{"id":6421,"date":"2021-07-04T06:57:41","date_gmt":"2021-07-04T10:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=6421"},"modified":"2024-01-05T12:15:17","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T17:15:17","slug":"my-dna-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/my-dna-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"My Viking Blood"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The first time someone wondered if I was Norwegian I was on a beach in Israel. A Dutch man I’d briefly met at a conference nearby came over to me and pointed back to a guy further up the beach.\u00a0 He said “Bjorn wants to know where you’re from in Norway.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I shrugged it off as a fluke since I’d always assumed my family heritage was Eastern European Jewish, (Russian, Polish, Lithuanian).\u00a0 But when I began traveling to Europe a lot, it started happening more often, especially in the Netherlands and Germany. I was once having dinner in Braunschweig while on a book tour for my memoir\/travelogue My Germany <\/em><\/a>when a man surprised me by sitting next to me at the trestle table.\u00a0 He said in German, “I do a lot of business in Norway.”<\/p>\n

That seemed like a bizarre conversation starter. I must have looked puzzled, because he said (still in German), “You’re not <\/em>Norwegian?” I shook my head: “Nein,<\/em> ich bin Amerikaner.<\/em>” We chatted anyway through our excellent dinners in a mixture of German and English, but he looked dubious, maybe because my German was too good in his opinion to be spoken by an American?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Similar situations have happened to me many other times in different ways, and back when my hair was shoulder-length, more than one German told me, “You look like a Viking.” Flying home from Berlin on another trip, my Swedish seatmate said half-way through the flight that he was surprised when I had started speaking to him in English because he’d been sure I was Norwegian when he boarded and took the seat next to me.<\/p>\n

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I finally thought I had the opportunity to get to the heart of this mystery when I overheard some people at a hotel lobby in New Jersey who were clearly Swedish–and something else. I recognized the sound of Swedish from having watched many (un-dubbed) Swedish movies, and took a guess that the one guy in the group who sounded different was Norwegian. I hoped so, anyway. When he headed off for the men’s room and then returned, I intercepted him before he got back to his buddies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“Are you Norwegian by any chance?” I asked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He nodded. I quickly filled him in on my experiences being taken for one of his countrymen and asked, “So, do I look Norwegian to you?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He scanned up and down and shrugged. “What does a Norwegian look like?”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well, a recent DNA analysis says I’m 5.4% Scandinavian, so all those people saw something that was always there and my family had no clue about. It might explain my deep affinity for Scandinavian crime fiction and on-screen adventure on screen like Vikings<\/em>, The Last Kingdom<\/em> and Wallander<\/em>.\u00a0 And could it explain that I felt so comfortable learning Swedish that friends with Swedish relatives said my accent was so good?<\/p>\n

Jag vat inte.\u00a0<\/em> I don’t know.\u00a0 Ar jag skandinavisk<\/em>?\u00a0 Could very well be……<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books from memoir to mystery and he coaches writers at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.
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The first time someone wondered if I was Norwegian I was on a beach in Israel. A Dutch man I’d briefly met at a conference nearby came over to me and pointed back to a guy further up the beach.\u00a0 He said “Bjorn wants to know where you’re from in Norway.” I shrugged it off … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2419],"tags":[2429,293,2420,2430,1344,2424,2422,1515,2431,2423,2421,2428,2426,2450,2449,2425,1346,2427,2451,341,1257,2452],"class_list":["post-6421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dna","tag-ancestry","tag-berlin","tag-dna","tag-dna-tests","tag-dutch","tag-heritage","tag-israel","tag-lev-raphaels-my-germany","tag-my-germany-memoir","tag-national-identity","tag-norway","tag-norwegian","tag-norwegians","tag-scadniavian-noir","tag-scandinavia","tag-swedes","tag-swedish","tag-swedish-movies","tag-the-last-viking","tag-travel","tag-vikings","tag-wallander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6421"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7872,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6421\/revisions\/7872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}