Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  I began our interpretation of the Northern Isles DNA with the Y-chromosome because of the Vikings’ reputation, but I also wanted to see what the maternal DNA told us as well. At the time we were analysing the DNA from the Northern Isles we had just completed a study with Agnar Helgason, an Icelandic anthropologist, on the genetic ancestry of his native land where we had asked a similar question about the paternal and maternal input. The histories of Iceland and of the Northern Isles were quite different in that, when the Vikings began to settle Iceland from around AD 860, it was uninhabited. The few Irish monks who had settled there in the quest for a life of contemplation sensibly left as soon as they saw the first sails on the horizon.

  Over the next fifty years large numbers of Norse settlers arrived in Iceland, most from around Bergen but some from Viking settlements in Britain. This was large-scale, planned immigration to a land with no indigenous opposition and by the beginning of the tenth century there were 60,000 people living in Iceland. The population has grown to 250,000 today, but there has been no recorded large-scale immigration since the original settlement. Agnar and I wanted to find out whether this had been a predominantly male-driven settlement, with females brought in from elsewhere, or whether roughly equal numbers of Norse men and women had arrived. There have been persistent stories that Icelandic men raided the coasts of Scotland and Ireland for wives. Agnar and I thought we could check these stories by comparing modern Icelandic Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA with the equivalent DNA from Scandinavia, Ireland and Scotland. By going through the Icelanders’ DNA results one by one, we assigned their most likely origin from comparison with British, Irish and Scandinavian samples.

  We discovered that roughly two thirds of Icelandic Y-chromosomes were Scandinavian, while the remaining third were from Ireland and Scotland. However, the origin of maternal DNA was reversed, with only a third from Norway and two thirds from Ireland and Scotland. This confirmed the stories that, while most of the men had settled in Iceland from Norway, they relied heavily on women imported from Ireland and Scotland. It doesn’t necessarily mean they were taken there against their will, as the results could not distinguish between settlers who had arrived straight from Norway and the male descendants of Vikings who had spent a generation or two in Scotland. Even so, it is hard to account for the Gaelic origins of a third of Icelandic Y-chromosomes without contemplating that these men were taken to Iceland as slaves. The Iceland study gave us a very interesting result, and also helped us to develop the way of assigning the Icelandic DNA to a Norse or Gaelic/Pictish origin, which we then used for Orkney and Shetland and then, in modified form, for the rest of the Isles.

  When we tried the same treatment on the Northern Isles, expecting a similar result to what we had found in Iceland, we were in for a major surprise. The maternal clans in Norway and in Orkney and Shetland were superficially quite different. Katrine was common in Norway but rare in Orkney and Shetland, and the same was true for Tara. But when we looked more carefully at the detailed sequences, the matches leapt out. Within each of the seven major clans, and the minor ones too, the similarities in detailed sequence were remarkable. I had initially expected to find hardly any Scandinavian mitochondrial DNA in either Orkney or Shetland. I had imagined that the Viking reputation for rape, pillage and general destruction recalled in Up Helly Aa, in atmosphere if not in fact, would have had the expected genetic consequence – kill the men and keep the women. When it came to permanent settlement, these same women, I had expected, would have become the wives of Viking men. That is the usual pattern of conquest and settlement that I have seen many times throughout the world. It is all too obvious in the genetic consequences of the European colonization of Polynesia and South America, where European Y-chromosomes are extremely common, while European mDNA is virtually unknown. This is a record of great success for the incoming Y-chromosomes at the expense of the indigenous, but with no effect at all on the aboriginal mitochondrial DNA. Orkney and Shetland had all the right ingredients, but the genetics said otherwise. Amazingly, there was as much Norse mitochondrial DNA in the Northern Isles as there were Norse Y-chromosomes. This could mean only one thing – anathema to the Jarls for the day of Up Helly Aa and their retinue of axe-wielding guizers. The Viking settlement of Orkney and Shetland had been peaceful! The Scandinavians had brought their women with them.

  The 60 per cent of Orcadians and Shetlanders who do not have a Viking genetic ancestry are most likely to be the descendants of the indigenous Picts. However, there is a proviso. After the islands were eventually ceded to Scotland in the fifteenth century there was a substantial immigration of Scots, which would have diluted the genes of the islanders, whether of Viking or Pictish ancestry. Since we had been successful in identifying Viking genes, both male and female, the next question was whether we could do the same for the Picts, and for that we must head south to the heart of Pictland.

  Close by the small town of Dunkeld, a few miles north of Perth on the banks of the River Tay, is the site of the Abbey of Scone. It was here that Kenneth MacAlpin was crowned as the first king of a united Scotland in 843. The area around Dunkeld was the central stronghold of the Pictish kings and Kenneth, a Gael from the west, deliberately chose Scone for his coronation to symbolize the unity between Pict and Celt which his reign proclaimed.

  Beneath the coronation throne lay Lia Fail, the Stone of Destiny, a rectangular block of sandstone. It is said that Lia Fail could talk and that it spoke the name of the next king. The Stone itself has a mythical history linking it to Egypt, Spain and Ireland, reminiscent of the Irish origin myths of Mil. However, geologists who have examined the Stone say it comes from the neighbourhood of Scone itself. But there is an explanation for that. The kings of Scotland continued to be crowned above the Stone of Destiny until 1296 when Edward I, always aware of the power of symbolism, carried off the Stone and installed it in Westminster Abbey. But, according to the legend, he was duped. Monks from the abbey, warned of the approach of Edward and his army, hid Lia Fail nearby and replaced it with a slab of local sandstone. It was this replica which Edward took back to England while the real Stone lies hidden somewhere close by.

  This neatly explains the geological similarity of the Stone to local rocks, and also why there continued to be a long succession of Scottish kings even when the Stone was lying in England. It could hardly be expected to speak the name of the next king of Scotland if it was installed in Westminster Abbey. Why didn’t the monks recover the Stone from its hiding place once Edward had departed? For fear of retribution once he knew he had been tricked is the rationalization of the myth. By the time it was safe to bring it out of hiding, the monks had forgotten where they put it. In the eighteenth century there was a local legend that, after a violent storm, a farm lad discovered an underground cavern which had been exposed by a landslide triggered by the torrential rain. The lad entered the cavern and found a stone covered with inscriptions, as indeed the original Lia Fail was recorded to have been. Thinking it of no importance he did not speak of it until years later when he heard the story that the monks had switched the stone. Alas, when he returned to the spot, he could not find the cavern entrance, presuming it to have been once more covered by a landslide. This all sounds very unlikely, but stranger things have happened and I am reminded how the prehistoric caves at Lascaux, in the Dordogne, the walls of which are covered with the ancient paintings of bison and reindeer that our ancestors hunted 20,000 years ago, were discovered by accident by another farm lad at about the same time. So perhaps Lia Fail really is still there, waiting to be rediscovered.

  Meanwhile, the Stone in Westminster Abbey remained resolutely where it was, beneath the coronation throne for every English monarch since Edward II, up to and including the present Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. That will be the last time, for in 1996, 700 years after it was taken to London, Lia Fail was returned to Scotland. In an elaborate procession along the Royal Mile, lined by 10,000 people on St Andrew’s Day, the Stone was taken from the Palace o
f Holyroodhouse to its new home in Edinburgh Castle. To the sound of a twenty-one-gun salute from the castle ramparts, the Stone was laid to rest in the Great Hall. The strength of feeling which energized the campaign to return Lia Fail to Scotland after 700 years was formidable. The ceremony which attended its return was in many respects the assertion of an ancient Pictish connection, in the same way that Up Helly Aa celebrates the Norse identity in Shetland.

  From a genetic point of view, I wanted to see whether I could find a parallel in the living descendants of the ancient Picts. Was there, hidden deep within the cells of Scots still living in the Pictish heartland, a signal of their ancient identity every bit as real, or perhaps more so, as the Stone of Destiny itself? We began our search for Pictish genes at Auchterarder, 15 miles south-west of Perth and temptingly close to the famous golfing hotel of Gleneagles, but I am sad to report that our research budget did not stretch to that level of subsistence. Auchterarder was the first of many visits that my research team paid to blood-donor sessions.

  Three months before, in the spring of 1996, I had spent a week travelling all round Scotland visiting the directors of all the Scottish Blood Transfusion Service centres, enlisting their help in our project. It was never difficult to explain why we wanted to do this work, but there were a lot of details to be sorted out in getting permission from the donors’ representatives, as well as formal permission from the Transfusion Service itself, ensuring we did not compromise the confidentiality of the donors. We also had to agree a way of collecting the blood that would not interfere with the smooth running of the donor sessions. There was one thing both I and the directors were agreed on. We must attend the sessions in person. Too many researchers ask for blood to be collected on their behalf, without actually going to the sessions. This makes extra work for the donor nurses. I also wanted to be sure we were there to explain our project to the donors and get their consent, and also to talk to them about their own backgrounds and to get the feel of the place.

  You may be a blood donor yourself, in which case you will know how the sessions work. As each donor arrives, they wait to be checked in. This, we jointly decided, was the best time for us to introduce ourselves and to ask for their consent to having us analyse their DNA. I was extremely fortunate in having a team of researchers in my group at the time who were absolutely brilliant in the art of persuasion. To the waiting donors, we explained that we were creating a new genetic map of Britain and trying to work out from it our Celtic, Pictish and Viking roots. That was about all the explanation anyone needed before agreeing to take part, especially when they realized we would only be taking a sample of blood from their donation, so there was no need for another needle. Donors told us where they were from, as far back as their grandparents. Those who didn’t know, generally the men, took a purple form home with them to ask someone in the family, invariably a woman, and sent it on to us.

  By the end of the session in Auchterarder we had collected 187 blood samples, a wonderful start. Over the next two years we visited almost all of the donor sessions throughout Scotland, from Galashiels and Thornhill in the Borders, to Thurso at the very top of Caithness, to Stornoway in the Western Isles, to Campbeltown on the tip of the Kintyre peninsula. Everyone in my research lab joined in, even if they were working on different projects. Itineraries were prepared so that, with luck, several different sessions in different regions could be covered in one trip. We travelled to Scotland by road, by air or by the Highland sleeper from Euston. We set aside a small office at the Institute as a planning room, with donor-session schedules on the wall and a large map of Scotland next to them. By the time we went to our last Scottish session, two years later in Fort William, we had collected over 5,000 blood samples and clocked up over 50,000 miles between us. It is a testament to the team’s powers of persuasion that we only ever had one person decline to take part in the project – a farmer from Callander in the Trossachs, north of Stirling – who had to rush off because one of his cows was about to give birth and he didn’t have time to fill in our form. It says a lot about him, and donors in general, that they take their blood donations very seriously. None of the donors is paid a penny and the sessions have a tangible atmosphere of selfless community service. Most sessions are entirely run by women, with the only men present being the drivers of the vans that bring the teams and the equipment. It was friendly, calm and efficient. Very impressive all round.

  To begin looking for the genetic signatures of the Picts on the mainland I began by dividing Scotland into regions. It was easy to decide where to draw the line on Orkney, Shetland and the Hebrides – they were islands – but on the mainland I needed to draw boundaries. These are shown on the map on page 15. Pictland was covered by two of these: the Grampian region and Tayside and Fife, which for convenience we will henceforth refer to simply as Tayside.

  Since we began our analysis of the Northern Isles with the Y-chromosome, and also in deference to the Pictish tradition of matrilineal inheritance, we began the search with mitochondrial DNA. The clan proportions for both Pictish regions were remarkably similar to one another – again you can see this in the Appendix. When I put the results through a statistical test, the only clans that had a significantly different frequency in the two regions were Jasmine, higher in Grampian, lower in Tayside, and Tara, higher in Tayside, lower in Grampian. Otherwise there was no difference. It looked, at this level of scrutiny, as if the maternal ancestry of the two Pictish regions was almost indistinguishable one from the other.

  When it came to analysing the detailed sequences, though, I could see plenty of differences. That is always to be expected, because a large proportion of mitochondrial sequences are unique to one region. At the risk of being technical, of the 170 different sequences we found in the two Pictish regions of Grampian and Tayside, 70 occurred only once. I used our experience with disentangling the Norse and Pictish components in the Northern Isles to devise a simple score between 0 and 100 which would summarize the similarity between the two regions. If all the sequences in one region have an exact match in the other, then the score is 100. If none of them matches, the score is 0. On this scale the match score for Grampian and Tayside was 77. Of course that doesn’t mean a great deal without anything else to compare it with but, as we shall see, 77 is a very high score compared to most others. It is high enough to consider both regions as one for the purpose of searching for Pictish genes.

  When I began to look in detail, it was immediately obvious that the DNA from these two regions was not really all that different from much else in Britain. There was no sign at all of the exotic sequences one might associate with a truly relic population that had been somehow isolated from the rest of mankind. Lots of sequences were unique to the two regions, but that isn’t unusual, as we have just seen. Looking through these unique sequences, I could see they were closely related to mDNA sequences from other regions, differing from them by just a single mutation. There was nothing very special about the Pictish DNA, at least on the maternal side. It didn’t seem to me that, on this evidence, a case could be made for treating the Picts of Tayside and Grampian as being particularly unusual. But that was just how they appeared to me at the time. We would certainly need to compare them with the rest of the Isles to gauge their true nature. That was my impression from the maternal signal, but what would the Y-chromosomes look like?

  Once again the overall Y-chromosome clan structures in Grampian and Tayside were, like the maternal signals, remarkably similar to each other. The clan of Oisin predominated in both, rising to 84 per cent in Grampian – not quite as high as the west of Ireland, but much higher than in Orkney or Shetland. Wodan was quite high in both, at 12 per cent in Grampian and 18 per cent in Tayside respectively, but Sigurd was very low indeed. Only 2 per cent of men in both Pictish regions belonged to Sigurd’s clan. You will recall that, in Orkney and Shetland, we assigned all the Sigurds to a Norse Viking origin. On the evidence from the Pictish regions, with low numbers in the clan of Sigurd, it looked as
if Grampian and Tayside had virtually no Viking ancestry. This is precisely what we would have expected from the history and the archaeology of both regions. There are no remains of Viking longhouses and no Norse place-names. In fact, some of the place-names have recognizably Pictish origins, notably Pitlochry on the River Tummel a few miles north of Dunkeld. In Orkney and Shetland the reverse is the case. All the place-names have Norse origins.

  In Pictland, the genetics suggests a very low level of Viking ancestry among the men. However, if we accept that, as I think we should, what can explain the substantial percentages of Wodan in both regions? In the Northern Isles the proportions of Sigurd and Wodan were roughly equal. If, as we had done, we attribute both clans in the Northern Isles to Viking settlement, based on the close affinities with Y-chromosomes we know exist in Norway, how do we explain the Wodan presence in Pictland? If Viking settlers in Orkney and Shetland were composed of roughly equal numbers of Wodans and Sigurds and these reflected the composition of a typical Viking immigration anywhere in the Isles, then only 2 per cent of the Pictland Wodans could have a Viking origin, leaving the other 12–16 per cent unaccounted for. When I checked through the detailed signatures of Pictland and Northern Isles Y-chromosomes from the clan of Wodan, there were plenty that matched – and plenty that didn’t. This was a puzzle. The Pictland Wodans could not all have arrived as Vikings, but where had they come from? Certainly not Gaelic Ireland, where they are almost unknown. Perhaps these men in the clan of Wodan really were the surviving descendants of the Picts.