How did the Vikings look like?, continued One researcher, Alette Schreiner, believed that there was one settlement that was inhabited by people that resembled the Vikings more than all others. This was the community of Valle located in Aust-Agder. She wrote that 60% of the males had blond hair and 40% were brunettes. 90% had light eyes. The head was larger than in most of Norway and the forehead and the jaw broad. The faces were large and angular. The brow ridges were frequently heavy. The men were heavy boned with longer and heavier bodies than members of the eastern Nordic type. Schreiner believed that the people of Valle had essentially remained unchanged physiologically since the Viking Age and represented how the people of western Norway looked like a thousand years ago. If this is so, the typical Norwegian Viking may have just as easily been dark-haired as fair. He would have been at least 5' 8' and maybe as much as 5' 10" tall. This was an impressive height in an age when few men stood taller than 5' 5", a good hand's breadth taller than his central European contemporaries and a full head taller than the Arabs. Robust and large-boned, he would have been heavier as well. Like most Vikings, he probably prided himself on long hair, a beard, and a mustache and may have been scrupulously groomed. The Vikings referred to Saturday as "laugardagr" (bath-day) and bathed once a week. Norway has played an important part in European racial history, since this nation has been a source of emigration to Iceland, to Normandy, and to the British Isles. One writer has commented that "the physical types of many British and Americans may be traced directly to a Norwegian origin." Another writer tells us that the Vikings "...substantially added to the racial composition of the present English population...". The English have the lightest hair of the British Isles and Wales the darkest. Among the English the blond element is considerably more important than the brunet. A fairly high percentage of the population of the North Sea coast is fair-haired. Golden hair is far commoner than the ashen variety. In Scotland fair hair is commonest in the east, in both highlands and lowlands and is especially prevalent in the very northeastern corner, and in the Orkneys and Shetlands, where much of the blood is Scandinavian. The fishermen of the English North Sea coast have as much as 90% light eyes. The general pigment character of Great Britain (this includes Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, as well as England) tends to be fair, vascular skin, medium brown hair, and an excess of rufosity and freckling, and blue or light-mixed eyes. "Blondism" of Scandinavian intensity, reflecting the Angle, Danish, and Norwegian influence, is characteristic of the whole eastern coast of England and Scotland. The mean stature for the whole island is approximately 172 cm. which is comparable to Norway and Sweden. The blond Anglo-Scandinavian area along the North Sea shore, from Scotland to Suffolk, is the tallest part of England. Heavy weights are also common on the east coast, as at Flamborough, Yorkshire, where a mean of 168 lbs. has been recorded. The bodily proportions of English and Scotch are are on the whole of "athletic" constitutional form, comparable to Norway and Sweden. The relative "sitting heights" of 52 to 53 are again similar to those of Scandinavian Nordics. Heads of unusual length are common in England, Wales, and Scotland and exceed most European groups. Only in western Norway, Iceland, and Ireland can they be equaled. But if the people of this region are primarily nordic, how can all the brunets and brown eyes be accounted for? Their characteristics have been described as "brown, hazel, or black eyes, with brown (chestnut), dark-brown, or black hair." It is also mistakenly referred to as "celtic". Archaeologists know that long before the Celts crossed the English Channel there was a pre-Celtic race living in the British Isles.  Thousands of years ago Neolithic farmers from the eastern Mediterranean began to settle in mainland Europe (Chikhi et al. 2002).  These Middle Eastern farmers contributed about 50% of the genes of modern Europeans. British archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes described them as being "...slightly built, dark people, with long, rather narrow heads and delicate features, members of that ancient Mediterranean race that today can be seen at its purest among the southern Italians."  However, a recent DNA study indicates that these Neolithic farmers had little genetic influence on Britain and Scandinavia.  Britons and Scandinavians belong to what geneticists have called the "North Atlantic Region".  Although so-called "celtic" y-chromosomes can be discerned from Scandinavian y-chromosomes, the people of the British Isles and Scandinavia are genetically more similar to each other than they are to any other European group.  For example, one of the genetic characteristics that Britons and Scandinavians share can be found in the mitochondrial DNA and x-chromosomes of both Welshmen and Norwegians.  Geneticists have recently discovered that the Welsh and the Norwegians share the same maternal ancestry (Wilson et al. 2001).  One report shows that there is simply no sharp difference between the women of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and the women of Scandinavia.  The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that a mass migration from Scandinavia to Britain must have occurred thousands of years ago that involved primarily women.  They were so numerous that they eventually displaced the native women already there.  One researcher explains: "The implication is that somewhere along the line, whether willingly or unwillingly, females from the continent joined the population in Britain and swamped out the earlier genetic complement from the maternal side."  Another study has corroborated the fact that the Celtic-speaking people of the British Isles and the people of Scandinavia are descended from the same group of women (Helgason et al. 2001).  But what is the exact nature of this genetic inheritance?  The women of the British Isles and Scandinavia are most closely related to the Germans (Helgason et al. 2001).  This underscores the essentially nordic nature of the British people. In 1935, R. H. Hodgkin published a map of the British Isles that had originally been compiled by John Beddoe in 1885. Hodgkin redrew the map to make it much more comprehensible. What Beddoe had originally done was to take the physical descriptions of 13,000 men and assign one point for a red- or fair-haired man, and one point for a man with dark hair. Every black-haired man was given two points and brown- and chestnut- haired men were considered neutral. The result was called the "Map Showing Distribution of Negrescence in Britain". If you examine this map on the next page, you will see how western England, western Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are on the whole darker than the people of eastern England and eastern Scotland. See the next page for a look at this fascinating map that was created by John Beddoe and later improved upon by R. H. Hodgkin. Previous Page......Next Page......or, for a few portraits of "dark" Scandinavians, click here.. ABOVE:   Norwegian women dressed in traditional bridal costumes.  The one in the middle has red hair, a common attribute in Scandinavia.  "Freckle" is an Old Norse word introduced into the English language by the Vikings. Describing "the Teutonic reverence for women", Charles H. Pearson writes that the bride was "lifted up in the air like a newly-chosen king." Source material: The photograph above was taken by Normanns Kunstforlag in Norway in Colors. Coon, Carlton S., The Races of Europe, (1939). Beddoe, John, The Races of Britain, (1885). Lundman, Bertil, The Races and Peoples of Europe, (1977). Shore, Thomas William, Origin of the Anglo-Saxon Race, A Study of the Settlement of England and the Tribal Origin of the Old English People, (1906). Schreiner, Alette, Valle Halandsdal und Eid Fjord. Pearson, Charles H., The Early and Middles Ages of England, 1861. The Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology is a wonderful and informative web site professionally designed by three Norwegian college students. It can be found on the internet at www.fikas.no/~sprocket/snpa/index2.htm Helgason A, Hickey E, Goodacre S, Bosnes V, Stefansson K, Ward R, Sykes B (2001)  mtDNA and the Islands of the North Atlantic:  Estimating the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry. Wison J F, Weiss D A, Richards M, Tomas M G, Bradman N, Goldstein D B (2001)  Genetic evidence for different male and female roles during cultural transmissions in the British Isles. Chikhi L, Destro-Bisol G, Bertorelle G, Pascali V, Barbujani G (1998) Clines of nuclear DNA markers suggest a largely Neolithic ancestry of the European gene pool.