TORSHAVN, FAROE ISLANDS—An archipelago of 18 islands lying in the North Atlantic roughly halfway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands were colonized by Norse settlers sometime between a.d. 872 and 930. According to the Færeyinga Saga, a later literary account of that event, a Norse chief named Grímur Kamban led the Viking band that settled the Faroes. But just where Grímur and his followers came from has never been clear. Now, according to a statement released by Frontiers, a genetic study of 139 Faroese men has revealed that the Vikings who colonized the islands came from a diverse range of Scandinavian backgrounds and were distinct from the populations that later settled in Iceland. “Scientists have long assumed that the Faroe Islands and Iceland were both settled by similar Norse people,” says anthropologist Christopher Tillquist of the University of Louisville, who led the study. “Our results demonstrate that Viking expansion into the North Atlantic was more complex than previously thought.” Read the original scholarly article about this research in Frontiers in Genetics. For more about the history of the people who settled the Faroe Islands, go to “Letter from the Faroes: Lost History of the Sheep Islands.”
