I had to look up "Eske" to find out if it was a male or female name. Male. I found Eske Bille on wiki. The name is probably rare in Denmark and probably not even used in Sweden (unless among Danish expats). Denmark has 490 Eske, all male, all main name, Sweden 4, 2 of each, plus another nine as middle name, 2 women and 7 men, Finland has 4 men as middle names, Norway 4 men as main name. Norway and Sweden have far more men named Eskil, but Denmark has only 387 Eskil, so, fewer than Eske, which is mainly a form of Eskil. Mr. Willerslev is probably a very decent scientist.
Vikings Were Muslims And Not White Say UK Professors
Metatron | 16 July 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLn6dyc_Yk
0:23 You are aware that Vikings and Muslims did meet in modern day Russia (which by the way has over 10 % Muslims and those not recent immigrants)?
0:57 "writing the Coran with runes" ...
The Vikings on Ireland were fluent enough in Gaelic to give Dublin a Gaelic name.
The Vikings in Russia and Ukraine were fluent enough in Old East Slavic to become rulers of Kievan Rus.
I think you underestimate the fluency of Vikings in foreign languages if you think they would have been unable to pray the Salat in Arabic. However, I also think this is the kind of marginal event, why not feature the Icelandic Muslim who had been robbed from Iceland in Tyrkjaránið in 1627 and become a Muslim before she could return?
But even in her day Icelandic Muslims would have been fewer than one %. About as common as Austrian Bolsheviks in the 1920, if not even quite a lot fewer than that.
2:19 Denmark and Norway have a lot more gingers than Sweden.*
Reason? Irish and Scottish were abducted as slaves to Denmark and Norway (West-Ward Vikings) but not to Sweden and parts of Finland (East-Ward Vikings) and that obviously implies some Irish geneflow into Scandinavia.
2:29 In modern Scandinavia, 50 % have blonde hair and blue eyes.
I'm not surprised at the study, and the nobles would as usual have been more international back then than the rest (given Viking raiding habits, the genetic additions from elsewhere were not necessarily always voluntary)
3:18 Many may not be a scientific term.
But it is a common sense term. You could hardly use it of 2 % of a population or a sample. You could use it of 20 % of either. Or more.
In modern Scandinavia, only 50 % have both blonde hair and blue eyes. The combination of blue eyes with darker hair is the more common one outside those 50 %, or perhaps brown eyes with darker hair is more common than that. When I see someone with brown eyes and blonde hair I wonder if she coloured her hair or is a foreigner or both. It's the rarest combination, probably rarer than red hair and green eyes.
4:43 I'm totally adequate to expand on taking on Viking identities.
It's like the equivalent of a Frenchman in occupied France joining the German army, or of an Abyssinian back in the day joining the Italian army.
In the case of Vikings, not purely army, but "army, police, tax collectors, maffia and general jet set able to throw a big party" as that is a pretty fair description of nobility. The mafia part varying between different nobles, but clearly pretty strong in Vikings. (If I'm wrong on the mafia, correct me, that's more like your backyard).
Back when Vikings worshipped Óðinn and Þórr this would involve joining that cult too, but later when they became Catholics (happened to many even before 1066), it absolutely no longer would mean that. The Danish Vikings that were killes on St. Brice's day in 1002 in England were Catholics.
5:40 Not just more isolated from each other but also more difference in influx from elsewhere.
Viking age influx from elsewhere into Sweden would come from Finland, Russia, Gotland and via Gotland from Poland and Germany.
Into Denmark and Norway? From British Isles, perhaps to some degree from Greenland and Amerindians, but I don't think that was very common. Also, from France was less common, as the Viking descendants in Normandy were actually settled there and cutting ties with Scandinavia. And they came early and protected France from other Vikings. William the Conqueror was fifth generation after Rollo and not all the female sides hailed from Denmark. Precisely as Robert the Bruce was not all that much of a French Norman. So, mainly from British Isles and when it came to Irish, it shows in red heads.
6:18 If you have an Irishman who marries a Norse woman, he certainly took on Viking identity as much as 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne took on an SS identity. Vikings didn't come to Ireland via the equivalent of Statten Island, and their women were not offered to Irishmen for no good reason at all.
6:55 Classic Tortuga Pirates were also traders on occasion, not least slave traders.
But Viking is a kind of blend between trader and pirate. Offer him a good business deal, he shakes your hand. Offer him a bad business deal or none at all, he'll give you an offer you can't refuse. Or if you refuse it, shake an axe onto your head so someone else can't refuse it.
So, they had cities where they were welcome traders, fine, they could get gold or wine by offering seal tusks or whale blubber. They had other cities where they weren't welcome, and also monasteries, where the chanting reminded them of "seithr" (a hypnotic chant meant to produce magic or divination), they had other plans than peaceful exchanges. And if they saw a ship, they were attentive to see if it was friend, foe or potential new business partner.
7:10 No, Vikings were anyone travelling by ship, whether they traded more or plundered more, they usually did some of both.
It was one and the same line of trade. It was what younger sons did among Odin worshippers and somewhat still into Catholic times, like younger sons of Catholic nobles often joined the clergy.
7:20 Non-Scandinavian women were certainly empowered enough to get on the home journeys of Viking ships.
Scandinavian noble women were usually marrying oldest sons, inheritors of land, who were typically older brothers to Vikings.
7:44 The Vikings who had brown hair were certainly more numerous than the Vikings who were Irish or Scottish.
For these, Mr. Eske Willerslev was not using the term "many". 2 / 400 is not many.
If Vikings with brown hair were referred to as "many" they were certainly more numerous than 2 in that 400 + sample.
And I for one believe it. You don't see much blonde hair in Palermo, unless it's died or on the head of a tourist, so, when you notice Swedes, you'll notice the blonde hair most. As blonde hair and blue eyes are only 50 %, and blonde hair is more restricted than blue eyes, probably 45 % or more have other colours than blonde. Your mistake about Swedes is like my beginners' mistake in Latin when I wanted to translate every subsidiary clause depending on a verbum iubendi or volendi with an accusative with infinitive, just because that's very rare in Swedish. Cicero actually did quite a lot of subsidiary clauses with ut / ne + subjunctive in those cases, just like Swedish would, except Swedish would replace subjunctive with indicative.
"Jag vill att du kommer" would more typically be "volo (ut) venias" than "volo te venire" according to my memories of Latin stylistics (i e Ciceronian prose stylistics). Even if English has "you to come" as a direct translation of "te venire" ...
You expect more blondes among true Scandinavians, just as I expected more "A cum I" in good Latin.
7:53 The Vikings were typically from Scandinavia, the article says "not exclusively".
But Scandinavian does NOT mean majority blonde, unless you mean a very bare majority, and the nobility who made children with and sometimes freed and married women from Ireland or Spain would have a lesser percentage of blondes than the general poppulation, a higher percentage of red, brown or even black hair.
8:02 I have met a white Zulu.
A Lutheran clergyman whose other nationality is Swedish. He grew up among Zulus. His daugter, who taught at the same school as I, grew up among Cape English. So, she was a Swedish Rooinek, as the Boers call the English. Neither of them was Boer or Xhosa, though.
So "Zulus are not necessarily black" is strictly speaking true. They are very typically black and the article doesn't deny Vikings were very typically Scandinavian.
I don't think you have a real reason to complain about its wording.
8:33 Here we may be dealing with some real cause for concern. Other article. Not CNN.**
8:51 I look the article up.
The guidance urges tutors to consider that "some Vikings became practising Muslims" due to Islamic goods being found in the graves of some Vikings, thought to have been attained by trade
They also found a Buddha on precincts of some Mälar Viking burial, perhaps Sigtuna.
Doesn't mean the Vikings were sometimes Buddhists. And some crosses in graves might have more to do with pride in successfully plundering a monastery (nobody's perfect as you mentioned) than with Christian devotion.
Here I would say the methodology is bad.
9:09 I totally agree.
Sounds like departments of education and similar nasty anti-parents' stuff.
11:17 My point precisely.
On reconsideration, though. On the date of Lindisfarne, Vikings worshipped Norse gods. Perhaps not all on Gotland, but certainly those who went to Lindisfarne.
On the date of 1066, Vikings outside Scandinavia typically, Vikings on Iceland basically exclusively and Vikings in Scandinavia to a fairly large part were Roman Catholic Christians.
It is not impossible that the change of religion was helped by some underhand pluralism in personal belief, as also the Norse sagas, both Icelanding Sagas and from earlier times (back to the Völkerwanderung) do feature less than monolithic adherence to Norse gods. They may have had a kind of policy of public worship to these joined with agnosticism or foreign religious influences in personal belief and this may have helped to spread Christianity as a provider of certainty and of unity. Outside certain parts of Norway mostly voluntarily, but Norse kings notably Saint Olaf probably thought the Norse religion was too much of a promoter of feuds, so he forced people, especially high ranking nobles, to become Christian.
Isn't there a country you may know better than I do, where a man may be a shinto when he is enthroned as descendant of the Sun Goddess and a buddhist or a secularist or something when doing war inside or outside that country? (And how do you like my theory that both Amaterasu and Venus Mater were in fact Puduhepa, priestess of the sun goddess of Arinna, whom she identified with the love goddess ...?).
14:53 "other parts of Europe and what is now Russia"
British Isles and Southern Europe for Danish and Norwegian ones, Russia for Swedish ones.
Muslims were arguably already present in Daghestan at this point. Just noting, Ukraine is more purely Christian then the Russian federation.
18:04 There is nothing wrong with being ethnically Anglo-Saxon or culturally so ... as long as you stay out of an US American nightmare called "The Anglo-Saxon Club" ... (ask Danielle Romero on the channel NYTN about what that is).
18:49 LONG HISTORY?
The Anglo Saxon Clubs of America was a white supremacist political organization which was active in the United States in the 1920s and lobbied in favor of anti-miscegenation laws and against immigration from outside of Northern Europe. Founded in Richmond, Virginia, in 1922 by musician and composer John Powell and political activist Earnest Sevier Cox, the organization had 400 members in 1923 and 32 "posts" by 1925 and was open only to white male members.
If since 1922 is "long history" to those guys, what is Viking age? Prehistory? Come on!
18:49 bis. I found a rabbit hole.
Anglo-Saxonism is really a very dead ideology, even White Suprematists wouldn't be as anti-Celtic as those guys were. Tolkien certainly wasn't, and wiki credits him with being influenced by Anglo-Saxonism. I looked up a footnote.***
Helen Young says that the links between racism and the study of the Middle Ages date at least back to the 18th century.
So? The links between anti-racism and the Middle Ages date at least back to the Crusades. Yes, literally. The German version of Parzifal (no, not Wagner's, the Medieval German), credits him with having a brother "Feirefitz" who is checkered in white and brown skin because he had white Lancelot for father and a Sarracen as mother. That kind of jokes don't look like heavy racial prejudice to me at least.
22:45 Indeed°, their offspring is going to have genetic mixing, and this would more often have been the case in the nobility.
If so and so "bought a wife from Asia" not sure if this is a thing, is he likelier to be speaking Cockney or the dialect of Soho?
* Vikings weren’t necessarily blond. Or Scandinavian. Why everything you thought you knew about the Norsemen may be wrong
By Harry Clarke-Ezzidio, CNN | Published 11:00 AM EDT, Wed September 16, 2020
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/16/europe/vikings-blond-scandinavian-study-scn-scli-intl-gbr/index.html
** GBN: Vikings were 'not all white and some were Muslim', pupils to be told in effort to ditch 'Eurocentric ideas'
By Ed Griffiths | Published: 01/06/2025 - 11:17 | Updated: 01/06/2025 - 13:08
https://www.gbnews.com/news/vikings-non-white-muslim-eurocentric-ideas
*** How Can We Untangle White Supremacy From Medieval Studies?
David M. Perry | October 9, 2017
https://psmag.com/education/untangling-white-supremacy-from-medieval-studies/
° We're on a third article:
LiveScience: Vikings may not have been blonde, or Scandinavian
News | By Yasemin Saplakoglu | published September 17, 2020
https://www.livescience.com/vikings-were-not-always-blonde-or-scandinavian.html
