What would you look like as a Viking ?



Tuono said:
Orkney, where my mothers side of my family are from way back in time. They were called Flett, Flett is a common name there and there is even a famous tune called Flett of Flotta, Flotta being one of the Orkney Islands. Weird then that my mother has no Scandy DNA.
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The Norwegian Vikings would raid in Scotland but created settlements on both sides of the country in Cumbria and Durham - much better farming land than they found in Scotland and they also held the Isle of Man as a stronghold. That's the reason that we've got the highest concentration of blond haired and blue eyed people in the UK, so the majority of us up here will have some Norwegian DNA.
 
Tuono said:
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My mother who's ancestors were all Scottish fishermen has no Scandinavian DNA yet I have traced her side of the family back to the Orkney Isles in the early 17th century and they even had the surname Flett which is a Scandinavian name. My mother was a ginger btw. My DNA is 3% Norwegian which must have came from my Irish side of the family.
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err we might be related... Not even kidding :lol: Especially if you had one from around Findochty/Cullen area called George as he's my 8x great grandad. Think his father was from Orkney but probably got blown off course in a storm or something :)

And ancestry.com this shite ;)
 
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Lord Potts said:
however they niether had long hair or beards because no experienced professional worrior at the time would have worn them. Excess body hair not only complicated the wearing of body protection and armour it made the treatment of wounds difficult and also helped to infect them. If a wound in battle did become infected it would usually guarantee you a very slow & painful death and experienced soldiers knew this. Fighting men would therefore keep themselves short haired and clean shaven - just as the Romans did. It seems that the Normans mocked the Anglo Saxon fashion for beards and long hair because it was not the appearence of a true warrior.
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I believe (stand to be corrected) the Macedonian’s banned beards during their glory years because it was an easy target for the enemy to grab and pull them out of position. Can imagine the same logic being important in a shield wall.
 
PeteFTM said:
I believe (stand to be corrected) the Macedonian’s banned beards during their glory years because it was an easy target for the enemy to grab and pull them out of position. Can imagine the same logic being important in a shield wall.
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Any Macedoinian shield wall would have would have been bristling with sarissa which was the 13 to 21 foot pike type spear held by each hopolite and for which they had become famous. The thing was twice the length of any spears used by the Greeks. Anyone who tried to get within beared pulling distance of the Macedonian front rank would therefore have found themselves been instantly skewered well before the were even at arms length.

I think that the story is probably just an ironic joke about the length of the sarissa and how unlikely it was that you would get very close the the Macadonian front line .

For their part the Anglo Saxons had beards and a shield wall that was reputed to be so solid that you would have had great difficulty pulling anyone out of it. It is often claimed that so tight was the press in the wall that even those members of it who died during the fighting still remained upright and in their position.

Having spent a whole day battling against the Anglo Saxon's unflinching shield wall at Hastings - which was an extra-ordinary length of time for an early medieval battle - Duke William only managed to break it when he tricked the Saxons by pretending his mounted knights were fleeing from it. Thinking they had beaten the Normans this tragically caused the wall to break and run in pursuit of the Norman knights who then simply turned around and cut the Anglo Saxons down on the open ground.

If that wall had only held a little longer. The day was running out for William it was early evening and Morcar the Earl of Northumberland was within an hour of so of arriving at the battlefield with his army from the north to support the King. The Norman force would have been smashed and William would have been defeated. Had that happened many historians belief that England would have become closely related to the Scandinavian countries and by now we really would have become Vikings
 

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