Sounds rather far-fetched. “Viking” only started getting used as an ethonym in the 19th century. In the sagas it it only used in the meaning of raider, pirate or outlaw. The etymology of “vik” (bay) is much more plausible.

No, vikingr is an old norse word meaning pirate, raider, or outlaw. Not everyone in the Nordics were vikings, just like not ever American were a cowboy.

Do we have any historical source of people referring to themselves as vikings?

No, because they did not. Title is correct, it was a job not a tribe

If you are referring to the “Vikings”-show, you should be aware it is fiction and the roles sadly are played by professional actors, not genuine vikings.

Look at that user's handle please.

The article is just really confused in its terminology. But historically, vikingr meant raider or pirate. It was only hereditary in the sense it might be a family tradition to go viking. But if you dont go raiding you are not a vikingr whatever your ancestry.

Yeah, and the Norse also called non-norse raiders Vikings. It was just a word meaning raider or pirate.

Don’t take “job” literally. It wasn’t centralized in any way. It just meant if you had the resources you could build a ship, hire some henchmen, and go raiding. It is not surprising Swedes went East, Nowegians Northwest etc - just look at a map.

The title is rather confused, because DNA cannot show how people understood a certain word. Historical sources like the sagas show how the word was understood.

Shakespeare tended to re-use existing stories or plays. As the article mentions, there are only two of his plays (out of almost 40) where we don’t know of a pre-existing source. Of course it is possible he made the story up himself after getting inspired by a drawing, buy I find it a lot more plausible he based it on another story or play which just happens to be lost (which is the case for many plays of the age).

Yeah, that's a very fair point, and the biggest strike against this theory.

It is kind of incredible that the man considered to be the best playwright and author in the English language basically just copied existing stories. On the other hand, the firsts were often groundbreaking and influential, but their actual works aren't that good compared to what came after.

He didn’t just copy the stories. He retold them with his own language and poetry and characterization, which is what he is celebrated for. Often his changes completely reframes the original story - but the basic storyline and the names of the characters remain the same.

Maybe best, but suerly not most influential.

I guess it depends on people’s priorities. He won that Nobel for some stuff he did in office, but probably more for his peacemaking efforts, afterwards.

I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.

The fundamental problem is XML was designed for textual markup formats but ended up getting used mostly for structured data. Many of the features like element/attribute distinction and mixed content is necessary for markup but unnecessary complexity for structured data.

JSON is perhaps an accident of history rather than deliberately designed, but for structured data interchange it is better because it is simpler.

Just like XML, JSON os getting used outside of its area. Using JSON for configuration files is absurd, since it doesn’t allow comments.