The study of such communities requires first a few thoughts on the terms ‘migration’ and ‘diaspora’ (Clifford 1999; Cohen 2008; Jesch 2008a). Human history has always been about migration; 18,000 years ago no one lived in north-west England because it was covered in ice. After the ice receded, people began migrating northward. Immigration and emigration happen throughout history, more intensely in some periods than others.
We live in an Age of Migration now, and the 10th century was also such a time in the region around the Irish Sea, the M6 motorway of its time, absolutely clogged with traffic. Just as on the M6, much of this traffic was commercial and involved trading activities. But some of it also involved people upping sticks and moving to new places. This is migration—the simple transplantation of people from the place in which they were born to another place where they settle and remain (some of them may even go on to somewhere else). Migration may involve staying within the same region or country where the language, culture, social and economic customs, and religion are the same or very similar, although such moves tend not to be thought of as migrations. Migration is usually understood to mean that people move somewhere with a different language, culture, social and economic customs, and religion. And in a historical context, the term ‘migration’ is used only when large numbers of people make the same move.
Diaspora, on the other hand, relates to the processes and results of migration and how migrants think and feel about their situation. Did they migrate in a group? Did they migrate to a place where there were other migrants from their home? Did they take their own social and cultural customs with them or did they adopt new ones? Did they give their children traditional names and encourage them to speak the old language as well as the new one? Did they assimilate into the culture of their new homes, and if so how many generations did that take? (How indeed does one define assimilation?) Did they maintain connections with their homeland? If not, did they nevertheless have a sense of where they had come from and a memory of how things were there? And were they in touch with other migrants from the same homeland who migrated somewhere else entirely? In other words, diaspora is about the migrant’s sense of connectedness:
• To the homeland
• To other migrants from the homeland
• To other regions with migrants from the same homeland
• To the new home
After the actual migrations had taken place, there remained webs and networks of connections among all of these groups, and that is diaspora—an ongoing connectedness arising from a migrational event or events. Nowadays it is possible to study these matters by asking people about their experiences, or, in the
It will not be possible to give consideration to the complex matter of the Viking Age in Ireland, but see Sheehan and O Corrain 2010.
Case of people who themselves have migrated, by introspection. However, for the Viking Age, we have no facts and figures about who migrated, or when and where, and it is no longer possible to ask the people who did so about their experiences or their feelings of connectedness. The answers to these questions have to be teased out of limited evidence.
Genetic studies, despite their limitations, can helpfully point the way. Although they do not tell us much about the people living in the north-west of England and the Irish Sea region in the Viking Age, they suggest interesting questions. The most glaring question that remains unanswered by the Y-chromosome studies concerns the role of women. Did the Vikings simply pass through and leave a lot of babies behind or was there a migration of families including women and children?
World History
