I am a lover of history, and of course love the dramatized series Vikings on the History Channel. It takes some dramatic license of course, but is fun.
Lately, the History Channel has added Real Vikings as an add-on show. It’s pretty good as you get to get some interesting facts and stories about the Vikings while seeing some of the European sites that they lived in and raided.
I’ve always been curious about my relationship to the Vikings and other races in history genetically. I am ¼ Irish, ¼ Finnish, 3/16 French Canadian (the French origins of Morin seem to be more from Normandy), 1/16 Micmac tribe, 1/8 Swedish, and 1/8 Italian (near Naples). Clearly the Irish side would have Celtic ancestry, but there were a lot of Vikings in Ireland – and I believe every major city in Ireland, or most of them, started out as Viking settlements during their raiding period. The Normans certainly were of Viking ancestry, and Swedes were pretty much as well (along with Norwegians and Danes). So I am pretty sure that Viking DNA is in me from the Irish, the French, and the Swedes, but what of the Finns?
The article below by Kristian Ola (Wilpuri) on the website All Empires is very interesting. She does a very nice job in English (I believe she is a Finn). Basically, she discusses the Finnic and Ugric tribes that lived in the Finnish peninsula during the Viking Age and how they interacted based upon the archeologic record. I have a better appreciation now of how the Finns (and their ancestors) really got stuck between the Swedes and Russians going back to the days of the Vikings. Curiously, during the Cold War, the Finns did not explore much of their history of that time so as not to alienate the USSR. In any case, I thought this was a good read.
http://www.allempires.com/article/index.php?q=Viking_Age_Finland
Mark A. Morin 