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was unloading my slides, a lady came in and sat down. I asked if she had come to hear my lecture.
She had. Having no audience is bad enough. Having an audience of one is far worse. Unable to
slink quietly away, I was honour-bound to give the lecture, all forty-five minutes of it, slides and
all. The sole member of the audience sat there quietly, paying attention and, when I had finished,
she picked up her handbag and, without a word, left the area. Field work is full of surprises.
One last reflection of Shetland came from talking to men and women at the Festival. I wanted to
know whether they felt closer to Scandinavia or to Scotland. On this question, the answer was
clear-cut. It was Scandinavia without a doubt. Very few felt any connection with Scotland, let alone
with the new Scottish parliament in Edinburgh. It was as if they even preferred to have their affairs
governed from Westminster than from Edinburgh. This allergy to Scotland extends to their own
individual desires for a Viking ancestry, especially among the men. Where there was any
uncertainty, and most people did not know where their ancestors had come from, they wanted to be
Vikings. Scots came a very poor second and, to my surprise, an Irish ancestry was even worse.
I know hardly anybody from among my friends and colleagues who has been to Shetland. Only
one, who is on the maintenance staff at the Institute where I work, visits regularly. He goes there to
witness the festival of Up Helly Aa. This annual event is held on the last Tuesday in January, in the
depths of winter darkness, and is a very real reminder of Shetland’s Viking affiliations. The day
begins with the year’s elected Jarl, or leader, and his fifty-seven-strong retinue of guizers marching
through the streets of Lerwick dressed in scarlet velvet, wearing winged helmets and carrying
elaborate shields and heavy war axes. Becoming the Jarl of Up Helly Aa is a great honour for a
Shetlander. It is the culmination of an induction and selection process that can last twenty years and
that begins as a teenager with a minor role in the pageant. The Jarl assumes the name Sigurd
Hlodvisson for the day and receives the freedom of Lerwick for the duration of his twenty-fourhour
reign. The culmination of Up Helly Aa is the ceremonial torching of Sigurd’s galley
Asmundervag, specially made for the occasion. The real Sigurd Hlodvisson, also known as Sigurd
the Stout, lived from 980 to 1014. Sigurd was the Norse Earl of Orkney and divided his time
between visiting his overseas dominions, in Ireland and the Isle of Man, and summers spent raiding
the Hebrides and the Scottish mainland. His reign as Earl of Orkney came to a sudden end when he
was killed at the battle of Clontarf when, as you may recall from the last chapter, Brian Boru
finally forced the Vikings out of Ireland. Maybe that is why the last thing a Shetland man wants to
be thought of is Irish.
We left Shetland after a busy week. The take-off was as alarming as the landing. In certain wind
conditions the elected runway faces south, straight at the cliff of Sumburgh Head. I thought we were
taxiing to another part of the airport, when the engines went to full throttle and we accelerated
down the runway – straight towards the cliff! Needless to say we banked sharply as soon as we left
the ground. We had with us over 600 DNA samples, a magnificent total.
We realized that we had the best chance yet of finding genetic evidence of Viking settlement in
the Northern Isles. If we could detect the signal anywhere it would be in Orkney and Shetland. And
if we could only identify Viking DNA in the Northern Isles, we could look for it elsewhere.
According to everything we are told about the Vikings, and which is reinforced by re-enactments
like Up Helly Aa, this was a society dominated by warlike chieftains and their blood-thirsty
acolytes, raping and pillaging their way around Europe. These being men, it seemed only sensible
to begin our search for Viking genes with the Y-chromosome. If these stories were true, then that