Joined Nov 2010
2,088 Posts | 37+
...
It is not at all obvious to scholars. Halfdan the black is variously called Halfdan the swarthy. Hair is almost never described as swarthy. In case you missed it, concerning the term "svartr", the article I posted says that "Often it is not entirely clear if the color adjective refers to hair color or complexion..." It's an interesting article.
The Color Blue in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature
And its clear being dark or swarthy did not preclude one from being either Norwegian or a ruler in Norway. Take, for example, Giermundr Heljarskin, one of the twins born to King Horr in the 9th century. The name heljar-skin referred to his skin and literally meant "black as hell".
"Settlers named in Landnamabok include many men of distinction: Geirmundr heljarskin, a warrior king (herkonungr) with a base in Rogaland (Sin, H86) ..." Old Icelandic Literature and Society, 2000, Edited by: Margaret Clunies Ross, University of Sydney, Cambridge University Press
You see here he was a "warrior king" with his own base in southern Norway? If anything it shows the ancients weren't so preoccupied with race as we are today. "There are many tribes and many tongues ... [t]here are giants and dwarfs; there are black men and many kinds of strange tribes." Snorri Sturlusson was in a position to describe the racial-scape of Scandinavia since he is believed to have written the story of the kings of Norway and lived in the 12th-13th centuries.
And Gwyn Jones was right to say: "The viking peoples who lived between the neck of Jutland and the Lofotens, Sogn, and Uppsala, were not all alike, and emphatically not of one 'pure' Nordic race." (A History Of The Vikings, pg. 67-68)
That much is attested in numerous family crests which clearly depict people of black ancestry. There was once a class of British and Scottish historians like Sir Godfrey Higgins, David MacRitchie, Albert Churchward etc., that were quite preoccupied with the subject and speculated quite broadly and, at times, erroneously, about the origins of pre-modern northerners, especially the Gypsies. Nevertheless, they did indeed uncover many interesting facts. On the cover of MacRitchie's Ancient and Modern Britons vol I he unveils a 16th century portrait of a Norman knight (and within the book numerous coats of arms to substantiate his hypothesis):
In most instances dark-skinned peoples in the north descended from certain Celtic and Picti tribes who had long dwelt there and were almost invariably associated with seafaring. Tacitus, for example, remarked on the "dark complexion of the Silures or Black Celts and [their] unusually curly hair". Herodotus believed the Picts descended from Egyptians. This was before the Romans (and in any case the Romans never conquered Ireland), so it cannot be attributed to a small number of Africans among Latin elites. In other cases, they, like Giermundr Heljarskin's mother, came from present day Denmark.
The question of where these people really came from isn't easy to ascertain. My best guess, they were remnants of Neolithic foragers who spread through Tunisia and/or NE Africa roughly 10,000 yka.
