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I NOW HAVE AN EXCUSE TO GO WASSAILING AND FIGHTING

I am descended from Vikings

Friday November 21,2008

By John Ingham

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I DISCOVERED my inner Viking this week. A few weeks ago I sent off a CSI-style mouth swab to Oxford Ancestors which uses the DNA to find which of the world’s 36 female and 15 male clans you are descended from.

I was hoping to be related to a generous Russian billionaire but no such luck. On my mother’s side I’m a Celt which rings true as her mother was from Cork. We are descended from the Helena clan which started 20,000 years ago in the Ice Age valleys of the Dordogne.

In winter Helena’s family would go south to France’s Camargue where she apparently loved to gather oysters. No wonder I enjoyed them there last summer. And I thought it was because they were so cheap.

My dad and I are part of the Wodan clan which started 25,000 years ago in the Ukraine and gradually spread north and west.

OA chairman Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, revealed that we are almost certainly descended from Danish Vikings who rampaged about the north 1,200 years ago. Yet Ingham is about as Anglo-
Saxon a name as you can get, meaning home of the people.

Nottingham is named after a chieftain called Snot. Happily the “s” was later dropped.

This may be splitting hairs – as DNA scientists like to do. The Danish Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons came from much the same area: southern Denmark and north Germany.

Links with Wodan ring true as he was a Germanic god of battles and berserkers and particularly bolshy. And my flame-haired father has Viking Hand, a complaint that makes the fingers curl and is said to be found in Norse descendants.