Cymbri, Cimbri:

Cymbri, Cimbri:

Descendants

The population of modern-day Himmerland claims to be the heirs of the ancient Cimbri. The adventures of the Cimbri are described by the Danish nobel-prize-winning author, Johannes V. Jensen, himself born in Himmerland, in the novel Cimbrernes Tog (1922), included in the cycle Den lange Rejse (Eng. The Long Journey, 1923). The so-called Cimbrian bull ("Cimbrertyren"), a sculpture made by the artist Anders Bundgaard, was erected 14 April 1937 on a central town square in Aalborg, the capital of the province.

In Northern Italy, a Germanic language traditionally called Cimbrian is spoken in some villages near the cities of Verona and Vicenza. Since the 14th century, it was believed that the speakers were the direct descendants of the Cimbrians defeated at Vercelli (some hundred kilometers to the west). However, this is most certainly not true.[14] The language is in fact related to the Austro-Bavarian dialects of German like many other Upper German dialects in Northern Italy, it is only more isolated and therefore less recognizable as German. The name was either indigenous (from Zimmer = "timber"?) or given to them by Italian humanists who wanted to find this "living fossil" of antiquity.

The Danish Vikings (and possibly some Jutes who arrived in Kent, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight circa 449 AD) who settled in the English Danelaw doubtless included Cimbri descendants from the Limfjord in Himmerland. In addition to providing detailed archaeological, historical and linguistic data to provide a chronological perspective relating to the Cimbri and their associates the Teutones, a recent study [2] focuses on genetic data. The Y-chromosome "signatures" of some from the Danish speaking area of the Danelaw (but not elsewhere in England or in Ireland at all), as well as regions believed to be settled by the Cimbri in Iron Age times (e.g., southeastern Norway), possess the single nucleotide polymorphism marker S28. This marker, which defines the phylogenetic category R1b1c10 is found at highest concentration in the Alpine areas of Germany, Switzerland and Italy and fans out across the area of Central Europe, as far east as Greece, known to have been inhabited by the La Tene Celts.