Across the pond

Thanks to an American blogger, John Evans, I have found another name for my newly discovered disability, shorter and catchier than Baron Dupuytren’s syndrome. Though the French baron idenified it in 1841 the condition was apparently rife among the Vikings. Follow this link to Evans’ light-hearted comment, ‘Hey, I’m a Viking’. For a fuller explanation of the medical side, as well as the history, go to the Baylor University medical center site.

Although the disease has been around since the pirates in the long boats were the fastest thing afloat nearly two centuries ago, the medics still have no idea what causes it. But they think it is an hereditary condition, not an occupational disease caused by rowing or bashing away at the keyboard. It begins with a thickening of the muscles on the palm of the hand, which pulls back the fingers, so that you can no longer lay your hands flat down on the table. Most often it affects the ring finger first, followed by the little finger. In my case it is the little finger on my right hand, which is now permanently crooked. But the ring fingers of both my hands also a bit crooked.

The condition is found mostly in Europeans and particularly those of Viking and Norman descent. Most Brits have some Viking blood but it has been quite a shock to me realise that I probably have more Viking genes than anything else. It should have been obvious to me, since I am tall, light-skinned and blue-eyed. Not blonde, but apparently there were many brown haired Vikings and not a few red heads, like Erik the Red.

But I have lived most of my life believing that it was Celtic genes which were driving my passion for literature and music. Mainly because I am a Jones of my father’s side and a Hughes on my mother’s. However, thanks to exhaustive research by my cousin, Colin Gough, I now know that the Hugheses have lived within a few miles of Wolverhampton since the sixteenth century. My own efforts have got back as far as 1800 on the Jones side, when they were in Walsall, all of six miles from Wolverhampton.

So I have to accept that I may not have any Celtic genes at all and that I am descended from axe-weilding pirates, who raped and pillaged England in the first century AD.

Now I am over the shock I can live with being a Viking. After all they were not all pirates. They were story tellers with a rich literature. And they had a system of social order far more democratic than most countries at the time.

And, of course, they spawned King Canute (or Cnut, as the historians like to call him). Now, Canute came to power through the sword but he established peace and order. For political reasons he married the widow of Ethelred the Unready, whom he defeated. But the love of his life was his mistress, one Aelgifu, a lass from Mercia, which covers the some part of the country as the Midlands, where my ancestors mostly lived.