No Stupid Questions

Well, it comes from Spain. Even if all your American ancestors came from Norway (which is unlikely), people in Europe have been intermixing for millennia. "Pure blooded" people don't exist.

Those DNA kits work differently than what you might expect. When they say "you're 20% German", what they mean is that you've got 20% of the genetic markers they've identified in modern people who identify as German.

This might not seem like a big difference, but it is because genetics doesn't respect political boundaries. Ancestry will not tell you that you're 60% Texan because "Texas" isn't a recognized biological origin. Even though people have been there as long as they've been in Mexico.

You also have to accept that 20th Century Germans who've participated in DNA testing is the absolute standard for what a "German" is.

Nonsense. The idea of "national DNA" is incoherent leftovers from race-theory.

who is telling you there's specific dna?

if you're talking about a ancestry dna kit, it's probably fair to say it's bunk.

"Ancestry tests" are notoriously inaccurate. But does it even matter? You don't have to base your identity on what some data harvesting company tells you, even if the results were correct.

DNA kits are a con. DNA can't show nationality and there are only 4 broad DNA variants in Europe.

Even if your entire family came from Norway it actually wouldn't be that surprising that you'd get some DNA from other cultures popping up in there somewhere. The Viking Age, which spanned several hundred years, was pretty wild. The Vikings developed a type of boat that could sail the open ocean, but still had a shallow enough draft that it could navigate most of the major networks of Europe, and which was light enough that they could be carried overland from one river to another. It was an absolutely devastating technology for the time. They could often sail up a river, sack an entire city, and be gone before the surrounding area was able to raise an army to fight them off. As you can probably imagine the Vikings got all over the damned place. They got all the way to North America to the west, and pushed into Asia and founded Russia to the east. Some sold their mercenary services to the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople and served in his Varangian Guard. They got around Europe so much and sacked so many European cities so often that at one point Europe straight up completely ran out of silver.

The Viking Age also overlapped with the Muslim expansion throughout the Mediterranean coast of Europe and North Africa. The Muslim conquest of the Iberian region of Spain, and the famous Viking raid on Lindisfarne in England only happened about 70 years apart. So the Vikings were also bumping into them as well. Most people have this idea of the Middle Ages where everyone pretty much stayed put, and nobody traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born. And while that was probably true enough for some people, lots other people moved around a ton, and there was actually quite a bit of cultural cross-pollination and trade. It's not hard to imagine that somewhere in all of that one of your Scandiwegian ancestors might have gotten a piece of some Spanish hotness.

Also, when the Vikings went raiding, they didn't just take silver, they also took slaves and brought many of them back to Scandinavia. And sometimes they had sex with those slaves. So there's also that possibility.

You don't need to be related to any Spanish or Scandinavian people to have similar markers. MyHeritage marked me with 35% DNA from the British Isles, but many people in my specific region of Germany seem to have the same. So they are just markers that are very common in some areas, but they can also appear elsewhere. Funnily enough, I have a relative with a British father and she has no British DNA markers.

They’re both seafaring Europeans and got around.

Also, the Spanish Netherlands and Norway aren’t far apart, along trading routes.

I think it's funny that dog DNA tests are more accurate than for humans. That is because someone defined a breed and then started tracking that for years. Since these breeders have almost complete control over the mating behaviour of their dogs we can define a breed. Humans are not like that. We move and mate everywhere we want

Because your mother slept with a Spaniard in Toledo

... apparently a lot of English people have at least 25% Scandinavian DNA,...

In the 9th century the Vikings invaded and occupied a huge chunk of England (mostly). They blended in with the Anglo Saxons after a while, who, btw, also originally came from Northern Europe.

A bunch of Vikings also went to set up shop in Normandy, France. That sounds very French today but when you look at it, it sounds surprisingly like "northman"-dy. These Normans also invaded England in the 11th century, stayed, and fucked around like their Viking cousins of old.

We are all blends of DNA. People moved around, also to North America. Including people from the Iberian peninsula. That's why it shouldn't be that inexplicable that you have some of their DNA in yours.

Some of your distant ancestors, from long before modern European ethnic groups formed, were of a lineage more likely to eventually end up in Spain than Scandinavia, though you inherited from the minority.

Spanish mommy and daddy