VIKINGS APOLOGISE – 100O YEARS TOO LATE!
By ATWadmin On August 14th, 2007
Guess what? The Danish government today expressed its regret over the Viking invasion of Ireland more than 1,000 years ago. The belated near apology came as thousands gathered to watch a replica Norse warrior ship pull into Dublin’s Docklands after an epic voyage across the North Sea. In a fit of diplomacy sparked by the sense of occasion, Danish Culture Minister Brian Mikkelson was moved to extend a surprise olive branch. “In Denmark we are certainly proud of this ship, but we are not proud of the damages to the people of Ireland that followed in the footsteps of the Vikings,” Mr Mikkelson whimpered.“But the warmth and friendliness with which you greet us today and the Viking ship show us that, luckily, it has all been forgiven.”
Isn’t this retro-historical apologising so beloved of liberals hilarious? It is true that the Vikings attacked the Irish 26 times in the first 25 years after their first appearance in Ireland, but the same Irish Annals that record this fact also mention attacks of Irishmen against Irish communities occurring 87 times within the same period! Whatever warrior spirit the Vikings had, it is clear that some Danes have long since lost it!
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
What a silly meaningless and unnecessary apology.
David
I agree it’s hilarious.
Actually this guy is a member of the conservative people’s party which governs Denmark. See HERE for details.
Now that we have the apology are we entitled to reparations? Mine’s a Carlsberg Brian and we’ll say no more about it.
Henry94 – brilliant response.
Does this mean the Irish will have to burn down the Danish embassy and murder some nuns?
Hmm, what caliber for a shield wall? This will require some serious contemplation…
It sounds as though it might be tongue in cheek on the part of the Danish minister. If he is being serious then it’s ridiculous.
But isn’t it appropriate that the Danish minister bears the name of the Irish chieftan that broke their power in Ireland?
Wot about Britain. Don’t we get an apology. Those nasty Vikings invaded us too. A Carlsberg won’t do for me. I’ll also need a nice tasty sizling Danishhhh bacon sarnie and a couple of those nice pastries they do thank you very much.
and what about those bloody romans??
anybody fancy hustling for a free pizza?
Actually, the most thorough invasion of Ireland was by the Celts and that of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. So why not just have everyone in both islands apologise to himself; and of course treat himself to a beer, pizza, etc.
David
‘Whatever warrior spirit the Vikings had, it is clear that some Danes have long since lost it!’
…and some haven’t of course.
Admittedly their current crucible is cartoon lampooning of Mohammed but they sure did better with that than the UK and US apologistas!
If the Dane’s freedom of speech includes apologizing to the Irish and irritating the Muslims…all in all, that’s a reasonable outcome…:)
Ummm. something odd though…I belatedly recollected that the Vikings were from Norway way…way to go of course but why are the Danes doing a mea culpa?
You’d think they were Thor at being overlooked or something?:)
Actually, the most thorough invasion of Ireland was by the Celts and that of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons.
Recent research has attacked both of these ideas. The idea of a celtic invasion of Ireland is probably a myth and the same goes for an anglo-saxon invasion of Britain. Genetic evidence suggests that around 90% of the white population of the British Isles has been here for thousands of years.
The evidence for an Anglo-Saxon invasion of England is pretty strong, IMHO. Which doesn’t rule out the Anglo-Saxons interbreeding with many of its existing inhabitants, whose DNA today’s white British people would thus share.
There is a school of thought that the language spoken by Britain’s pre-Saxon population was Germanic, rather than Celtic.
I’m hoping this was t-i-c. It reminds me of a story about Berwick still being at war with some country because of it’s being at different sides of the Scotish/English border at various times and so it declered war on someone and then wasn’t part of the declaration of peace. A ceremony in recent times took place where the mayor made a spech saying that the people of ???? could now lie safe in their beds.
Sean
I read a very interesting book about this recently called The Origins of the British.
There’s a good synopsis HERE
Thanks, it sounds interesting. I don’t think that conquest necessarily implies genocide. No one disputes the Danish invasions of the ninth century, nor the Norman invasion of 1066, but neither of these was genocidal, although doubtless both were pretty brutal.
But I should have thought that the literary evidence is pretty clear for conquest of at least some parts of England, by Anglo-Saxons in the Fifth to Eighth centuries. The Law of Ine, for example, shows that there was a distinction drawn between the English and the Welsh of Wessex, with the latter being in a subordinate position.
Sean
The Viking and Norman events were small in numbers and logistically genocide was not an option for invaders in those centuries even if they had wanted it.
The literary evidence for the anglo-saxon "invasion" is heavily suspect and relies virtually entirely on one biased source, namely Gildas. There is very little genetic evidence to support a large scale anglo-saxon invasion.
See HERE for Gildas and his book.
>>Genetic evidence suggests that around 90% of the white population of the British Isles has been here for thousands of years.<<
Incredible, I never thought Britons lived that long!
Seriously. An interesting topic, Peter, but the simple (and wonderful) fact that each person has two parents means that at any time a number (n) of generations ago, each of us had, on average, 2 to the power of n ancestors running around, of each of which we are the direct decendant. Thus, 10 generations ago (not a long time, around the days of Capitain Cook) each of us had on average 1,056 ancestors, and by the year 1500 there were 1,048,576 proto-Peters with many glints in their Saxon eyes, (well, because of crossings, the figures are actually significantly lower). Only 1 of these, or one of the tens of thousands of ancestors that came after them, need be a full Celt or Saxon, or Italian Jew for that matter, for you to have the relevant ethnic genes.
In any case, the above shows that there is no way that 98% (or probably even 1%) of the present population of Britain is of a pure pre-Roman stock, or for that matter that there is anyone with a parent born in, say, pre-WWII Britain who does not have a lineage including all of these tribes and many more besides.
Noel
If you read the synopsis of the book linked above, or better still the book itself, you’ll get a better idea of the genetic methodology used and the theory advanced. I found it very persuasive.
I will, Peter. Cheers.
Oops, meant to add: you forgot the enormous amount of linguistic evidence of a large ethnic movement of Germanic tribes into Britain.
"finger", "hand", "arm" (to name but the closest things I now see) – all German words.
Noel
Also "bread" "water" "beer" and "cheese"!
The book deals in detail with the linguistic aspect. One of its main theories is that the roots of English are much older than the so-called anglo-saxon period and that the language spoken in eastern and southern Britain at the time the Romans arrived was probably germanic rather than celtic. If it was celtic, as previously supposed, then why are there virtually no celtic place names in most of England or celtic words in English?
What does Steven Oppenheimer teach at Oxford?
WRT literary evidence, Gildas was no doubt biased, but I don’t think one can dismiss what he wrote out of hand.
As well as Gildas, we have the famous appeal to Aetius in the 440s’, and references to Britain having been conquered in Procopius in the Sixth Century. The disappearance of Christianity from Eastern and Central Britain in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries would point to some form of non-Christian conquest during that period, along with the evidence of rapid economic decline, during the same period.
Is Oppenheimer’s argument that the people who took over Britan, during this period, were in fact the Germanic speakers who inhabited Southern and Eastern Britain in the Roman period? How would he account for the adoption of the worship of gods like Thor and Odin, in place of either Christianity, or the Celtic gods?
Sean
I can only suggest you read the book. His argument is that there is no evidence for a large-scale anglo-saxon invasion as claimed by Gildas, although there were certainly raids and settlements. What is the evidence for the disappearance of christianity from parts of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries?
The almost complete absence of celtic place-names is persuasive to me. Wales, Scotland and Ireland have been heavily anglicised but the celtic place names survive, usually in anglicised form. But in southern and eastern England they are absent, which either implies some sort of genocide of the celts or, more likely, that they were never there to start with.
Peter, I’ve been doing a lot of reading of "deep ancestry" and find it fascinating. In fact, through th National Geographic Genome Project, I had my mitochondrial DNA tested, with suprising results.
mDNA is passed from mother to daughter in a single line back abouth 150,000 years. I got mine from my mother but can’t pass it on.
From the report:
"We finally arrive at your own clan, a group of individuals who descend from a woman in the U branch of the tree. Her descendants, and the most recent common ancestor for all U5 individuals, broke off from the rest of the group and headed north into Scandinavia. Even though U5 is descended from an ancestor in haplogroup U, it is also ancient, estimated to be around 50,000 years old.
U5 is quite restricted in its variation to Scandinavia, and particularly to Finland. This is likely the result of the significant geographical, linguistic, and cultural isolation of the Finnish populations, which would have restricted geographic distribution of this subgroup and kept it fairly isolated genetically. The Saami, reindeer hunters who follow the herds from Siberia to Scandinavia each season, have the U5 lineage at a very high frequency of around 50 percent, indicating that it may have been introduced during their movements into these northern territories."
>>Ireland have been heavily anglicised but the celtic place names survive,<<
Peter, why then did you say that the mass migration of Celts into Ireland is probably a myth?
>>The book deals in detail with the linguistic aspect<<
What book exactly are you referring to? De Excidio Britanniae was written well before the Anglo-Saxon migrations.
"What is the evidence for the disappearance of christianity from parts of Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries".
The fact that when Augustine came to Kent in 597 the Kingdom was pagan. The fact that the Sutton Hoo burials are pagan burials, not Christian burials.
As you say, though, I should read the book.
Noel
I am referring to the book I linked to a synopsis of at 12.53, namely The Origins of the British which I should make clear deals with both Britain and Ireland. I said that a celtic invasion of Ireland was probably a myth, not that there wasn’t celtic cultural influence and language.
Charles
Very interesting. I intend to do the same test as you some time. The book deals with the re-population of the British Isles and northern Europe after that last ice age and you might find it interesting as well.
Charles,
I don’t know about my wife’s DNA, but she has been to Finland and developed quite a taste for reindeer.
This part of Brooklyn has always had lots of Irish and Norwegians ( with some Danes, Swedes and the odd Icelander ) And boy do those Squareheads ( a name the Norwegians made for themselves! ) get along famously with the Irish.
Yeah, the apology was silly. I’ll apologize if I’ve wronged someone–but do not think that I’ll want to apologize for something that anyone did hundreds of years back.
I apologize for any apologies that have been made over the past ten years if anyone may have been offended.
Nice apology Phantom!
Aileen, Russia
Peter, The interesting word you used was re-population. As the ice sheets waxed and wained across the Isles, populations moved south into the Iberian peninsula. My wife is 100% Irish, and we’re interested to have her take the test.
As far as I know, my maternal line is Protestant from Scotaland or the borderlands. Interesting to think of the woman in that line I’m decsended from coming over in a longboat.
Charles,
I’m U5 too, U5a in fact. Cheddar Man may well have been my uncle.
They say somebody eat him.
Am still awaiting an apology.
Charles
The book deals with how the ice-bound lands were re-populated from several warmer areas in southern europe. The genetic makeup of the northern european populations today was heavily determined by where the the last re-population took place from. Of course there were significant population movements subsequently, but they were not as genetically important because they were into land areas that were already settled.
Fascinating stuff.
Hmmm, sounds very interesting, Peter.
I still think, however, that such heavy linguistic influence (Anglo-Saxon-Jute on Britain, Celtic on Ireland before the Tudors) can only have come about though massive physical migration (or "invasion"). The emergence of Old English (in many ways almost identical to the language of Schleswig-Holstein today BTW) could not have been as it was had the Roman influence come after the Germanic.
Noel
English became the language of Wales, Scotland and Ireland without an overwhelming physical presence of Englishmen in any of the three countries. Celtic and Anglo-Saxon could have achieved similar dominance in the past in Ireland and Eastern England without obliterating the local populations by weight of numbers.
Read the book and we can discuss further. It deals as much with language and culture as with genetics.
Peter, there is an article by Stephen Oppenheimer here:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7817
I haven’t read the book, but the idea he presents seem reasonably persuasive.
Ross, Thanks for the link. I’ve printed it out to read tonight.
David Gough, or should I say cousin! I think I’m U5b,
but nevertheless, we’re descended from the same woman.
Actually we’re all descended for the same woman in Africa dubbed "Mitochondrial Eve."
.
From the article:
"Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia."
Interesting article Ross. Thanks for the link.