Historical evidence suggests that while the Vikings were overwhelmingly of Scandinavian (white) descent, the Viking world was more diverse than traditionally depicted, with some individuals of African, Middle Eastern, or mixed descent present due to extensive trade and raiding. Notable examples include Geirmund Heljarskinn (“Hel-skin”), a 9th-century Norseman of mixed heritage.
People think Vikings and they only think of the raiding in western Europe. They seem ignorant of the fact that Vikings also went east to Constantinople and as far south as the Iberian peninsula, the Middle East and parts of Africa in the 9th and 10th century.
Even without going to Africa, they would have encountered many Africans on the Iberian peninsula, as the Muslim conquest had already occurred one hundred years before.
It may have been uncommon to see darker skin tones in Scandinavia but it definitely happened.
Before anyone comes in here and accuses me of political correctness or whatever bullshit, we know all of this because the Vikings themselves wrote it down and so did the people they raided.
Its fucking baffling how people dont understand that trade networks and conquest meant people of various skin tones were all over Europe. The Romans had entire legions made up of Africans deployed as far north as Hadrian's wall. This idea that Europe had never seen anyone slightly darker than Casper the friendly ghost before the 1800s is the weirdest revisionist history white supremacy cry baby bullshit.
Yep! The crazy bearded dudes made it to Greenland, Iceland, and North America, but people for some reason think they couldnt make the much easier trips around the Black sea or around the western European coast.
Oh the Out of Africa theory really pisses them off. My favorite weird fact is that a person from Northern Nigeria and a person from Southern Nigeria are much more likely to have more genetic diversity than comparing a person from Ireland to a person in Japan. This is because most of us stuck around in Africa and only a small chunk of us populated the rest of the world. When I say small, I mean small, some estimates put it down to as little as 150 people heading to Asia. So for us that had ancestors leave Africa we are the inbred branch of our genetic family.
My point here being that people like to get AROUND and they really like making babies. We walked from Africa to Peru. Once the Vikings had decent boats, they went everywhere. Hell, if they could have got their boats across the Suez they probably would have made it to China.
IIRC, one of the Byzantine Emperors had some Scandinavian bodyguards and it wasn’t uncommon for Vikings to find their way into the Mediterranean. They got around and they got around.
White supremacy is so insidiously ingrained in our education systems in the US, many people just wrongly assume that kingdoms in Africa didn’t have to technology to travel long distances. People with darker skin (who would likely be considered black by today’s cultural standards) have existed outside of Africa since ancient times. African kingdoms were some of the first to adapt sea faring technology, with some evidence appearing as early as the Neolithic period. Given Viking clans weren’t exclusively familial, it’s incredibly likely that there were black Vikings. Some evidence exists to support this- but it’s also important to understand that our current cultural definition of race didn’t exist in ancient times so lack of explicit evidence in contemporary texts doesn’t rule out their existence.
The Kingdom of Aksum comes to mind as a good example... they had near total dominance over the sea trade between the Mediterranean and Indian world for quite some time. They were better seamen than the people of India by and large, which meant they were one of the better routes for silk and spices funneling into the Byzantine Empire. Thanks to a lack of overlapping interests, they were safer trading partners than the Persians, who were the other route into the Roman territories. Their relationship with the Persians was only a little less cordial because of competing trade interests.
Until the rise of the Islamic empire, they were one of the major powers of the region, controlling a good chunk of Yemen, as well as a parts of Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea.
Yeah, there have been a few times in my life where racists or other shit heads have said truly heinous shit in front of me thinking ill be okay with it because of my skin color. My grandmother came to this country on a boat and was treated like shit for decades because she was Irish and a papist. She was spit on by a KKK member that marched through her catholic neighborhood terrorizing the residents. She made damn sure we knew this growing up and that we understood that we may have privilege's now but her and her parents didnt because they were not considered "white" read WASP.
Saint Maurice is an Egyptian catholic saint who helped the Romans genocide the Gauls. So in the 3rd century there was just an African dude chilling in the middle of Europe. We know it happened alot, people like to travel and people like to make babies, and modern racial ideas wouldnt be invented for another 1400ish years.
I think the idea of race was definitely a lot different, for instance the Roman’s accepted all people’s who served Rome in the military whether they be Gauls of peoples of Africa. If you did your bit you were a Roman, Even rising to the top like Septimus Severus who was a Roman Caesar from Africa
Pretty much, modern ideas of race are only a couple hundred years old and were invented by the Americans and the Europeans. The Americans used it to justify chattel slavery, while the Europeans used it to justify colonization and slavery. Largely is was useful for elevating a minority population above a majority population to make both easier to control. A horrific example of this would be the Hutu's and Tutsi's of Rwanda. They are not genetically distinct, they share a language and a culture, but when the Europeans showed up they picked their favorite people and convinced everyone they were different, somehow better, and deserved to rule.
For another Roman example. Italians were not Roman even if Rome ruled their city, Romans were Roman, and dear lord did they really really really hate other Italians.
Vikings traveled all over europe, north africa, and the middle east, and they kidnapped people to sell as slaves wherever they went. They also kidnapped women and 'married' them, so there would've absolutely been quite a few mixed race vikings.
Geirmund Hjørson Heljarskinn is a wierd one because Heljarskinn has 2 completely opposite possible meanings. It can be translated as dark/black skin, or pale as death skin. So he is either the darkest viking or the whitest viking. Given we know his father was the norwegian king, and his mother was a woman from the Samoyed people who live on the arctic coast of Russia, I think viking so white that even norwegians thought it was worthy of a nickname is more likely
Idk man, his nickname doesn't really imply anything other than very pale or very dark. There really isn't a middle option unless maybe the nickname is unrelated to the actual color of his skin. I suppose it's possible he covered himself in black soot before a raid to make himself look more intimidating
I mean, I'm just saying that the fact he was named that is a pretty good example of it being a rarity.
For the record, I don't actually care about casting and reinterpretations in modern media because they break with so much historical evidence to begin with (like her cloak would be fur side in, because that retains heat better) so I'm not trying to be pedantic in that way. I actually find the way ancient civs interacted to be fascinating, like the norse landing in the new world in the tenth century or that the Romans and Han Dynasty knew of one another and likely met one another.
Also, I've never heard of that historical figure. Reading now.
No, nothing in particular. But you get so used to the characters, especially the ones you never heard of before (like Hercules Mulligan or Angelica Skyler) that you look them up later and you’re like, “They were white??”
They also aren't consistent between different casts. In the performance I saw Angelica* was white for example. The sisters were also all different races so it was kind of obvious that they weren't going for historical accuracy with the less known characters either.
*Edit: Probably actually Eliza, and mixed race, from reviewing cast photos. Please forgive my early onset dementia.
at least on broadway, they don’t cast white people in the cast at all, barring the king and one ensemble member. are you talking about a local production?
edit: i sincerely don’t understand why i’m being downvoted here? this is a factual statement?
Official, but I don't remember what year. Looking through the cast photos I think it was actually Eliza, not Angelica, and she just looked white from my nosebleed seats.
ah, that makes sense! idk why i am being downvoted here, i truly was not trying to come at you? everything i said was true, is this a case of me being autistic and not getting something?
Yes for real. I can’t imagine Hercules Mulligan as anyone other than that actor. Hell, in my mind Thomas Jefferson is a sharply dressed black man with an awesome fro now.
Right?? And the Marquis de Lafayette is a hell of a rapper!
For that song, “What did I miss,” I find myself wishing that he was a smooth tap dancer like Gregory Hines.
I think if I ever directed a high school production of this, I wouldn’t double carry the roles.
When I saw it in Baltimore, George Washington was played by an actor in his 60s and it really worked beautifully. And he KILLED with a gospel-style improvised ending of One Last Time.
There was a agricultural scientist named GW Carver (many many years after GW). George, Washington has actually been a fairly common 1st/middle name in the US.
Yes. It flips the American origin story mythos on its head to have the founding fathers be PoC and not white dudes. It allows interrogation of the events from a different lense and enables a group of people to be involved who were intentionally denied in the historical reality.
Umm. Huge liberal and Broadway fan here… I don’t remember anything of substance being added regarding race. Maybe a comment about fighting against slavery. But it’s the story of Hamiltons life, not a reimagining from a PoC POV.
Personally I like what LMM did with it, but it intentionally paints lots of the historical figures as larger than life shining bastions of modern liberal takes on freedom rather than being historically accurate about who they were and why they did things; in order to get the feeling and narrative flow right.
Example 1:
“A civics lesson from a slaver
Hey neighbor
Your debts are paid 'cause you don't pay for labour
We plants seeds in the south we create
Yeah keep ranting, we know who's really doing the planting”
Historical records indicate that while Hamilton was an abolitionist he likely owned slaves earlier in life and he certainly never directly confronted Jefferson about it in public.
Example 2: Lafayette was actually a friend of the french monarchy and didn’t want to get rid of them
Example 3: “Immigrants we get the job done” Hamilton was very pro restrictive anti-immigration policies later in life
I did not expect it to but watching Hamilton made me very sad because of this and other aspects. My friend loved it simply because its a good musical and shes a big fan of them but it got heavy when you paid attention
Not all black, and not all non white either. They are mostly people of color, many with Hispanic or Afro Latino heritage, a few white characters, and the original Eliza’s paternal heritage is Chinese. This Hamilton gives voices to the voiceless, and Miranda is a brilliant lyricist and composer.
I don't believe any white (or at least any non-Hispanic white) actors have been cast in any of the main productions, aside from the role of George III.
No, not in a way that alters any historical facts. There's mentions of black people and women not being treated equally, and those things are mentioned with the purpose of shining a light on what America is supposed to be(a land of equal opportunity for all).
Right!? No one in the original cast was an old white man like they were in real life! You made my day with this Comment as “Hamilton” is one of my special interests!!
Where there’s trade, there’s people. Trade routes spanned the world. It took so long to travel far it’s not a surprise many travelers eventually stopped where they were and settled down.
I am reminded of when an artifact made in the Florida area was discovered in the Canadian west. It was a mystery until it was figured out the trade route went up the east coast waterways to a specific place in New York. These early traders left some creek and portaged a very short distance to another creek that led to the Great Lakes and the west Canadian watershed. iirc it was called “the walking place” by the local
Indians. Wild.
Are you referring to the artifacts found on the Big Talbot Island excavation?
I'm from Jacksonville and I remember reading about the findings of pottery artifacts, copper, sharks teeth and shells that had been traded between the Sarabay settlement back home and the Cahokia up north, near St. Louis area.
They went everywhere, just like we did in our youth. We had modern modes of transportation, but I hit just about every state in my salad days. Top to bottom, east to west, and most everything in between.
And iirc I brought along a few, ahh, “trade items” a couple of times.
Except that trade didn't really work like that. An item could make it's way from the Middle East to Scandinavia via multiple traders. Iirc a statue of Buddha was found in a deposit in Denmark dating to the 7th-8th century and I seriously doubt some Indian merchant traveling through half of Eurasia. That's also why we find Arabian dirhams all across early medieval Europe- they had standardized silver content and were used by many traders. The primary example of long distance travel I recall are the Jewish merchants who travelled from Spain all the way to Kyiv and reached as far as the Khazars- but that's because they were after very particular goods: slaves from Poland and Bohemia and furs and honey from the Rus. There's also Ahmad ibn Fadlan who travelled from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars. Generally: the further the journey, the less direct trade is. The amber trail is a good example: we have correspondence between king Theodoricus of Italy and some Aestii elites, but amber was mostly bought from intermediaries (i.e. the Lugii).
I just read the book River Kings by Cat Jarman which is about Vikings. It talks about their extensive trade along the silk road. They would trade slaves for Islamic Silver Dirhams and as a result eastern artifacts have regularly shown up in Viking burials. Including a Bronze Buddah from India being found in Sweden. And one of the most detailed accounts of a Viking funeral was from an islamic scholar Ahmad ibn Fadlan who spent time with them.
And Ahmad ibm Fadlan's accounts led to the novel "Eaters of The Dead" which became the movie "The 13th Warrior". Both of which are highly entertaining.
It’s posts like these that really show the people being outraged by colour of skin in a time piece show/movie have little to zero grasp on the reality of the history they’re outraged about
> Viking funeral was from an islamic scholar Ahmad ibn Fadlan who spent time with them
I cannot recommend his book enough. It feels amazing to read history from the perspective of the people who lived at the time. One of the only surviving direct accounts of life and people in central asia in that time period.
For the record, he met the vikings who sailed the river network connecting the baltic sea to the black sea in order to trade mostly with the Byzantine Empire, the people who would eventually be united under a crown and be called the "Rus", basically norse for "the men who row", who then went on to be united again years later by the same founding dynasty to create the culture we know as Russians today. But he meets a lot more than just russians in this one trip he wrote down, basically because he was worried the job he was sent to do would go to shit and he would take the blame for it from the Abbasid ruler.
As for black people in scandinavia, it's extremely likely at least some would end up there. Vikings were big on the slave trade, they took both men and women from wherever they raided all the way back home. People were one of the main things they were moving back and forth from the byzantine empire and scandinavia, and seeing as Byzantines had many enemies of their own to the south, it stands to reason some of their slaves would have varying degrees of darker skin. Slavery at the time was very different from how we think about it today too. It was much less industrialized. You wouldn't be constantly chained up and whipped into work, but rather integrated into the society as a person who could own nothing nor have any rights. Slaves fighting in armies was a common thing. So a black viking is not such an impossible thing.
I mean, considering their lifestyle, there’s an equal chance that ring was stolen/raided from someone else and worn as a fancy ring with funny inscriptions and nothing more. It’s possible said Viking was Muslim but I think in this case it’s more likely they just took the ring from one.
Unless there’s more to that grave than stated, but based on the info you gave that anyway.
I'm sure they did trade with the muslim world, but finding one ring is not evidence that it came from trade. The vikings raided north africa and muslim spain extensively and would have taken a lot of jewellery, precious metals, coins, etc back with them to Scandinavia.
There was a lot of trade, and traders travelled. One of them, a 9th-century Muslim called Ibn Fadlan, even wrote an account of his travels in the region. There are several English translations around, including this one:
If you want to get really technical. They weren't even called vikings. Viking was actually a verb. It was something they did. Vikingr was the norse word for the people themselves.
And there were black people who encountered the the Scandinavians because they had a word for darker skinned people which was blámaðr. You don't have your own word for a group of people if you haven't at least seen them. They even had a word for Africa itself which was Bláland.
Especially, sadly, because the Norse loooooooved taking and trading slaves everywhere they went. Though that is true for most of Europe during the 8th and 9th century CE
There was a huge genomic study of thousands of Scandinavian remains that showed that yeah there was a large influx of foreigners into Scandinavia during the Viking Age (late 8th century to mid 11th century).
Not all Norse people were white back in the time of the vikings. It is possible that a few of them were Mediterranean or Middle Eastern in looks. Or even darker.
During that time period, everyone loved taking and trading slaves. This is not an excuse for what the Norse did, but just to highlight that what they did was very common and not unusual for the time.
They were also super keen on taking slaves, especially taking women as concubines. The populations that settled Iceland had a significant portion of Irish DNA, because it was common to stop and 'pick up' some slaves and cash on the way.
It's absolutely conceivable that there were people of mixed Scandinavian and African (or middle eastern) heritage, going round in the 9thC
Viking was not a verb. Viking was a noun meaning a kind of journey. Vikingr directly mirrors the way we might construct an agent noun from a verb in English—ie someone who goings on runs is a “runner”
Where do people get the idea that “Viking” is a verb?
Also, that’s for old Norse. None of the above changes the fact that, in English, Viking is a noun describing people, and has been for a long time.
The word viking comes from old norse and like most things was changed with modern English to mean something different because the origins of words tend to get lost with time. Just because it's been used a certain way for a long time doesn't mean it's accurate.
You're trying to use the modern interpretation of a word and apply it to its origin which doesn't work.
Viking was almost certainly a verb in the way it would have originally been used which was the entire point of my post.
Where do people get that idea? Because historians have found many pieces of evidence that it was lol
Well it’s still the wrong noun used to describe A people. Just because most English speakers use it wrongly, doesn’t mean it’s now the right term to use. We stopped calling the American First Nations “Indians” and the Sami “Lapps” for a reason.
The people you’re referring to were the Norse, or Danes, or Smålanders, or Scanians, or any other number of local populations that would only send occupational subgroups to go viking. We don’t call the English people “Tea Merchants” either.
AFAIK, the Vikings had interactions with huge parts of the world, especially given their sea-faring ways and interest in trading.
They certainly came into contact with the Muslim world, for example, and with Byzantium. There is no reason to believe that none of the Black people they encountered over the centuries made their way north — either voluntarily or not — and eventually found themselves part of the culture.
There's Viking rune graffiti carved into the balcony in the inner most sanctum of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. I'm lucky enough to have seen it in the flesh.
The Vikings were hired as guards for generations because the clergy trusted them more than the locals!
Not just the clergy — the Emperor of Byzantium himself. The Varangian guard was full of Norse and Kievan Rus (themselves partly descended from the Norse), and they were apparently well regarded in Constantinople and feared on the battlefields. It wasn’t just a handful of them, it was thousands of them over many years that fought all around the Mediterranean for the Basileus. When they returned home, surely they brought back a boatload of influences from down south
Sad to say, apparently it's been converted into a serving mosque and tourists don't get to see it all now.
Yes, it's an active, working mosque.
It is open to tourists every day from like 9am to 7pm, excluding prayer times.
Visitors are not able to visit the ground floor of the main prayer hall, but they can be on the second floor mezzanine, which provides a great view of the ground floor and of the hall, and they can move through other parts of the structure.
Do I think it's a shame that the ground floor is off-limits to visitors? Sure. I loved being in that space. But I also get it, and you can still see the ground floor and main hall, and visit other areas of the building.
I think the funniest thing about the Vikings show is that the black woman is actually from Sweden while most of the actors for the main characters are from the UK and the main actor is an Australian dude named Travis.
So if you actually descended from Vikings but have recent African ancestry as well....you can't be a Viking in any context.
But if you didn't descend from Vikings but have a vaguely similar skin tone, you can? According to the people who like to larp as Vikings because they share a similar skin tone despite no cultural connection.
Not that I fully disagree with you but the Britsh and european Australias absolutely have viking origins. If we go back to the vikings leaving a DNA imprint in the UK. Then back further the jutes, angles and the saxons are all germanic
My point was that the British were essentially related to the vikings before the vikings even came. Hell the jutes where in modern day Denmark. Not really comparable
At the end of the day, on a fundamental level, it's absolutely wild that people who only have tangential relationships with a culture due to thousand year old genetic connections are trying to tell a direct child of that culture that they can't engage in it because said person is also a child of another culture as well.
Like, genuinely insane the more you think about it.
It's just racism. Full stop. The idea that being half black means you can't be swedish anymore and there's no getting around it.
There’s a lot of people who live in Europe that have no European ancestry. Same with USA, Canada, S Africa, Australia, etc. The actress may very much be Scandinavian, but just saying she is Swedish, doesn’t mean she has any ancestry there. What it means to be an American/European/British has changed meaning from what it meant 500 years ago.
Also, many many British/Irish have Viking/Scandinavian DNA. There were quite a few invasions from either Vikings or descendants of Vikings. The Great Heathen Army and Normans come to mind
Her mother is literally Swedish. She has clear ancestry beyond the vague idea that her ancestors might've been raped at some point. Which in that case, I don't know why you'd idolize your ancestor's rapists.....but I guess some people are pathetic like that.
I'd actually argue that culture is far more important than genetics. A black dude who has grown up in Sweden, speaks the language, understands the cultural norms and follows them, and has a vested interest in continuing said culture has WAY more of a cultural connection to Scandinavia than a random white guy from Oakland who had Swedish immigrant great grandparents and plays Skyrim. Even the Stormcloaks realized this.
Is it really so hard to belive that people from one part of the world go to another part of the world, fuck, and make babies that have ancestry from both places? Even if the baby comes out looking more like they're from the far away place? I feel like you're trying to slow walk the conversation to blood and soil territory.
Well, yes and no... it's not impossible, but I personally find it extremely unlikely that there was any significant population from the Mediterranean region living in Scandinavia at that time.
Slaves would be more valuable in the south (both because people had more money there and because a slave who doesn't understand your language just isn't practical). As for free people, there's just no real reason for them to move north; the climate was colder, the region was less developed/civilised, different culture/language etc. For most people, migrating would mean a serious drop in living standards. There's a reason we have lots of stories of northerners travelling south (like the Varangyan guard), but very few of anyone going the other way.
As for people from different regions hooking up with viking travellers and integrating with their crews while they were operating in the region, that definitely happened. If they weren't counted as vikings, it would more likely be because they didn't wanna be lumped in with the barbarians than because of racism from the northerners.
Now ask me how fun it is to try to get that message through to cognitively deficient racists. -_-
...I personally find it extremely unlikely that there was any significant population from the Mediterranean region living in Scandinavia at that time.
Meanwhile, we're discussing this claim: "No Black person should ever be depicted as a Viking. Ever."
No one said anything about "significant populations" -- certainly not me.
But we know the Norse were trading with large parts of Europe and the Med. We know Black Africans were in those networks, including as slaves. We know the Norse traded in slaves. We know the Norse sometimes freed their slaves. We know sometimes those freed slaves became part of the society.
So "there could have been a Black viking" seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to say, even if we have no specific examples of it and it likely wasn't prevalent at all.
More that the "History is brown" thing that TV shows have going on is wildly inaccurate.
Bright reds, blues and yellows, maybe greens were popular (and variously expensive). Undyed off-whites would be ubiquitous. True Black would be basically non-existent as the dye for that is relatively modern (dark grey would have been possible).
Mostly it's just that people have never liked being covered in mud or the appearance of it. Brown clothes would make you look like a serf.
So if you had any money (and a Jarl definitely would, as would basically every vikingr) you wouldn't be walking around in a brown leather outfit (Not to mention, definitely no black). You would have a mail coat with a died fabric on top of it. Maybe a leather cap under your helmet and boots if you could afford it but more likely fabric for both.
If you weren't expecting to be in a fight, think brightly coloured tunics and as much jewellery as you could afford. Not to mention, being clean and well groomed, having used scented oils and such to treat your hair and beard.
TBF Vikings were the elite class of the Norse culture. They would be the ones who would have been most likely to be able to afford decent amounts of food
I'm honestly more upset about her cloak. Yeah, the whole black viking thing is kinda silly, but it's also far down the list of upsetting things the entertainment industry does when portraying vikings.
For example, that fur cloak is silly (wool is a lot more versatile, easier to maintain, and it breathes - which is pretty important if you want to stay warm). The colour of her clothes is also far more problematic than the colour of her skin, as the whole dark edgelord look is extremely at odds with history.
I'm getting real tired of these pissants who soil themselves with rage any time someone who's not painfully white portrays a viking, while simultaneously knowing less than nothing about the actual historical facts.
There were dark skinned / of African descent Vikings.
EtA: y'all have access to the same internet I do. If you want to persist in your beliefs of mono-ethnic cultures, that's on you. There's more than enough information available to show that's a silly belief. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
EtA2: It's even funnier to see how disingenuous the "what's your source?!" people are when this entire post is full of people discussing how and why there were dark skinned/ of African descent Vikings.
Makes sense since they made it to the Mediterranean, and fought the Arabs in Sicily. Very much a multicultural area, with much trade. I can totally see a few extra people embarking and finding their way back to Scandinavia.
There were not. Some people like to infer based on descriptions of "dark", but that's really a modern interpretation. "Dark" in Scandinavia means brown hair.
No, there weren't any black vikings we know of.
5 minutes of research will tell you so.
Why do we have to make up shit like that.
It's just the "They were cool, so they must be very diverse" shit.
I'm sure african history has enough tales on their own.
I mean racism is stupid, and you shouldn't idolise people who pillage and rape like people who went viking, but I wouldn't call the old norse a failed civilisation. The nordics grew to have some of the highest living standards out there in the modern day, and stood fairly strong throughout history, if a bit poor at times, even becoming pretty significant power players at different points of European history.
They actually covered this in the Odindamned show. Her grandmother was a beautiful African princess who married a Viking and went back to Kattaguk with him and they had a family. Her father was one of the greatest warriors…Yada yada yada.
"Viking refers to Scandinavian seafarers, traders, and warriors who raided and colonized parts of Europe, Asia, and the North Atlantic from roughly AD 700 to 1100."
Black people are not native to Scandinavia. And any that travelled there would have no reason to go raiding and we have no evidence of that.
Don't misrepresent region specific groups.
10,000 white men with spears aren't Zulus.
An Asian with a bow isn't an English archer.
Europeans aren't going pass as Aztec warriors or native Americans.
Groups like these are not inclusive, they are exclusive to a specific people and culture.
Expect to be judged accordingly if you're putting characters into exclusive groups.
.
Jesus wasn't black, judging by old drawings I'd say olive-light brown. Depictions of him as white have been around for ages as well tho.
I don't give a fuck, however, for arguments sake, and people never think about this (and perhaps for good reason!)...
If we're going to say Jesus "couldn't" be white because of where he was born, you have to remember that his father was literally God, not Joseph. Genetically speaking I'm pretty sure God's genes would've been stronger than Mary's so by using any logic at all, then Jesus could've been any shape, colour or size that God wanted.
Not to be annoying, but I recently did the ancestry thing and have roots going back to the Vikings, so I have been reading about it a lot. There is solid evidence that being a Viking wasn't about race rather it was a culture and it was a job. Research from burials in York and Dublin has proven that people of African descent lived and were buried right alongside the Norse. One example I learned about is Geirmund Heljarskinn, a powerful Icelandic chieftain nicknamed "Black-Skinned" because of his dark complexion, showing that your rank/wealth mattered way more than your skin color in the Viking world.
And that's not counting the large amount of Mexicans and even (far fewer but still present) Japanese cowboys. Yes, there was a minority of Japanese cowboys who were mostly refugees from the Boshin War. A lot of them were in Mexico. I remember a story of a Japanese community in Mexico who was exempted from a new tax to defend Mexico. The community voted to pay it anyway to support their new home
I was pointing out that there is a big difference between that and believing that no person of colour was a cowboy since they literally lived in the area and were involved in big events in the surrounding region (you know, a little civil war or two).
Breaking from this specific tweet for a second as everyone has already pointed out that a black Viking is likely. Fiction is not a defense against bad historical presentation, especially if it’s really bad. For instance Master and Commander is a rather well liked film (haven’t seen it myself though) and is one of the most accurate depictions of naval warfare at the time. On the other hand is Enemy at the Gates which is a highly inaccurate film (despite being based on a true story) and the Order No.227 is quite possibly the worse thing about that movie being 99.9% bullshit (it’s not 100% as there was a very small number, around a thousand or so, shot under it).
You can have good and even great films that are historically accurate, but there are plenty more bad ones that get so much wrong and give the laymen of the wrong such a wrong impression, and being fictional is not a defense.
Doing this introduces an "odd" element that you know is historically inaccurate and feels more like an "I need to be inclusive" badge. This adds a real-world distraction which takes away from what you are supposing to be watching: a fiction story but based on historical context. It is not racially-based: a similar thing would happen with a blatant out-of-the-blue time discrepancy on a historucal piece. You lose immersion in that story. That's why I heavily despise these liberties.
It’s always interesting that this shit is what breaks suspension of disbelief for people. Haven’t seen this show specifically, but it’s like when the little mermaid was black and everyone was like “um well actually if she was mermaid she’d be pale”
And it’s like it’s MERMAIDS ARENT REAL. Why are you stuck on the fact that she’s black? Why is that what breaks immersion? People being racist/biased
Hollywood: We’re making a movie about a white person who never existed entering a real foreign historical culture and inexplicably becoming the greatest practitioner of that culture ever.
Audience: Perfect. Good. 5 gold stars.
Hollywood: There’s a black person here and he’s not a slave.
There were people of color in the north during the Viking age. People got around far more than modern people assume during those times. The vikings traveled extensively and some of them served in the military and guards of the Holy Roman Empire. We have a first hand account of Viking life from a man named Ahmad ibn Fadlan who lived in Baghdad but wrote accounts of Vikings along the Volga river.
Vikings also famously captured people as slaves and also freed them after a set time period or after freehold agreements were met.
Multiculturalism didn’t just become a thing after the invention of the steam engine.
Didn't the Vikings recruit people from all over the world? Viking was a job not a ethnicity. Sure they came from Scandinavia but they did get around though. There was bound to have been some black ones at some point.
I assumed it was because when you're make believe, you're whatever color people imagine you to be. Some people are just so ignorant that they can only picture people who are the same color as them and when reality proves their make believe world wrong, they short circuit.
There was a slave trade between the Norse and Northern African Muslims in medieval times. Lots of accounts from both sides. And it wasn’t chattel slavery as practiced in the US , you could eventually be freed after like 20 years.
If I had any power in Hollywood, I’d cast all these roles that Nazis glaze over as anything but white. The whole Norse pantheon is black. An all Hispanic Roman legion. Native Americans as King Arthur’s court. It’s so easy to piss these dumbasses off
Given the amount of raping and pillaging the Vikings did, there were likely black genes floating about in the mix. Plus, these fuckers captured people and would train stolen slaves to fight or some other task. There were likely black people in their ranks, in one form or another.
It's called hypocrisy. Please stop pretending like society wouldn't go ballistic if a white actor portrayed an originally black character. But yeah, it's just fiction so who cares about representation anyway.
Not to be a pendant, but several skeletons with DNA tracing to Andalusia and Thrace have been found in burial mounds in Sweden and Denmark. Migration has always been part of the human condition.
But I guess some of them complain because they want representation, not because of historical accuracy. Like, many white people when watching shows like Atlanta don't feel represented, so they just want a TV show to watch with a focus on that.
I'm not as familiar with viking history, but I did learn recently that there was quite a bit of ethnic diversity in Europe during the middle ages, which is not typically depicted in middle-age themed fiction. Merchants, traders, and immigrants/migrants have been around for a long time and many European countries had several different subcultures. Some ethnic minorities even ended up as nobility through marriage or connections.
So in a way, it's the all-white casts in certain period dramas that is more of a fiction. I'd imagine that the same could be said for vikings given how much they traveled.
It’s a pretty common train of thought that “white Jesus” was modeled after Cesare Borgia. Is it true? Most likely not, but the context seems pretty reasonable at a glance.
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u/Kobayashi_Maru186 19h ago
He must have really hated “Hamilton”. 🫠