Many Icelanders of British origin

Most Icelanders are a homogeneous mixture of Nordic and Celtic people. This has been known in Iceland for a long time as the Icelandic Sagas explain how large part of the country's settlers came from the British Isles. As a consequence Icelanders have for generations referred to the Irish people as their cousins as in the case of the Faroese, the Norwegians, the Danes and the Swedes.

Ongoing DNA research by the genetics firm deCODE in cooperation with Oxford University has shed further light on the British origins of Icelanders suggesting that 63 percent of female settlers of Iceland more than one thousand years ago were Celtic and had ancestral lines which could be traced to the British Isles, based on the present day population of the country. The same goes for about 20 percent of the male settlers. The research has concentrated on genetic mitochondria inherited solely in the female line, from mother to child, and on Y-chromosomes inherited through the male line.

Recently an e-book was published in the United Kingdom called The Iceland Bus by Ed Conduit and Jean Scott-Smith suggesting that present day Icelanders are descendants of ancient women from Cumbria in northern England. "Genetic research shows that the mitochondrial DNA of Icelanders, which comes exclusively down the female line, is overwhelmingly British," Conduit was quoted saying on Friday in an interview with The Westmorland Gazette. He says Nordic men took Cumbric wives and brought them to Iceland suggesting that rather than resisting them some of the women may have preferred Nordic husbands to Anglo-Saxon ones.