Grok Say 'Uff Da'

Hans and Petra Skari

I went ahead and sent my spit to a DNA company, because I feel there is such a thing as too much privacy, and also because I was curious about my genetic heritage. Lots of you have done the same thing, including some 589 close relatives of mine, which is extraordinary, inasmuch as I thought my family tree had been reduced to a stump with a few of us suckers coming out of it. (I haven't paid the extra to be introduced to these people, because of the risk they'd be a lot like me.)

I generally describe myself as half Norwegian. Americans like to do that. We have only the single citizenship and no familiarity with other languages or cultures or anything but you ask any of your basic paler Americans what they "are" and they'll start ticking countries off their fingers. We're real proud of our immigrant heritage as long as it has at least a few decades of antiquity to it. So I say I'm half Norwegian because my mom's parents were both from the old country and it was assumed their parents were too, and so on and so forth. I describe the other half as a dull mixture of pasty peoples in the English realm, but don't get too specific. I figure they're all interchangeable anyway.

But I was surprised to discover that I actually am 43.7% Norwegian. Surprised, because this DNA business goes back a long way and it seems to me people should have moved around a bit more than that, or, in the case of the Vikings, conquered more people than that, and so I would have expected my DNA to reflect inferior vanquished overrun peoples' DNA. Your Russian, your French, Spanish, Welsh, Irish, Greek, Italian, maybe even some Mi'kmaq from Newfoundland. Could I possibly have come from Viking stock? Oh looky there! I'm 0.4% Northern African! The Vikings conquered Morocco in 845. Boo-yah!

So I am quite tickled about the results,  because mild-mannered folk like myself like to imagine we harbor an inner Viking. Robust! Hearty! Swinging a broadsword through a cranium like it was butter! In fact--if we are what we eat--buttery! And that includes us womenfolk, with our fat blond braids tucked into our belts alongside our battle axes, ready to bash people over the head with our krumkake irons. Uff da!

All I've got to threaten people with is writing them into my novels.

Anyway, sure enough, the rest of the story was mixed and pasty. Until we get to the good stuff. The stuff I was most interested in.

Yes, folks, read it and weep. I have way more Neanderthal in me than most of you. Nearly 4%. The reconstructions of Neanderthal skeletons are not as dreadful-looking as most people imagine, I'll have you know. The Neanderthal is short and stocky and has thicker, denser facial bones than their skinny-ass compatriots in the H. sapiens school. I can relate. I am short and--oh, let's substitute "sturdy" for "stocky," why don't we--and I have empirical evidence that my head is not fragile, because I keep falling on it, and nothing has spilled out. Between my inner Vikings and Neanderthals I'm pretty sure I could keep my smug inner Irish and English portions in line. I like to think they didn't contribute much to the wonder that is me.

Maybe just the eyebrows.

Passport To North Dakota!

We were all chatting in the line to get passport photos. "Where are you traveling?" the nice lady behind me asked.

"North Dakota," I said brightly, and then everyone got sort of quiet.

But indeed to North Dakota I did go. That's where my cousin Don lives, and we were having a cousin reunion, with four out of five first cousins on my mother's side in attendance. The last time we were all together was almost sixty years ago at our grandma's farm in Balfour, population not-so-many. Everyone in my family is nice as pie because that's what you get in North Dakota. It's almost as if my mom's side never met anyone rotten in their lives, so they assumed the best of everyone, and you know? People respond to that. Don is probably the nicest of us cousins, because he didn't stray far from the Grandmothership, whereas the rest of us got contaminated to some extent by living elsewhere. Don might be the nicest man in North Dakota, now that our Uncle Clifford is gone.

Minot, I'm sure you've heard, is where the annual Norsk Hostfest is held, the largest Scandinavian festival in the country. It's popular. You have never seen so many gosh-darn nice white people in one place in all your life. In fact Dave and I have a friend here in Portland named Bruce Johnson who is just about the nicest white guy we know, and by golly if he wasn't there at the Hostfest too. And you will never see so many people in one place who are not staring at their cell phones. No sir: these were people comfortable with eye contact. And, to be fair, mostly on the riper side of middle age.

There was music, and food, and arts, and crafts, but what really perked my blood was the little group of authentic Vikings they had imported from the eleventh century. They were outstanding. For the first time in my life I felt as though my maligned fashioned sense has been validated, with its emphasis on pajamas and maybe a kicky T-strap shoe in soft leather. The men wore simple tunics over baggy pants, although there were a few T-shirts in evidence--I know!--and if authentic Vikings can show up in T-shirts a thousand years before they were invented, is it so hard to imagine they also discovered America way before anyone else except the people who already lived here? I submit it is not.

Most of them had holes in their clothes, but those were authentic, too, and come from their hobby of slicing each other up with massive axes and spears and what have you. You'll find none of your dainty arrows and epees here. We were treated to a demonstration of Viking fighting techniques which left no doubt that the standard outcome was death and gore and finality all around: clobber and cleave all the way to perdition. Consequently, all of the violence has long since been carved out of the gene pool and only the inoffensive and amiable remain, some of us still wearing our heritage pajamas.

The Vikings who survived being cleft down the middle, or who were pre-cloven, also displayed their sunny side with games of all sorts. All right, there was only one sort, with several versions. They involved one form or another of jumping on each other really hard, and then trying to pull each other apart. These games were done in teams, except for that one wherein two men sat cross-legged on a bench and took turns slapping each other into kingdom come, or off the bench, whichever came first. Awesome. Winners of any given game celebrated with a mighty shout, a vestige of which remains to this day in modern Norwegians on bingo night.

Cousin Don also treated us to a splendid tour of northern North Dakota, and anyone who dismisses the landscape as flat and dull needs to have his soul taken in for repairs. Here is a banquet of rolling green and gold, slathered in pelicans and cranes. Even at night, sometimes God throws northern lights over the place just to show his approval. Of course we also made sure to visit Goodness Central, the Home of Grandma, and found it still faithful to our memory. Except that the current owners--no doubt slaves to comfort--replaced the old farmhouse with a tight and tidy ranch, displaying a cruel indifference to our nostalgia for that drafty old sucker with the colossal coal furnace we knew and loved but didn't have to live in.


Then it was on to the stately and provincial International Peace Garden, where my shiny new passport allowed me to poke a toe into Manitoba. I lingered, hoping my Canadian friends would sense my presence, but having an attractive and sensible Prime Minister has made them complacent. Ah well: farewell Canada! See you in November, maybe!

Next up: Norwegian Cuisine. Ooh ja.

Uff Da! Viking Blood

When I was the age I should have been reading about spunky girl detectives or Victorian maids, my dad brought home a copy of Njal's Saga, finally in paperback after a thousand years in vellum. Njal's was one of several Norse sagas originating in tenth-century Iceland, and I devoured it. I'm not sure why. I might have been trying to locate some sign of gusto in my heritage. I'd already preferred to think of my own origins as leaning to the Norwegian side, although it was not a spicy bunch, my maternal relatives pale and mild-mannered and modest to a fault. I discounted the contribution from my dour Puritan forebears who were brought into the gene pool to introduce blotchiness. But I simply had nothing in the way of ethnicity. Norwegians have ethnicity in the same way dust bunnies have personality: they might, but nobody cares. As a people, they could use some horseradish. I wanted zest and mettle. I wanted brio. I wanted family that would laugh haw-haw-haw right there at the dinner table.

Njal and his friends delivered. The saga gallops along in bite-sized chapters, each one introducing a character without fanfare and killing him spectacularly. Wonderful characters: Ulf the Unwashed and Brynjolf the Unruly. These were people who expressed themselves with a broad-axe. They did not shrivel and die; they were cloven down the middle, landing east and west at once. The more gifted ones lasted a few chapters but that was all; the biggest heroes took down dozens first, single-handedly, lopping off limbs and heads until finally succumbing in a picturesque way astride a mountain of severed body parts. For instance, they could be ripped open and have their intestines nailed to a tree and be marched around it until they ran out of guts. And not only did they march, but they laughed heartily, haw-haw-haw, right up until their diaphragms came loose. An insult to their manhood was all that was required to get the ball rolling, and then vengeance kept it in play for generations. Any one of these men was one tiny-penis joke away from being decapitated. These were plot-driven people; these were people I could be proud of.

Trouble is, they didn't resemble my living Norwegian relatives in the least. My relatives were no threat to anyone who wasn't a standing field of wheat. They landed in a featureless plain and bundled up and they perfected the art of beige cooking, and gosh-darn they were nice. Somewhere in the latter part of the nineteenth century they had gotten weary of strapping themselves and their possessions to a steep fjord, and they traveled to North Dakota, where someone laid a potato down on the ground and it stayed put, and that was good enough for them. It was darn good, in fact.

What had  happened to my spear-wielding precursors, who might try to win a woman's' heart by murdering someone for her? It seems to me that it is just possible that they sliced and lopped their violent selves right out of the genetic stew, leaving behind only a handsome bunch with strong character and an inoffensive nature. Could that work today? We have a surplus of world leaders who suffered slights in their youth and were belittled by their fathers or a generic woman until they felt a war coming on. Could the kind of man who would go to war because someone said something bad about his daddy be persuaded to gird up his loins and his genetic material and go one-on-one with an axe till his violent ways are selected out? Sadly, no. And it doesn't work if he just gets a hundred thousand kids to do the war for him.