
Icelandic fiction: a family affair - signor_bosco
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/iceland-fiction-ethics-cultural-life/
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dahart
> I spent the rest of the day running around Reykjavík, repeating what I had
> learned. Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir was my twenty-seventh generation ancestor. I
> was as good as Icelandic royalty. It wasn’t until late that evening that a
> friend explained that, well, _everyone_ was. In a nation of 350,000 people,
> if your lineage remains unbroken from the tenth century, you are the
> ancestor of everyone.

I'm sure it's magnified in Iceland, but this is true in other countries and
globally. When I traced my lineage back to Charlemange, I had a similar
moment, telling a bunch of people at work because I thought it was
interesting. As soon as the French guys heard it, they laughed and explained
that the big joke in France is everyone's related to Charlemange.

After that, I realized it's actually plausible that everyone is related to
Charlemagne. Moving backwards in time, we each have two parents.
Conservatively assuming a generation is 30 years, Charlemagne was 40
generations ago. The theoretical maximum number of ancestors I have 40
generations ago is 2^40, or in other words, more people than have ever lived
on the planet by many multiples. On the surface, and assuming a reasonable
amount of mixing, that seems like it would make it extremely likely than
anyone with any European ancestry is related to Charlemagne.

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jschwartzi
To be fair, at this point of removal the amount of DNA you share with
Charlemagne is likely to be similar to the amount of silver nitrate in a
homeopathic remedy.

~~~
dahart
Yeah exactly, if there's any left at all. Since DNA's finite and has fewer
than 2^40 base pairs, any one person's direct DNA influence is likely to have
been factored out completely.

Fun to think about the probabilities and combinatorics though. There are 2^40
"votes" in our ancestry for the time Charlemagne lived. Depending on how
"prolific" he was, all the population crossover since then means he will
occupy many of those 2^40 votes. Some people have a lot more influence than
others, but it's nearly impossible to know.

~~~
peter303
Its smaller than that if count just the 21K coding proteins, two copies from
both parents. If perfectly mixed you start losing ancestor contributions as
soon as 16 generations or 400 years. But meiosis- the halving of DNA during
creation of eggs and sperm- is not perfectly random, but chunky. So ancestor
dropout occurs sooner.(It is hypothesized much of the other 98% of the genome
has some sort of genetic influence too.)

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kickscondor
It's good to see more mention of Halldor Laxness. His books are always
pleasant - and often profound. A good starting place is The Fish Can Sing,
which has the benefit of also being a shorter novel of his.

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fapjacks
This is very interesting and sort of tangential to something I'd realized
after I married a Scandinavian woman: If you want to get famous doing some
thing, you haven't a shot in hell in a country with three hundred million
people like the United States. But for example Sweden. Sweden has only _nine
million_ citizens, and more than ten percent of them live in Stockholm! This
is such a relatively tiny audience. I imagined that anything you wanted to do:
Write a book, sing a song, make a movie, open a restaurant, become a
politician, play a sport, anything! It would be easier to attain status as
noteworthy in a country with two orders of magnitude fewer people that all
speak their own language, have their own culture, their own rules. I'm still
convinced that this is the case, and I'd love the chance to test it someday.

Of course, please excuse my broad generalities and extreme oversimplification.
But for example, most (non-Swedish) people don't know how much of Western
culture is currently driven by Swedes. You go look at famous pop culture
musicians and count how many of them are actually Swedes. You'll be surprised.
Now, I haven't studied the rest of popular culture to know whether or not
there is an equal amount of representation from other places e.g. Norway,
Poland, etc. But it makes me wonder if these musicians -- every one of whom of
course are as talented as can be -- if they are getting more international
recognition because they have recognition in their own homeland? Or does
Sweden produce musicians more appealing to Western popular culture? I'm not
sure. So many questions, so many thoughts! One example of this type of idea
that I've heard about in recent years is some woman from a wealthy family who
did some kind of esoteric series of competitions -- skiing, I think? -- and
was able to compete in the Olympics because of the lack of competitors for a
slot in the team of a particular country. She was able to compete after
winning a slot by default. This is sort of asymptotic to what I'm talking
about, but not quite there. This is just a super-fascinating thing for me.

~~~
kqr
> But it makes me wonder if these musicians -- every one of whom of course are
> as talented as can be -- if they are getting more international recognition
> because they have recognition in their own homeland? Or does Sweden produce
> musicians more appealing to Western popular culture?

As far as I know, the working hypothesis is that Sweden's extensive social
safety net (unemployment benefits,low-cost health care, fair insurance deals,
so on and so forth) allows people to feel more secure in trying out things
that may not become very profitable.

~~~
fapjacks
Oh, now that's an interesting proposition! I hadn't considered that, but it
seems logically sound. Housing however is still a big issue in Sweden, not
only with rent but with waiting lists in metropolitan areas, so it's still not
completely safe to throw all caution to the wind.

