names, and yes often overlaps with white power stuff too. Norwegian or Swedish I can understand, a bit, as that was a key wave of black metal, but think what if a band that loved brazilian bm usee Portugese names (I do remember a band using spanish even though its members weren't latino but it does sound odd doesn't it?)

And the funnier thing is, among all thr cultural roots of white or other people, these bm bands it's always German if you know what I mean.

Athros of quebecois black metal fame as a member of Forteresse also thought that was weird, he dropped out of Blutskrieg due to their overt nazism and perhaps even their use of english, to instead make a bit of a career out of french separatism.

I had no idea Athros had a similar thought, its hilarious and fun to see others noticed it too.

> It's so bizarre to me when North Americans proudly claim "Viking ancestry", rather than Scandinavian.

Where did you hear it? I am sure at least one out of hundreds of millions of Americans claimed it. But you know, we have people who think the earth is flat, as well. But by that token one can take any dumb thing someone from a large group said and sort of say “why do all X say this one dumb thing”

At least from my experience I only heard people claim Scandinavian ancestry. Or even more specifically a country like Norway or Sweden for example. Places like Minnesota or Wisconsin have a lot of that.

There are five million Irish in Ireland and something like 75 million “Irish” in the US. And Chicago has more Polish that Warsaw, but that’s actual expats and their kids. Not great great great grandchildren of Margaret and John who came over in 1845.

This source puts that number at 35M of people with "some" Irish descent: https://overlandirelandtours.com/blog/why-are-there-more-iri... — that means that most of them probably have some other heritage too.

People say similar stuff about Serbians in Chicago (how it's the second biggest Serbian city after Belgrade), but usually all of that is overestimated significantly. Just like people overestimate their local city population (most in Belgrade claim it has 2M people when census on a metropolitan area gets us to 1.57M).

People say a very similar thing about the number of Greeks in Melbourne, Australia.

> There are five million Irish in Ireland and something like 75 million “Irish” in the US.

Reminds me of this sketch. [0]

> And Chicago has more Polish that Warsaw, but that’s actual expats and their kids.

This is one of those persistent myths. While Chicago has many Poles and people of Polish ancestry living there, it has never exceeded the population of Warsaw. And New York has more Poles than Chicago.

[0] https://youtu.be/xzlMME_sekI

The reason I like to use the Polish example is that I got it straight from a Polish dissident, and a second one didn't correct me when I repeated it to him later.

Nobody has official numbers on populations that are a mix of documented and undocumented people. But I trust members of those groups and their relatives probably have a better estimate, even if it's offset by not having a degree in statistics.

> you're identifying specifically with violent raiders who killed peaceful monks

That's not that surprising; figures like Caesar and Genghis Khan are still being worshiped today. Hell, most famous European monarchs are famous because of their violence. It's a lot easier to forgive murder when it happened centuries ago.

It makes sense if you're Irish or British. People here who are blond and blue-eyed but whose ancestors come from Ireland assume they have Viking ancestry, and they're probably right since the Viking era was the main time Scandinavians mixed into the Irish gene pool. It doesn't have white nationalist connotations: the alt-right probably identify more with Celtic iconography if anything.

If you're American, it doesn't make as much sense, because Scandinavians and Germans have been coming to America for hundreds of years.

Never heard someone saying they were Vikings tbh.

Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.

Ninjas, samurai, Native Americans in war paint, etc. It's like every culture (that has survived) has reverence for their own group.

American's like to romanticize outlaw types of all origins

One of our big exports. Germans were obsessed with American outlaws (Karl May). And I am of the opinion that this is what the Nazi's were thinking when they invaded Poland and Russia. They wanted to create and settle their own variation of the "wild west". Hard to explain to people in 2025 how captivating the American frontier was to a European in 1910.

It's one thing to find a culture fascinating, but this "aesthetic" is generally a construct of the imagination cobbled out of stereotypes.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone IRL say they have viking ancestors.

Yearning for Valhalla is more a specific type of extremely online poster / podcast bro / FBI director kind of behavior.

Would wearing a haircut from that dreadful viking TV show and a Thor hammer necklace count? I’ve seen quite a meme-worthy characters over the years

Modern paganism went through a revival during the early 2000s. Are you sure you're not just seeing someone's religion?

And its not the first time, either. There's been several revivals of the beliefs and culture over the years - for example, we didn't even have the word 'viking' in English until the 18th Century.

No, that's not specifying the Viking job, just old nordic culture. I don't think that anyone wearing a cross is pretending to be a crusader.

The modern Techno Viking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjCdB5p2v0Y

There was that one Indian guy who hit the gym, bleached his skin and hair and now does a pretty credible Viking impression.

Crazy what people will do for a government pension

Yes, but when you call it "pillaging" it sounds much more romantic.

It’s called the power of branding.

Someone online from a region of North England was proud that he was more of a viking than Scandinavians because the Scandinavians that came to that place were definitely going viking. Not just lazy Scandinavians that stayed home all the time on their ill-geography farms.

If his ancestors remained in England following the viking age, then he's 0% viking. I take it he's conflating vikings with the great heathen army.

Those monks were part of a system intending to push out the native beliefs of the inhabitants of the land as a soft form of conquering.

1. People yearn for identity labels. It's a core part of human existance.

2. "White" and "American" are problematic identity labels. People therefore often reach back toward European ancestry (real or supposed), for identity labels that are less controversial.

3. The average person isn't aware (or concerned) that "Viking" isn't strictly an ethnicity. Because it's nevertheless a commonly used identity label.

Not everything has to be an opportunity to spot Nazis hiding behind every tree, or showcase your pedant chops. People wear shamrock jewelry or put an Italian flag bumper sticker on their car because it's fun and feels good, simple as that. Only a small number of legit white supremacists, and a legion of absolutely insufferable Internet progressives, think about this all that deeply.

What is problematic about simply "American"?

1. You can't just steal someone else's identity labels when you've polluted your own so much that you can't stand them any more.

2. It would be so much more useful if Americans who didn't like what their country is doing actually fought for it to stop doing that, rather than trying to co-opt other people's identities.

3. Making up an almost-completely-bullshit identity marker like the modern version of Vikings is even worse, because it's not only stealing someone else's identity, it's then erasing that identity with some made-up bullshit.

Maybe y'all should start thinking about this deeply.

While I personally agree that claiming any European identity label from 400+ years ago is silly, I disagree that there's any winning move other than ignoring the slacktivist noise. The people telling you that your natural identity labels are "polluted" will never be satisfied with any amount of "fighting" (i.e. arguing on social media). Because their own identity is that too wrapped up in that.

Also, in this particular instance, arguing both that "Viking" is an imaginary identity that no one really has today, AND that it's being stolen from someone else and erased, is absurd. Other Nordic commenters here have discussed contexts in which the term "Viking" is used today, and it sounds like the same semi-cheeky spirit that everyone else says it.

You will always find plenty of buyers on HN and Reddit for general anti-US sentiment. But probably fewer takers for the unjust oppression of northern European white dudes.

> Also, in this particular instance, arguing both that "Viking" is an imaginary identity that no one really has today, AND that it's being stolen from someone else and erased, is absurd. Other Nordic commenters here have discussed contexts in which the term "Viking" is used today, and it sounds like the same semi-cheeky spirit that everyone else uses it.

No, I think this is part of the point, if not the entire point.

There were actual Vikings. Not a genetic ethnicity, but a profession that others would recognise. Real people really called themselves Vikings, and probably took some pride in that identity.

Making up some bullshit ethnicity around Vikings erases that. Those real people's history becomes polluted with the made-up bullshit. For example: modern Dark Age and Early Medieval re-enactment groups are having a real problem with people joining who are cosplaying the utterly inaccurate Vikings series. They're not interested in learning about the real Vikings, the real people who did incredible things and who are much more interesting (but less photogenic).

So yes, "Viking" is an imaginary identity that no-one really has today, and yes, it is being stolen from actual real people who existed.

edit: and not all Vikings were Northern European white dudes, something you'd know if you read the article or knew anything about actual Vikings.

edit edit: in fact, everything about that statement is wrong. There were Vikings in Southern Europe. There were Vikings in North America. There were brown Vikings. There were female Vikings.

You are getting struck hard by the comments, so I'll provide some source about the concept of Viking in American self identity.

>In the United States, mainstream Americans incorporated Vikings into emerging Anglo-Saxon racial identities

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3kq8c3g3

>As the man skims through these figures, his eyes are suddenly opened wide. According to the test results, he is “0.012% Viking.” With tears in his eyes, he falls on his knees and yells with excitement.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14636778.2020.1...

Just the first papers I grabbed, there is a good chuck of research literature on viking identity of Americans. There is also several monographies on the subject like Krueger, D. M. (2015). Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America. Besides that there are organizations like the American Viking:

>We are loyal to our country, United States of America, bound by our Viking Heritage, and fueled by modern Longships, the Rune-Carvers, and the Skalds.

https://www.americanviking.org/about

I think its a bit harsh dismissing the idea of Viking ancestry as a thing in USA. It might be linked to white supremacy, and mainly experienced in certain circles online, but its still a real phenomenon that has been going on for a long time.

next will be combined "genitscope" readings "astrogenetics", the "pro" reading will include your chart including planet 10

Douche bag culture is highly-competitive across the world. Is this one really NA specific? I'd bet it's common among ICE employees, but they don't represent NA as a whole.

Pfft, ICE agents wish they were pirates.

In other parts of the world, plenty of people romanticize ancestry with Ghenghis Khan too.

Everyone loves being seen to be on the ‘winning’ side sometimes, (and there is always a counter-culture minority!) and when sufficiently remote in time, no one is going to really ‘feel’ the atrocities. Then it’s all about marketing and current social whims.

If the Nazi’s won, the current 80/20 pro/anti ratio would be flipped no question.

You don’t have to go very far back in history to see that humans have some pretty dark tendencies.

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Have you read the old testament? It's much the same. Why focus on this specific religion?

It's just one example, I don't think we expect commenters to hit ALL applicable examples. Why did you focus specifically on that religious text?

I did not focus on any religious text, I gave a counterexample.

The parent went off on a weird tangent about islam on a post about vikings.

Please don't derail this discussion with unrelated political ragebait.

You won't be downvoted because of double-standards. You'll be downvoted because this is a hard tangent from the current discussion. I suspect you know that and decide to pre-emptively deflect the reason so as to appear the victim.

Why the political correctness though?

What does this even mean?

You do realize Tabari is not the Quran?

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So Africans have the raping gene but Scandinavians do not?

Rape is an act, not a gene. Genes can show where each ethnic groups travel however acts of rape in some countries are often unreported or under-reported for political or religious reasons. Many countries do not track the ethnicity of the attacker. Some cultures permit rape if the victim is not of the same religion but there we would delve into rather taboo topics as rarely discussed without emotion by western cultures.

I understand that - I was referring to how OP said "Scandinavians evolved away" from that