Viking DNA test: what a DNA test can and cannot tell you about Viking ancestry

It cannot give you a Viking percentage. No such number can exist, because the people the word describes were not a genetic population.

Whether you are related to Vikings is a harder question. A test can tell you whether part of your genome looks like people buried in Viking Age Scandinavia and whether you share segments with them, but each of those results has more than one explanation, and none of them can name a relative or show that anyone in your family went raiding.

In Old Norse, a víkingr was someone who went on a víking, a season or a career of raiding and trading by sea: something a person did, not something a person was born as. Ancient DNA has now confirmed the consequence. Margaryan and colleagues sequenced 442 people from the Viking Age and the centuries around it, and the individuals buried with Scandinavian rites turned out to be genetically varied. Two people in Orkney, a man and a woman, buried in Scandinavian fashion, had ancestry similar to present-day Irish and Scottish people; the authors think they are likely the first Pictish genomes published, and that Pictish people may have been integrated into Scandinavian culture by the Viking Age. Individuals in Denmark and Sweden carried substantial southern European ancestry; some in Norway carried Sami-related ancestry.

Scandinavia itself was regionally structured, with related but distinguishable Danish-like, Norwegian-like and Swedish-like profiles, and each shows up most strongly along a different route out of the region. The authors call those labels inexact and indicative.

Those are tendencies, and a single crew could go either way. Execution sites in Dorset and Oxford hold people with North Atlantic-like, Danish-like and Norwegian-like ancestry, so if they were Viking raiding parties that lost, those parties drew on different origins. The Salme ship burial in Estonia shows the opposite: 41 men who died violently, buried in two boats nearly half a century before the first documented raid, on Lindisfarne in 793. Among the 34 sequenced were four brothers buried side by side and a third-degree relative of one of them, and the group’s ancestry was similar from man to man and Swedish-like, which points to a crew recruited from a small community.

For testing, the consequence is that there is no Viking allele, no Viking haplogroup and no Viking reference population. There are Viking Age reference genomes, from Scandinavia and from the places its people reached, which is a different and far more useful thing, and a test that sells a “Viking percentage” is selling a label for a Scandinavian-related ancestry estimate. The estimate is the part to read.

Suppose a report finds part of your genome best explained by a Viking Age Scandinavian source. Three readings are open, and a genome cannot decide between them.

The first is ancestry from Scandinavians who left during the Viking Age: Danish settlers in the Danelaw, Norwegian settlers in Orkney, Dublin, Iceland and Normandy, Swedish traders on the eastern rivers. The second is ancestry from the same North Sea populations at a different time. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes who settled England from the fifth century came from a coast running from the northern Netherlands through northern Germany into Denmark, and Gretzinger and colleagues found their ancestry overlaps heavily with what Danish settlers brought later. Separating the two by autosomal ancestry alone is at the edge of what any method can do. The third is plain geography: Scandinavians, the Dutch, northern Germans and the eastern English form one continuum, so a northern European genome resembles Viking Age Scandinavians partly because it resembles their neighbours.

The reference genomes carry traffic in the other direction too. Margaryan’s team found Finnish and Baltic ancestry reaching what is now Sweden, particularly the island of Gotland, ancestry from the British Isles reaching western Scandinavia, and the first evidence of South European ancestry in Scandinavia, in Viking Age Denmark and southern Sweden. Rodríguez-Varela and colleagues added in 2023 that modern Scandinavians carry less of that British-Irish, eastern Baltic and southern European inflow than the Viking Age population did. So the reference genomes are not purer versions of today’s Swedes and Danes; the deeper history is in Scandinavian DNA: ancient origins.

What lasted is modest outside Scandinavia. Margaryan’s paper calls the Viking genetic legacy there consistent but limited: up to 5% in Poland, and no more than 6% in England. It finds the stronger effect in the other direction, with present-day Norwegians between 12 and 25% in North Atlantic-like ancestry and Swedes at a more uniform 10%. A result is a resemblance to sampled people, not a certificate of membership.

Ancestrify runs three analyses on one raw file, each asking a different question of the Viking Age.

The first is qpAdm modelling. A formal admixture model offers your genome a set of ancestral peoples and asks whether it can be written as a mixture of them, with a p-value that passes or fails the fit and a standard error on every weight. For a British or Irish customer the natural model contrasts a Viking Age Scandinavian source with an Iron Age British source and an early medieval continental one. The output is often a weight with a wide error bar, or a nested model in which the Scandinavian source is not needed at all, because the three sources are close relatives. Either one is accurate about how similar those populations were. Ancient Ancestry, our qpAdm analysis, prints the p-value and every standard error so the trade-off can be seen.

The second is Global25 distance, which needs a coordinate row from Davidski’s Global25 service: paste one you already hold, or get one through Ancestry Map with the Coordinate Concierge. With the row, you can measure the distance from your position to published Viking Age individuals and population averages, labelled in our catalog by region and period: Danish Viking, Norwegian Viking, Swedish Viking, English Viking, Iceland Norse-Gaelic and others. Distance is a similarity measure, not an ancestry proportion. A modern Norwegian sits close to the Norwegian Viking Age samples because little has changed since; a modern English person sits at a moderate distance from all of them. Read the cluster, not the single winner, in Ancestry Map, our Global25 analysis.

The third analysis skips populations altogether. It scans your raw file against every individual in the ancient panel, including the Viking Age individuals published by Margaryan and later studies, and reports the stretches you share with each, painted on your chromosomes with the evidence on every row. Sharing a segment with a man from the Salme ship burial or a woman buried in Viking Age Denmark is identity by state: your genome and theirs read the same across that stretch. It is the most concrete of the three results and the most easily over-read, which is why every row says what it is and why Ancient Matches never names anyone as your ancestor.

• 
  Ancient AncestryqpAdm

  Your ancestry as a tested mix of ancient peoples, approved by a person.

  from €29.99
• 
  Ancestry MapG25

  Where your DNA sits among the world’s peoples, Bronze Age to today.

  €29.99
• 
  Ancient Matches

  Find the individual ancient people whose DNA overlaps with yours.

  €29.99

Three Y-chromosome lineages carry the label in marketing copy: I1, R1a-Z284 and R1b-U106, and each is common in Scandinavia. I1 reaches roughly a third of men in Sweden and around a quarter in Norway and Denmark; R1a-Z284 is the Scandinavian branch of R1a, concentrated in Norway and Sweden; R1b-U106 is the main R1b branch of the Germanic-speaking world, from the Netherlands and northern Germany to Denmark and England.

None of them is diagnostic, because a haplogroup is a frequency, not a proof. I1 is carried by around one man in seven in England and is common across northern Germany and the Low Countries. Gretzinger and colleagues found I1 absent from sampled Iron Age and Roman Britain and present in more than a third of early medieval English men, so an English I1 lineage most likely arrived with the Anglo-Saxon migration, three centuries before the first raid on Lindisfarne. The same holds for U106. R1a-Z284 is the most Scandinavia-specific of the three, and even it says only that a paternal line once lived in Scandinavia, not when it left.

The free Clade Finder reads your Y and mitochondrial branches from the raw file and shows where each is common today. It cannot tell you that anyone on it was a Viking.

1. Does the report name the ancient individuals and populations it compared you with, or only a label? Named samples can be checked; “Viking” cannot.
2. Does every ancestry weight come with a standard error or another statement of uncertainty?
3. Are the sources ancient genomes from the Viking Age, or modern Scandinavians relabelled?
4. Does the test say that a haplogroup is a frequency? If it calls your haplogroup Viking, stop reading.
5. Where is your raw file processed? Ancestrify runs in the EU, one-time, and does not sell a percentage it cannot define.

Can a DNA test tell if I have Viking ancestry?#

It can measure resemblance to published Viking Age individuals, model your genome with Viking Age Scandinavian sources and show shared segments with specific people from the period. It cannot show that an ancestor went raiding, because Viking describes an occupation and the Viking Age population that practised it was genetically mixed.

Am I related to Vikings?#

A DNA test can show that part of your genome resembles Viking Age Scandinavians, or that you share segments with individuals from the period. It cannot say why. The resemblance may come from Scandinavians who left during the Viking Age, from the same North Sea populations at another time, or from neighbours on one northern European continuum, and a shared segment means your genome and theirs read the same across that stretch. None of that names a particular Viking as your relative.

Which haplogroups are Viking?#

None. I1, R1a-Z284 and R1b-U106 are common in Scandinavia and marketed as Viking, but each is found across northern Europe, and in England I1 and U106 arrived mainly with the Anglo-Saxon migration. A haplogroup tells you where a single paternal line is common today, not what any of its bearers did.

How much Viking DNA do English people have?#

A Scandinavian-related contribution exists, concentrated in the old Danelaw counties, and the summary of the 442-genome study put the Viking-related share of the UK population at up to about six percent. Gretzinger’s early medieval genomes show why the figure is soft: the continental ancestry that reached England with the Angles and Saxons overlaps with what Danish settlers brought later, and no autosomal method separates them cleanly.

Were Vikings blond?#

Many were not. The authors of the 442-genome study say many Vikings had brown hair, and they measured higher polygenic scores for black hair colour in Viking Age individuals than in present-day Danes, though they cannot say whether selection or something else, such as more ethnic diversity in the Viking Age sample, explains the gap. A prediction from selected variants estimates a likelihood and cannot reconstruct a face, and hair colour says nothing about whether someone was a Viking.

What is the best Viking DNA test?#

One that names its ancient reference individuals, publishes the uncertainty on every number and refuses to call any of it Viking. Ancestrify’s three analyses do that from one raw file: a formal model with error bars, a distance to Viking Age samples, and segment matches to the individuals themselves. The same questions pick the best DNA test for Scandinavian ancestry in general, because a Scandinavian label means no more than the reference genomes behind it.

Terms used here are defined in the glossary.

1. Margaryan, A. et al. (2020). Population genomics of the Viking world. Nature, 585, 390 to 396.
2. Rodríguez-Varela, R. et al. (2023). The genetic history of Scandinavia from the Roman Iron Age to the present. Cell, 186, 32 to 47.
3. Gretzinger, J. et al. (2022). The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature, 610, 112 to 119.
4. Ebenesersdóttir, S. S. et al. (2018). Ancient genomes from Iceland reveal the making of a human population. Science, 360, 1028 to 1032.
5. Leslie, S. et al. (2015). The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population. Nature, 519, 309 to 314.