Is that a Viking surname?

Between the ages of twelve and eighteen I find myself in a boarding school in the small market town of Pocklington in East Yorkshire. I’m at the epicentre of the Viking incursion into Britain – fourteen miles from York, or ‘Jorvik’ as we call it, the Viking capital. So many place names of nearby villages are Viking in origin – Kexby, Foggathorpe, Bubwith, Cawkeld, Wilberfoss, Wetwang. I’m not making these up.

I study medieval history for A-level at school. For the first year it concentrates almost exclusively on Vikings, and the Danelaw. It’s full of great names like Ivar the Boneless and Erik Bloodaxe, not to mention that great typing error who becomes King of a United England, King Cnut, and his somehow even funnier son, King Harthacnut – try it in a Cockney accent, turning the th into an f. Half-a-cnut.

Me and my classmates love the Vikings – not only do they seem very good at fighting but they have great-looking boats, cool weapons and nifty hats with horns. Modern archaeologists are keen to debunk this idea, but it’s such an iconic one that I’m prepared to hang on until some future archaeologist debunks the debunkers.

They also have berserkers, an elite fighting corps who are off their tits on henbane – a hallucinogenic drug – and large quantities of alcohol. This makes them fight with a furious and senseless abandon which is still evident in many Scandinavian heavy metal bands to this day.

The etymology of the word ‘berserk’ is disputed. Some think it means bear-shirted (wearing a shirt made of bearskin), others think it means bare-shirted (naked) like one of those big-bellied Leeds United supporters in the Lurpak stand. In Norse sagas they’re often described as so wild-eyed and frenzied that they bite into their shields. The rook from the Lewis chess set depicts such a fellow.

My school is eight miles from the site of the battle of Stamford Bridge, where the last English king, Harold Godwinson, finally saw off the last of the Vikings, Harold Hardrada. One Sunday afternoon I cycle there to look at the battlefield. I’m singing ‘See My Baby Jive’ by Wizzard as I pootle along the gloriously named Hatkill Lane between Fangfoss and Full Sutton. I’m not wearing a hat, so I figure I’m safe.

Once I get to Stamford Bridge I find the original bridge disappeared centuries ago and there are no archaeological remains of the battlefield at all. There’s an uninspiring monument in the village, but no buildings older than 1591, so you have to conjure up everything yourself. There weren’t even any embroiderers from Bayeux, like there were at Hastings three weeks later, to quickly stitch down the salient details. The current thinking is that the bridge crossed from the present-day caravan park on the west bank to the Co-op on the east bank.

But whose side are you on? Are you a Viking or an Anglo-Saxon?

That’s what I’d like to know.

Edmondson is a patronymic name – the father’s name with ‘son’ added. In Scotland the patronymic is ‘Mac’ or ‘Mc’; in Ireland it’s ‘O’. . .’; in Wales it’s ‘Ap’ usually contracted to a simple ‘P’ in names like Price and Prichard. But the ‘son’ patronymic, whilst in use in England, is more particularly associated with Scandinavia.

As a young schoolboy historian this gives me the idea that I am in fact Scandinavian.

I join the school Local History Society and get a closer understanding of the waves of Viking invasion and settlement – their origins, their destinations, their movements – and conclude that I am, more precisely, Norwegian. It’s a harmless fantasy, but it takes hold of me. Forever after when anyone asks me about my family history I say, ‘I’m originally Norwegian – I came over with the Vikings.’

By the time I have children old enough to be interested in genealogy I tell them the same story: ‘Yes, we’re definitely Vikings. Norwegians to be precise.’

It’s not a lie as such. It’s based on circumstantial evidence. No one would like to be convicted for murder on circumstantial evidence, but in terms of carving out an identity for yourself it’s fairly harmless.

As an adult I visit Sweden and Iceland and discover something truly brilliant. Although I had white-blond hair as a child, what’s left of it is now a fairly dull fairish/brown, and I find that only a few Scandinavians look like Ulrika Jonsson: there’s a more common, much uglier underclass, that look like they’re descended from trolls – these people look like me!

My birthday is in January, and one year my lovely wife Jennifer organizes a trip to my homeland Norway as a birthday surprise. It’s an odd time to go on holiday to Scandinavia unless you’re going skiing. We fail to see the Northern Lights in Tromsø because it’s just snowing all the time. We shiver around Bergen looking at the port and the fish market, which is mostly closed because it’s the middle of winter. We get the train from Bergen to Oslo across the mountains, where the visibility is so bad it’s like a scene from that Kirk Douglas war film Heroes of Telemark.

The person sitting opposite us, a Norwegian, studies us for a while and eventually asks what we’re doing on the Bergen–Oslo train in the off season. I tell him I have this bee in my bonnet that I’m of Norwegian heritage.

‘What’s your name?’ he asks.

‘Edmondson,’ I reply.

‘No!’ he shouts, rather too angrily for comfort. ‘You’re not Norwegian! You’re Danish!’

It’s only later that I find that the Norwegians have always felt bullied by the other Scandinavian countries, and have a particular antipathy towards the Danes. So perhaps he was angry with them rather than with me in particular. Still, if he was angry with me it meant he thought I was Danish? He thought I was Scandinavian, right? I mean, talk about hearing it from the horse’s mouth.

Eventually, of course, with the growth of the internet and data banks full of old birth, death and marriage certificates, the genealogy craze kicks off big time. In the late nineties my niece Clare does her family history as a project at school. She gets back as far as the generation before my grandparents before she leaves school to go to university (and get a social life).

But my sister takes up the study and delves back further. It becomes a minor obsession. Then a fairly major one. She visits gravestones in Yorkshire, Suffolk and Devon and discovers that somewhere along the line some bloke changed the spelling of our surname from Edmonson to Edmondson for no apparent reason.

FOR NO APPARENT REASON!

Perhaps he just spelled it wrongly.

An Edmondson spelling his own name wrongly!

Dad is already slipping into dementia by the time Hilary uncovers this, which is a blessing, because one thing that really got his goat was people missing out the second ‘d’ when writing our name. He successfully passed this splenetic fury on to us and it used to bother me a lot until I learned that there are only six existing documents on which William Shakespeare wrote his name, and that he spelled it differently on each one. There are eighty different spellings of his name from contemporaneous sources, ranging from Shappere to Shaxberd. I told Dad. He wasn’t impressed.

I don’t care. Edmondson, Edmonson, Edmundson, Edmunson, Evanson, Evinson, Amundson, Saunders . . . I’ve had them all.

Perhaps Dad was feeling residual anger at the comparative feebleness of his name, Fred Edmondson, and was keen to protect every letter he had.

He’d had apoplectic fits when as a teacher at Tong Comprehensive in Bradford pupils would elide the two words Mister and Edmondson, and he would be addressed as Mr Redmonson.

‘Blood and stomach pills!’, as Dad would say.

But are the Redmonsons Danish or Norwegian?

By the 2010s DNA tests become ever cheaper, more sophisticated and supposedly more accurate. Eventually I spit into a small plastic tube, send it off, and sit back to await the results. I’m 90% certain that my results will show strong Scandinavian heritage. Most probably Danish with a hint of Norwegian.

The results come back. They are very disappointing. I am overwhelmingly British. I am 72% ‘British’. ‘Europe West’, an alarmingly nebulous group to be in, comes in second with 16%. Then trailing in third place, in the bronze medal position, is ‘Scandinavia’ at a miserable 10%. Further analysis says I’m most probably from Yorkshire and the Pennines, with a possible connection to Devon and the South West.

It takes a while for me to process the disappointment and cancel my application for a Danish passport. But I eventually turn it into a vague positive – at least the idea I have of myself made the podium, I am partly Scandinavian, I have some Viking blood in me.

Through her grandparents’ heritage Jennifer is confident she’s three-quarters English, and a quarter Scottish. But she turns out to be only 9% British (most of which is Scottish). She is 38% Irish, and – get this – 37% Scandinavian! She also has other odds and sods in her report, including 5% Italy/Greece, 2% Finland/Northwest Russia, and 2% South Asian.

But although she is such a mongrel she is still almost four times more Scandinavian than me.

At least our children are pleased, the idea that they have some Viking blood in them – the idea I’ve been selling them all these years as their birthright – is corroborated on their mother’s side. And at least I’m married to a Viking. I’m half hoping she’ll drag me off by what’s left of my hair and pillage me.

Some years later I uncover more research about the name Edmondson and its geographical spread. Someone has researched all the Edmondsons that ever existed in Great Britain. Turns out 98 per cent of them were from the West Riding of Yorkshire. Not only am I not an adventurous Viking setting off bravely in my longboat for lands unknown – Britain, Normandy, Sicily, Greenland, the Black Sea, Constantinople – I’ve barely made it out of my own front door.

For balance, it’s worth pointing out that my brother Alastair sends off a sample to a different DNA testing company and they tell him he has a lot of Native American in him. So, either my mum was playing the field in a way that we never knew, and that I frankly find quite impressive, or we have to take these test results with a pinch of salt.

Or with a pinch of salted liquorice as they might say in Finland. Though this is perhaps a clue to the amount of Scandinavian blood in me, because salmiakki is one of the very few things on this earth that I find truly disgusting and impossible to eat. The same can be said for the Icelandic delicacy hákarl – a fermented shark dish. A common misconception is that they dig a hole in gravelly sand, put the shark in, piss on it, fill in the hole and come back a year later when it has rotted. In fact, the Greenland shark doesn’t have a urinary system so releases urea through its own flesh. It smells of urine even if you don’t piss on it. Either way, it’s not my cup of tea.

And yet – isn’t there something of the berserker in my character Vyvyan Basterd from The Young Ones? And Sir Adrian Dangerous from the Dangerous Brothers? And Eddie Hitler from Bottom?

The dictionary defines ‘berserk’ as: out of control with anger or excitement; wild or frenzied. A ‘berserker’ is: an ancient Norse warrior frenzied in battle and held to be invulnerable; one whose actions are recklessly defiant.

This seems to describe a lot of what I am and a lot of what I go on to do. For a child brought up in the Mission where does this seemingly inherent anger, frenzy and defiance come from?