The Iranic Roots of Odinism, Elder Futhark, and the Viking Legacy

By Bobby Darvish

The ancient world was far more interconnected than modern ideologies would like to admit. A striking truth now emerging with the advancement of historical, linguistic, and genetic research is that the early Germanic peoples — including the Vikings — have significant roots in the Iranic (or Iranic-speaking) civilizations of the East. Elder Futhark, the earliest form of the runic alphabets, and Odinism itself are deeply connected to ancient Iranian mythology, language, and religious traditions.

Dr. Roy Casagranda, a respected scholar, has articulated this view plainly: the Vikings were originally from the Iranic world. He argues that long before they were seafarers of the North, the ancestors of the Norse came from the East, specifically from regions dominated by Iranian-speaking peoples such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans. These were nomadic warrior cultures known for their horseback mastery, sky-worship, and mythologies centered around powerful gods — all of which find remarkable parallels in early Germanic and Norse belief systems.

Linguistically, too, the similarities are impossible to ignore. The Elder Futhark rune system, which predates Viking Age Norse by centuries, shows structural and phonetic parallels to ancient Iranic alphabets and symbolic writing. For instance, many of the rune names, such as Ansuz (God, or spiritual power), bear close resemblance to Iranic concepts like Ahura (divine being) from the ancient Zoroastrian and Aryan traditions. Furthermore, both mythologies share a focus on a sky-father deity: Odin for the Norse and Ahura Mazda for the ancient Iranians.

Even Adolf Hitler, controversial as he is, recognized this ancestral connection. In Mein Kampf and other speeches, he asserted that the Aryan — meaning the noble, ancient Iranic-European — was the father of both Eastern and Western civilizations, and that Germanic peoples carried this bloodline into Europe. His racial theory (however misapplied politically) actually anticipated what modern genetics is now confirming: significant genetic overlap between Iranian steppe tribes and Northern European populations, particularly the early Germanic tribes.

Genetic science has recently corroborated these connections through Y-DNA haplogroup studies and ancient genome projects. Research on the Eurasian steppes reveals that the Yamnaya culture, often credited with the Indo-European expansion, carried haplogroups that are now common in both Iranian and Northern European populations. Ancient DNA from Viking burial sites also shows significant traces of steppe ancestry — the same origin point for early Iranian nomadic peoples.

Persian historical sources also echo this narrative. The Shahnameh ("The Book of Kings") by Ferdowsi describes the Iranian people as great wanderers, conquerors, and settlers, many of whom moved Westward into Europe in ancient times. Similarly, Germanic legends preserve myths of a far eastern homeland (Ásaland) where their gods and ancestors once lived before migrating to Scandinavia — an account astonishingly similar to Iranian and Scythian migration legends.

Thus, from Persian epic poetry to Viking sagas, from linguistic patterns to genetic evidence, the truth becomes clear: the Vikings were not isolated islanders but descendants of Iranic warrior civilizations who migrated and adapted to new lands, carrying with them the seeds of what would become Norse mythology, Elder Futhark runes, and the fierce spirit of Odinism. The old wisdom of historians — and even the controversial statements made by Hitler about Aryan ancestry — are now finding validation in the cold, hard evidence of modern science.

As history, language, and DNA converge, they tell one story:
The East birthed the West, and the blood of Iranian nomads still roars in the veins of the sons of Odin.

---

Citations:

• Casagranda, Roy. The Iranian Origins of the Norse: A Historical and Mythological Analysis. Public Lecture Series, Austin Community College, 2023.

• Mallory, J.P., and Douglas Q. Adams. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Oxford University Press, 2006.

• Kristiansen, Kristian, and Thomas B. Larsson. The Rise of Bronze Age Society: Travels, Transmissions and Transformations. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

• Unterländer, Martina, et al. "Ancestry and demography and descendants of Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian Steppe." Nature Communications 8.1 (2017): 14615. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14615

• Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated by Ralph Manheim, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943.

• Ferdowsi. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Translated by Dick Davis, Penguin Classics, 2007.

• Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda. Translated by Jesse Byock, Penguin Classics, 2005.

• Damgaard, Peter de Barros, et al. "137 ancient human genomes from across the Eurasian steppes." Nature 557.7705 (2018): 369-374. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0094-2