83459348539

would be the place to look. Recalling the Irish results, where almost 100 per cent of men with
Gaelic surnames are in the same Y-chromosome clan – that of Oisin – what is the paternal clan
make-up of Orkney and Shetland? The answer is, very different from Ireland. Although there are
still plenty of Oisins in the Northern Isles, the proportion is very much lower than it is in Ireland.
Even so, Oisin is still the major clan in both Shetland and Orkney, with just under 60 per cent of
men in this paternal clan. That is a very big difference from the situation in Ireland, so this was a
very promising start. Almost all the remaining 40 per cent was made up equally of the two clans
Wodan and Sigurd, with just a smattering from the minor clans Eshu and Re.
Even without delving any further into the detail of the Y-chromosome genetic fingerprints, it
was clear that Ireland and the Northern Isles had a very different genetic history if we listened only
to the version told by men. But it wasn’t completely different. Oisin still dominated, as it did in
Ireland, but nowhere near as much. Our first thought, when we saw these results, was to draw the
conclusion that in the Northern Isles Oisin represented the descendants of the indigenous Pictish
ancestry, while the men in the clans of Wodan and Sigurd had Viking ancestors who had come from
Norway. That would put the ancestral proportions in present-day Shetland at roughly 65 per cent
Pict and 35 per cent Viking. The indigenous Pictish ancestry would still be in the majority but with
a big slice of Viking male ancestry.
The first test of this theory was to see what things were like in Norway. To prepare for this
comparison, two of the team, Jayne Nicholson and Eileen Hickey, had already been collecting in
Norway. Thanks to the co-operation of the Norwegian Blood Transfusion Service, we had 400
blood samples from all over the country, from Finnmark in the far north to Rogaland in the extreme
south. If Norwegian Y-chromosomes were all either in the clans of Wodan and Sigurd, with no
Oisin, then it would back up this first conclusion – at least to the coarse level of detail embraced
by simple clan membership. However, as it turned out, there were plenty of Oisins in Norway as
well. Altogether, nearly a third of Norwegian men were members of the clan of Oisin. The
straightforward link between Oisin = Pict and Wodan and Sigurd = Viking that we had begun to
hope for in our first run through the Shetland Y-chromosomes had obviously been an
oversimplification.
However, when we looked at the clan make-up in the different regions of Norway, the
concentration of Oisins in the western provinces, the traditional homeland of the Vikings, was much
lower than in other parts of Norway. Around Bergen, on the south-west coast, only 15 per cent of
men had Oisin clan Y-chromosomes. The other two thirds of Norwegians were split between the
clans of Wodan and Sigurd, with Wodans outnumbering Sigurds by roughly two to one.
We were faced with two questions before we could be sure of interpreting our Shetland results
correctly. The first was this. Were the Norwegian Wodans and Sigurds genetically similar, at the
more detailed fingerprint level, to the men in the same clans from the Northern Isles? In other
words, did we find the same detailed Y-chromosome fingerprints in Norway and the Northern Isles
within each of the clans? We checked each one, looking for matches in the Norwegian men. To our
great relief, we found exact or first-generation matches to almost all the Sigurds and to about two
thirds of the Wodans. This certainly looked like a good indication that most, if not quite all, of the
Y-chromosomes in these two clans had arrived from Scandinavia. But how about the Oisins? Here
again there were matches between the Norwegian and Shetland samples, but nowhere near as
many. There were far more Shetland Oisins whose Y-chromosome signatures were unmatched in