Saturday, January 12, 2008

I Dream of Edla With the Light Hair

Assistant Village Idiot posits "a mutation of light hair on the Baltic coat of Sweden which spread out generations ago." Possibly. But consider. . .

Olof Skötkonung was King of Sweden between 995 and 1022 AD. According to Wikipedia, "In a Viking expedition to Wendland, he had captured Edla, the daughter of a Wendish chieftain, and she gave him the son Emund (who was to become king of Sweden)." See Saga of Hervör and Heithrek at 141. Wendland refers to a region in eastern Germany once home to a Slavic-speaking minority.

Could Edla the Wend and Olof each have had a recessive gene for "light hair"?:



source: Peter Frost, Why Do Europeans Have So Many Hair and Eye Colors? (2006), via Strangemaps

Note: The foregoing is utterly uninformed speculation invented as an excuse to re-post a great map.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wanna see the same map for South America. WTF are all those blonde Brazillian supermodels coming from?

Did Sweden secretly invade Brazil in the 1960s? Who has been hiding this for the last 45-odd years?!?! Inquiring minds want to know!! I sense a new conspiracy theory...

:o)

@nooil4pacifists said...

OBH is much better than I at "utterly uninformed speculation."