Danelaw to Denmark: A Viking Journey

English men once ruled the planet. Now they meekly submit to humiliation like this. What happened? pic.twitter.com/rfShqro88v

— Pete Varela (@VarelaPete) December 25, 2019

The entire history of the United States falls within the Modern era.

The ethnic and cultural distinction between Yankee and Southerner can similarly be traced back to the Early Modern Era and has its roots in divisions over climate, slavery and religion. The Anglo-American founding stock came from different parts of the British Isles. The Puritans famously came from East Anglia while lowland Southerners came from the south and west of England. The Scots-Irish came from Ulster and the Borderlands of the north of England.

The overwhelming majority of Southerners and millions of other Americans can trace their ancestry back to the British Isles. We came from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Those who didn’t come from the British Isles tended to come from Northwestern Europe: Germans, Dutch, French and Scandinavians. We’re broadly Germanic and Celtic. Prior to the 17th century, all of our ancestors were still in Northwestern Europe around the North Sea. There are White Americans whose ancestors came here from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, but they are a minority. The great bulk of White Americans came here from either Britain, Ireland or Germany and most now have ancestors that at some point came from all three of these countries.

In this documentary, we go back and continue to explore Britain after the fall of Rome. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrive in post-Roman Britain from their ancestral homeland on the North Sea coast of the Netherlands, northern Germany and Denmark. Originally, the Angles and Saxons (their merger is a product of later English history) were seafaring peoples, but after arriving in Britain, settling down to become farmers and converting to Christianity, they became land dwellers and lost interest in the sea until the Viking invasions of the 9th century in King Alfred’s time. They built wooden settlements next to the old Roman towns which were constructed of stone. The Roman ruins of Londinium were reoccupied and refurbished during the pagan Viking invasions and the development of modern London traces back to this period.

In between the withdrawal of the Romans around 410 AD and the invasion of Britain by the Great Heathen Army in 865 AD, seven major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged in what became England which was unified under Æthelstan in 927: Wessex, Sussex, Essex, Kent, Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria. Celtic Britons held out in the far west of Britain in what is now Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria and Strathclyde. Interestingly enough, the Scots-Irish can partially trace their ancestry back to these Britons who were sandwiched between what later became England and Scotland. The area was also overrun and settled by the English, Scots and Norse though.

As the Norse and Danes developed a trading network around the North Sea and as the English unified and developed a navy to fight off the Viking invasions, the English developed a renewed interest in the sea and began traveling to distant parts of Northern Europe to trade. Scandinavia, Kievan Rus and Poland began to convert to Christianity around 1000 AD. The Viking Age came to an end around the time Harold Hardrada, the king of Norway, died while invading England which only a few weeks later fell to the Normans in the Norman Conquest.

Whether it was Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norse, Frisians or Normans, these people were racially, culturally and ethnically similar enough to be almost indistinguishable from each other. They all came from the same area and founding stock and were only briefly divided by their respective conversions to Christianity. The Celtic Britons and Irish weren’t dissimilar enough to merge with the English, Danes and Norse in all sorts of ways over time. The Norse who settled in Ireland and Scotland were also absorbed into those nations.

It goes without saying that trying to repeat this experiment with every racial, ethnic, cultural and religious group in the world who separated by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution on different continents is a disaster that will not and cannot produce the same result.