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Or by a mixture of both? The whole thrust of the explanation is based on historical events that we
already know about. If we had not had a reasonable explanation to hand, would the blood-group
evidence be strong enough to come up with one on its own? I really doubt that. Instead of proposing
something completely original, the genetic data is rationalized and fitted in to what we already
suspect from other sources.
The rationalizations reach their peak in relation to Iceland. Iceland was unoccupied until the
late 800s when the systematic settlement from Scandinavia began. The language, the culture, even
the written histories recorded in the Icelandic sagas, including the Histories of Settlement, leave
no one in any doubt that the great majority of settlers were Norse. And yet, the blood-group
proportions in Iceland are very different from those of modern-day Norway and almost identical to
those of Ireland, as the table shows.
A B O
Iceland 19 7 74
Norway 31 6 62
Ireland 18 7 75
By any token, the only conclusion from the blood-group composition is that Iceland was not
settled from Norway at all. Far more likely, from the blood-group results, is a wholesale settlement
from Ireland or somewhere else with similar blood-group proportions, like parts of Scotland. As
we will see in a later chapter, there is at least a partial explanation for this discrepancy, but that is
not the main message I want to get across here.
Faced with this disagreement in the blood results, instead of having the confidence to overturn
the theory of Norse settlement, Mourant tries to rationalize by finding Scandinavian ‘homelands’
that might heal the discrepancy. He cites parts of western Norway around Trondelag that have a
blood-group composition a little more like Iceland than the rest of the country, then reports an
isolated population in northern Sweden in the province of Vasterbotten with an even more
Icelandic composition. Northern Sweden isn’t even close to the Atlantic and no traditions link it to
the settlement of Iceland. Mourant then highlights an old settlement at Settesdal in southern Norway
with ‘Icelandic’ blood-group compositions. Finally, to resolve this awkward disagreement, he
suggests that the modern-day Scandinavians are the descendants of people moving in from the south
and east who displaced the Vikings and drove them to settle in Iceland.
All of these attempts to resolve the disparity between, on the one hand, mountains of cultural
and historical evidence on the Scandinavian origin of the Icelanders, and the blood-group results
on the other, highlight a fundamental weakness in the value of using blood groups to infer origins. If
the results from the labs agree with what you already believe about the origins or make-up of
people, then there is a cosy feeling that the genetics, archaeology and history are all in agreement
with each other. But when they do not there is a temptation to fabricate an agreement with
increasingly unlikely scenarios, as with Iceland.
I suspect the same has been done in the south-west corner of Wales. The southern part of
Pembrokeshire surrounding the deep-water inlet of Milford Haven delights in the sobriquet of
‘Little England beyond Wales’, a reference to the anglicized place-names and the long use of the
English as opposed to the Welsh language. The levels of group A in this small region of Wales are