Faroe - Sandur

The Faroe Samples: What the Branches Show and What Tradition Says

Against the lazy explanation

To explain the origins of the two Sandur samples as simply "Viking" is at the very least, lazy and it steps over several details that complicate the proposal considerably.

First, the archaeology; Evidence exists for early occupation of the Faroes well before the conventional Norse settlement date: agriculture appears to have been brought to the islands somewhere between 300 and 500 CE and evidence for animal husbandry follows around 500 CE, both roughly three centuries before the Norse settlement period. Modern Faroese carry mostly Scandinavian paternal ancestry but mostly British/Irish maternal ancestry with a higher proportion of that British/Irish ancestry than Iceland itself shows, consistent with an existing population already present when the Norse arrived, Faroese archaeologists themselves remain split on this: some are sceptical that the Irish textual and place-name evidence proves early settlement, while others find the combined circumstantial case convincing, the proposed source population for this earlier wave is specifically British Isles peoples arriving by early medieval seafaring, centuries before the Norse had even adopted the sail.

So the question is not simply whether the Sandur lineages are "recent incomers" or "native" — there is a real third possibility: that they arrived earlier than either label allows for.

What the two Sandur samples actually show

The Sandur samples themselves date to approximately the 1600s AD, centuries after Norse settlement and this needs to be stated plainly rather than glossed over, their burials are not pre-Norse artefacts and nothing here claims otherwise.

What is genuinely striking is not when they were buried, but how they relate to one another, the two Sandur samples sit on "genuinely separate branches", not as siblings under one shared terminal node. That is real information, and it changes the shape of the question, two recently unrelated S1194 lines converging on the same tiny archipelago is far better explained by multiple arrivals over time than by a single founding event, a single Viking-era ship's crew would not be expected to carry two already-divergent branches of the same rare haplogroup, unless its members had picked those branches up from different places, or at different times, before ever reaching the Faroes, It is more likely that two such separated lines were drawn from an S1194 stronghold, a place where multiple related lines had already been established and had coexisted for a long period of time before any of their descendants ever set foot on Sandur.

Can such a situation be found in early British tradition, a place, and a moment, where multiple long-established related lines might plausibly have converged?

What tradition says

I have not studied classical Arthurian legend in great detail, but putting aside the romanticised versions that circulate today, it seems clear that more than one historical figure has been folded into the single modern myth of "King Arthur." The relevance of that here is the following tradition set down as it survives, without examining it for attestation: Tracing the ancestry of Britain from Troy through the legendary founder Brutus and down to King Arthur, the Elizabethan scholar John Dee referred to how Arthur conquered thirty kingdoms in the North Atlantic and Scandinavia,  since Arthur had conquered these lands for Britain first, the reasoning went, Elizabeth had a right to them now, provided she settled the land, Arthur, a Welsh king, was supposedly an ancestor of the Welsh Tudors, whose arrival on the English throne in 1485 signalled the revival of the "British" empire after a long domination of England under the Saxons.

By the tradition Geoffrey of Monmouth records: that summer Arthur prepared his fleet to go to Ireland, which he desired to conquer, having subdued the whole country, Arthur took his fleet to Iceland, where he defeated the natives and conquered their land, as news spread through the islands that no one could stop Arthur, King Doldavius of Gotland and King Gunuasius of the Orkneys came unbidden to submit and promised tribute, Arthur, exulting at being universally feared, decided to conquer all Europe, readied his fleets, and headed first for Norway to make his brother-in-law Loth its king, the Britons assaulted the cities with fire and scattered the country-dwellers with unabated fury until the whole of Norway and Denmark had been subjected to Arthur's control.

Dee's own source, a Welsh book he claimed as his authority, said to be the same text Geoffrey himself drew upon, goes further still, claiming Arthur conquered the Arctic regions in the 530s AD, recorded in a text called the Gestis Arthuri, "The Deeds of Arthur," during these voyages Arthur is said to have encountered many troubles, including fast-flowing seas that blocked passage to northern Norway, in which four thousand knights reportedly lost their lives among the straits. In the mountains around the North Pole, tradition holds, there were cities standing in Arthur's own time. The lands he is said to have conquered include Iceland, Ireland, Greenland, Shetland, Orkney, the Faroe Islands (called Friseland), Grocland, Icaria, Estotiland, and Drogio.

Orkney: a second thread in the same tradition

The Dee/Arthur material names Orkney directly, King Gunuasius submitting unbidden alongside Gotland, which makes it worth asking the same question of Orkney that's been asked of the Faroes: is there any independent evidence of a pre-Norse Celtic presence there, separate from the Norse settlement story?

There is and it comes in two tiers worth keeping clearly apart.

Confirmed, modern archaeology.

The Brough of Birsay, on Orkney's Mainland, has produced genuine pre-Norse inscribed stones, independently excavated and academically published. Three ogham-inscribed building slabs were recovered in 1934, 1960, and 1980, formally catalogued and discussed by Katherine Forsyth (University of Glasgow) in a 2021 publication. A Pictish symbol stone, broken into sixteen fragments, was found at the same site in 1935 and dated to the 7th–8th century AD, possibly broken deliberately during the 9th-century transition from Pictish to Norse occupation. Both are held by the National Museum of Scotland. This is solid, corroborated evidence of a genuine pre-Norse Celtic/Pictish inscribed-stone tradition at Birsay specifically.

Separately, the "papar" place-names scattered across Orkney and the Faroes alike, Papa Westray, Papa Stronsay, derive from the Old Norse word for the Gaelic-speaking Christian hermits, Norse settlers found already resident when they arrived. This is well-established toponymic and archaeological evidence, entirely independent of the ogham/Pictish stone finds, and it reinforces the same basic picture: real, pre-Norse Celtic presence in Orkney, not merely a Norse founding population.

Unconfirmed, flagged for follow-up.

John Toland's A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning (1726; this citation from an 1815 reprint) reports, via Brand's 1701 Description of Orkney and Zetland, a stone standing at Birsay inscribed with the word "BELUS" in ancient characters, which, if genuine and pre-Norse, would connect directly to the Belenus/Beltane solar-cult tradition, no modern archaeological record of this specific stone has yet been located and Toland himself declines to say whether it commemorates Belenus or "a native Prince," rather than asserting it confidently, It should be treated as unconfirmed 18th-century secondhand reporting, not evidence, but it is worth recording precisely because it names a specific, checkable claim: a search of Historic Environment Scotland's records and Orkney's archaeological archives could establish whether the stone survives, was reclassified under another name, or was lost. Given that Birsay is independently confirmed to have carried other pre-Norse inscribed stones, the Belus report is at least plausible in context, even though it remains unverified on its own.

Was long-distance British seafaring plausible at all?

Before weighing the Arthurian/Orkney tradition any further, it's worth asking a more basic question: is there any real evidence British Celts were capable of the kind of open-water voyaging a Faroese or Orkney settlement would require, independent of any legendary account?

There is, and it's solid, Caesar records the Britons as closely related to and in regular contact with the Veneti of Armorica (modern Brittany) the dominant Atlantic seafaring power of the pre-Roman era. Caesar's own description of Veneti ships (accurately preserved in the Trevelyan material, source below) details oak hulls, high bows and sterns built specifically to withstand open Atlantic swell rather than mere coastal crossings, and leather sails suited to sustained ocean conditions, a genuinely Atlantic-capable design, not a river or Channel-hopping one.

This is independently attested classical evidence, not tradition and it establishes that sophisticated open-water shipbuilding knowledge existed among Celtic peoples in direct regular contact with Britain centuries before any of the Faroese or Orkney settlement dates in question.

Later still, the "Count of the Saxon Shore" command a real, Notitia Dignitatum-attested Roman naval office headquartered at Boulogne and briefly seized by the British-born usurper Carausius in the 3rd century AD, shows organised British and Romano-British sea power controlling the Channel and southern North Sea. That's a different era and a different specific mission (coastal defence, not exploration), but it demonstrates a continuous thread of serious British naval capability across the Roman period, immediately preceding the post-Roman centuries in which any British voyage to the Faroes or Orkney would have to have taken place.

Neither of these proves a British voyage to Sandur or Orkney happened. What they do is remove "the Britons simply weren't capable of this kind of voyage" as an objection, the maritime technology and tradition were demonstrably there.

A second, independent tradition naming Orkney

The Dee/Arthur material isn't the only British legendary strand claiming maritime reach to Orkney. Separately and from a different tradition entirely, the Welsh Triads as preserved in Marie Trevelyan's 1918 compilation, ancient British kings are described as holding "dominion by sea" over a named group of islands: Orkney, the Isle of Man, Anglesey, and the Isle of Wight. This is Triadic material, unconnected to Geoffrey of Monmouth or Dee's Arthurian conquest narrative, yet it makes a structurally similar claim: that Orkney specifically fell within the maritime reach of early British kingship, two separate strands of tradition converging on the same claim doesn't make either one evidence, but it does show this isn't a single author's invention; the idea of British sea-power extending to Orkney recurs independently across more than one branch of the surviving legendary corpus.

Nothing here claims the Arthurian tradition attests, proves, or explains the two Sandur burials. What can be said is narrower, and worth stating precisely: the genetic evidence shows two unrelated (in recent times) S1194 lineages, both ending up on the same small North Atlantic archipelago, having diverged from one another long before either man was born and independent archaeology already shows the Faroes were reached earlier, and by a different route, than the conventional Norse-settlement story allows.

Whether the specific tradition of an early, wide-ranging British conquest and settlement of the North Atlantic, the Faroes explicitly named among the lands claimed, has any bearing on how those two divergent lines arrived on Sandur is, at present, exactly the kind of question that cannot be settled either way. It is set down here as tradition, not as evidence, because that is what it currently is. AJB.c.2026

Sources

Genetic data

• Struve, D. (2025–2026), S1194 phylogenetic and geographic chart, FTDNA and own research — source for the two Faroe Islands Sandur sample positions, their approximate 1600s AD dating, and their placement on genuinely separate branches off BY11764/FT381000.

Pre-Norse Faroese archaeology

• Quaternary Science Reviews (2013) — charred barley grains recovered beneath a Viking-period longhouse floor on Sandoy, dated 300–500 years before the conventional Norse settlement horizon.

• Sedimentary ancient DNA / fecal biomarker study (2021) — sheep DNA and grazing-linked vegetation change in Faroese sediment cores, first appearing around 500 CE (370–610 CE at 95% confidence), predating Norse settlement by roughly three centuries.

• Modern Faroese population genetics — paternal ancestry predominantly Scandinavian, maternal ancestry predominantly British/Irish, at a higher proportion than seen in Iceland; cited as consistent with an existing population present before Norse arrival, though interpretation remains debated among Faroese archaeologists.

Attested British/Celtic maritime capability

• Caesar, J., Commentarii de Bello Gallico, Book III — source for the Veneti's Atlantic-capable ship construction and their close kinship/contact with the Britons.

• Notitia Dignitatum — source for the "Comes Littoris Saxonici" ("Count of the Saxon Shore") command; Eutropius and Aurelius Victor for Carausius's historical seizure of that command, AD 286–293.

Welsh Triadic tradition

• Trevelyan, M., The Early British Navy (Plymouth, 1918) — source for the Triadic "dominion by sea" tradition naming Orkney, the Isle of Man, Anglesey, and the Isle of Wight as islands under the fleets of ancient British kings. Presented as tradition, independent of the Dee/Geoffrey material, not as evidence.

Pre-Norse Orkney archaeology

• Forsyth, K. (2021), "Ogham inscriptions from the Brough of Birsay," in Morris, C.D. and Barrowman, R.C. (eds.), The Birsay Bay Project Volume 3: The Brough of Birsay, Orkney: Investigations 1954–2014, Oxbow, pp. 375–388 — source for the three confirmed ogham-inscribed slabs excavated at Birsay.

• National Museum of Scotland / Historic Environment Scotland records — source for the 1935 Pictish symbol stone found at the Brough of Birsay, dated 7th–8th century AD.

• Toland, J., A Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning (1726; 1815 reprint), citing Brand, J., A Brief Description of Orkney, Zetland, Pightland-Firth, and Caithness (1701) — source for the reported but currently unconfirmed "BELUS" inscribed stone at Birsay. Flagged for future archival follow-up; not currently corroborated by any modern archaeological record located.

Arthurian/Dee tradition

• Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, Book 9 (c. 1136) — source for Arthur's conquests of Ireland, Iceland, Gotland, Orkney, Norway, and Denmark.

• Rettino, M., "King Arthur, Conqueror of the Arctic: John Dee, Canada's First Lord, Historical Fantasy and Early British Imperialism" (2013), matthewrettino.com — source for Dee's use of the Arthurian conquest tradition in Elizabethan territorial claims, the Gestis Arthuri material, and the list of lands including the Faroe Islands ("Friseland").

• Green, [author], jemne.org, issue 15 — source for the Geoffrey of Monmouth passage (9.153–154) on Arthur's Norwegian and Danish campaigns. (Note: I have not verified what "JEMNE" stands for or the full publication this represents — worth confirming before citing formally.)

Note: the Dee/Arthurian material above is presented in this piece as tradition only, as instructed, without being checked for attestation. It should be read and cited as narrative tradition, not as historical evidence, unless and until it is examined on that basis separately. AJB.c.2026