The circumstances and fate of people of British-Irish ancestry who arrived in Scandinavia at this time are likely to have been variable, ranging from the forced migration of slaves to the voluntary immigration of more high-ranking individuals such as Christian missionaries and monks.
OK, although the monks should have been celibate, so their influence on the population's genetics ought not to have been great.
I have long reflected on the fact that the Norse sagas don't really mention Irish female slaves in great numbers -- in fact I can't think of even one example -- but they must have been pretty thick on the ground if they made up half the genetic heritage for a while. The sagas weren't written down until much later, and tend to be about high-status families or individuals, but still you'd think they'd come up.
Now there's a parallel discussion as to whether the Jews were ever slaves in Egypt, with some reform Jews arguing that the traditions are falsified because the only evidence for them is Biblical. However, the historic evidence for Jewish slaves in Egypt is much stronger than the evidence for female Irish slaves in Iceland; and there were very clearly a lot of Irish slave-women in Iceland. Maybe the Egyptians were no more interested in documenting their slaves' activities than were the Vikings, and the Irish women less literate and capable of documenting it themselves.
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One thing I'll toss into the discussion just for fun is that I seem to recall that there were some scholars interested in Njal's Saga who suggested that Njal was a Celtic name "Neil" and that his being beardless was a matter of being clean shaven in accord with Irish fashion. If so, this might explain why he spy Iceland adapting Christianity Perhaps there were a few Irish and Scots who found occasion to throw in their lot with the Vikings for one reason or another? o_O
I read this new research in a couple of other places. It's not a very clean narrative, likely owing to the fact that they started studying a few things separately and then combined them when the genomes started telling related stories. I have a personal interest because my mtDNA (U3) is from south-central Sweden and is unusual enough that it should not be there. It is supposed to be originally Iranian or Berber. The exception is that it is known in Lithuanian and Polish Roma women, so seeing the Baltic influx into that area might be related to my own ancestry. I have no traceable Roma DNA, but that is at least plausible. We'll know eventually as our knowledge base improves, but no one in the family but me cares at this point.
WRT the female Irish slaves, the status of their children was probably diminished for a couple of generations so no one would brag on that and there wouldn't be record. Then people might not be even remembering it much, just vague "status." Some kind of taint, enough to reduce marriage into the more prosperous families, might have hung on for a few generations after that. If your group is averaging three surviving children for 120 years while the norm is five, that adds up. Or doesn't add up, actually - it subtracts out, though quietly. That's my guess, anyway.
@AVI: I am reminded of the surprise suffered by academics when the site of the Trojan war was found, and specific types of helmets and other artifacts clearly described in the Iliad were recovered by archaeologists. There the scholars had long assumed that the old mythic stories had no real basis, but they turned out to preserve intimate details.
Here we have clear evidence in one case of an important detail being lost; in the Biblical case, it’s still not clear which way it will fall out.
It's interesting that, in the sagas, there are a couple instances (Gudrid the Far-Traveled and Olaf Peacock come to mind) where it's mentioned that characters are the children of slave women. But then the sagas go on to point out that those slave women were the daughters of kings and very much above the normal run of slaves.
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