It was the blood of our Varangian ancestry that gave us our sharp-edged bone structure as she called it. The Eastern Romans called them Varangians, the Vikings descending out of what was now Norway in the ninth century. It was one of these ancestors who settled in the medieval state of Kievan Rus’—a territory which was now Ukraine and part of Russia—and who became a Byzantine Varangian Guard. There, he met our ancestral foremother. When he took her by force as his wife, she had no idea she would be the first mother of a grim reaper.
