Which dovetails nicely with this blonde joke:. Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps gmail. Expert opinions matter, especially when their knowledge is continuously refined by critical analysis.
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Q: How do you get a blonde out of a tree? The highest percentages of fair-haired people can be found around the Baltic Sea e. Denmark, the Polish coast and the Baltic states , making it in effect an almost entirely blonde-bounded lake. Only the German part of the Baltic coastline is remarkably un-blonde. Iceland was settled by mainly Norwegian colonists , and Icelanders still share the same degree of blondness with the largest part of Norway.
The southern border of the fairer-haired part of Great Britain seems to correspond quite well with the southern border of the Danelaw , which was ruled and settled by the Danish in the early Middle Ages. The darkest-haired part of France seems to correspond with those areas most heavily populated by its more ancient Gallo-Roman inhabitants, lighter-haired regions possibly reflect a later influx of Celts in Brittany and a more pronounced settlement of Frankish tribes of Germanic origin in northern France and down towards Burgundy.
Maybe this explains the relative blondness of that north-west corner of Spain. The darker-haired area of Switzerland seems to correspond with the areas where Rhaeto-Roman and Italian are spoken. Romanian areas closest to the Hungarian border are equally blonde β many ethnic Hungarians live in Romania, possibly most of them closest to the border.
