The online Telegraph reports 80% of Icelandic mitochondrial DNA is Scottish.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=001831922500268&rtmo=3SSKxAxM&atmo=gggggggK&pg=/et/01/3/3/nice03.html
Iceland is more or less sequencing its entire population's DNA, and this is
one of the more interesting results. I've never heard anyone suggest there
is a Celtic substratum to Icelandic, tho' all those Celtic-speaking Scottish
women must have had some linguistic influence, albeit a short-lived one. I
am sure there are some loan words, however (are there?).
There is a lesson here about elite languages. Old Norse was the elite
language, the language of the men. While Norse women (whatever their
language) had considerably more rights than other European women of that
time, their language left no mark on Iceland.
Iceland is of course an island, and like mountains, the isolation allows
stuff to persist for an extravagantly long time. But you wonder. The pattern
of the mannerbund (wandering warrior bands) settling down, after
kidnapping/buying some women, seems to be underemphasized in the usual
discussions of how the various IE stocks arose. It's a mixture of the
migration vs. conquest models. Raiding is not the same as sack0and-burn
conquest. Bandits don't normally burn down the villages they prey upon
(that's bad for business).
This is not quite the conquest model, but rather, the Early Bronze Age
equivalent of biker gangs holed up in the hills. Unless you have an army to
chase down such gangs, they will establish themselves as overlords who
extract tribute.
If we accept Gimbutas' view of her Old Europeans, and the place of 'the
goddess', then the less civilized and brutally blasphemous bandits who
kidnap the priestesses' daughters (and giggle at their funny Graves-style
dances with the Gorgon mask), become dominant. It takes a city-state with a
real army to maintain itself against such depredations.
The bandits, of course, quickly -- nay, *instantaneously* -- take on the
material culture of those they prey upon, and thus leave very little in the
way of archaeological remains.
St. Augustine said something along this line. The whole history of
civilization is one set of bandits supplanting an earlier, grown-soft set of
bandits. Bandits are opportunists, like wolves; city dwellers are creatures
of habit, like sheep.
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