As I understand it, Black Norwegians are pretty much what the name says… a minority of dark-skinned people who live among the blond and pale skinned Scandanavians. Who are these people, and how did they come to be there?
I would Imagine they immagrated.
Maybe you saw Earle Hyman over there? Best known as the guy who played Russell Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s father on “The Cosby Show”, Hyman is one of Norway’s finest Shakespearian actors. Apparently he fell in love with the place on a visit, learned the language, married a local woman, and made an acting career in Norwegian.
“You could look it up.” -Casey Stengel
I did some quick looking around, and it looks as though you might be referring to the Sami people, who might have been residents before the neighboring Teutonic folks moved in. They aren’t black, though. There are “Black Irish,” also, and that has been covered in a Straight Dope column. Also, many Southerners claim lineage to the “Black Dutch,” and there were good reasons for this at one time.
“Y’know, one bit a negra blood in ya, an I gets to call you mah slave!”
“Er… oh, no, sir, I’m… uh… Black Dutch! Yes! That’s it!”
I’ve been in this country for ten years, and have never heard this term before. I’ve checked with the husband unit, who has lived here all his life (40-mumble years), and he has never heard it either. Are you sure both your legs are still the same length? I’m concerned that someone might have been tugging on one.
(Scandihoovians aren’t all blonde, by the way, not even close. Most common hair color among adults in Norway is light brown. The kids are mostly tow-heads, but they get darker.)
… and what the column said was that there aren’t, in fact, Black Irish. The whole thing’s a myth.
The Irish celts were a dark-haired people, not truly small but not a huge people. The public image of the the Irish is of red hair, green eyes, fair complexions and freckles. That’s the Irish from the Dublin area, which was a Danish-founded city and the Viking blood still runs rich through the East.
I myself am of Norwegian ancestry, and have light brown hair and am 6’8". Yet I have relatives with dark hair and olive skin who have more Norwegian blood than I. Go figure.
I believe that the Nordic countries have more liberal immigration laws than most European countries, so there certainly are at least a few people of African ethnicity living in Norway. According to this site, 18 million black people live in Europe and
That said, I think the term “Black Norwegians” usually refers to the Sami (Lapps), as Mjollnir said. From this site
But this site says
In Norwegian, Tater means “gypsy” according to my dictionary.
Frankly, I have never heard the terms “Black Norwegians”, “Flat-faced Norwegians” or “Brown Swedes”. “Finn”, on the other hand, is, IIRC, the Norwegian word for “Sami”.
If Norwegian tater has the same meaning as the Swedish word tattare the correct translation into English is traveller (tinker in Ireland). Gypsy is something completely different.
And I must agree with flodnak about the predominant hair colour in Scandinavia. Most of us are dark.
Thanks to those who mentioned the Sami or Saami people. They are, I think, the folks I was asking about.
Unfortunately, no, the Nordic countries, with the possible exception of Sweden, do not have particularly open immigration policies. In Norway, outside of the cities, it is still a rare thing to see an honest-to-gosh dark-skinned person.
At one time, some Norwegians used the terms “finn”, “lapp” and “kven” pretty well interchangeably - they were “others”, therefore one name was as good as any other. Fortunately those days are gone, and the word “finn” in Norwegian means the same as “Finn” in English. (Names of nationalities aren’t capitalized in Norw.) Some people still use the term “lapp”, but most people now use “sami”/“same” for the Sami. (“Kven” refers to a specific Finnish-speaking group that moved into what is now Norway three or four centuries ago.)
I have asked many people about who the “tatere” are. Some claim they are related to the Rom/Gypsies. Others say they are related to the Tartars. Still others say they were ordinary Norwegians who started travelling around as a result of poverty or outlawry. I suspect the last explanation is closest to the truth. The word for “Gypsy” in Norwegian is “sigøyner”, so the two words are definitely referring to different groups.
Maybe I should start an “Ask the Pseudo-Norwegian Chick” thread 
The Sami are a people of diminutive stature. They are very proud that one of their number emigrated to America where he hit the big time in show business, but openly proclaimed his origins in his name:
Sami Davis Jr.
I’m 68 and my cousin in 70. He referred to my Grandfather’s family being Black Norwegians or the Black Swiss. He mentioned it referred to the persecuted people that crossed into Alscace, France who married and their downline had dark hair and light skin. There was also Black Swedes. One older guy told me when I was young that a ship load of Roman Soldiers crashed in the Fjords of Sweden and ended up marrying the highland women. Maybe all legends…,
The nice lady who sold me a metro ticket in Stockholm was dark-skinned by any standard. What I definitely did not ask was, was she from a centuries-old line of Scandinavians, or a Finn, or possibly a recent immigrant. Who cares? Some people are just black, and there is no need to make up legends about it. Genuine historic and pre-historic civilizations and migration patterns are always interesting, though.
Welcome to the Straight Dope, Ricochet56. The thread you have replied to was last active 22 years ago and the first post hasn’t been back for 19 years. It appears that in their case the term was used in the US for the Sami people. Why your cousin thought Norwegian’s might pop up in Alsace I do not know. Nor why someone would think Sweden has highland women for Roman Soldiers to marry.
It’s unlikely Scandinavians were ever exclusively fair haired and blue eyed, even if you discount the Sami, so there’s really no reason to look for this sort of explanation for those of us with darker hair, complexion and eyes.
Well no, extremely unlikely to be from a centuries old line of dark Scandanavians. In fact, they would get quite sick without modern medical tests and treatments, to deal with Vitamin D, calcium and iron deficiencies…
Or they’d deal with in the way many modern indoor Scandinavians of all colors deal, by eating a lot of fatty fish. Fair skin is not a subarctic superpower, it’s a slight evolutionary advantage in the summer months. Depending on what timeline for the evolution of fair skin is correct the first Scandinavians may predate the required mutations.
Ive grown up in norway, and i have never heard the term black norwegian, even though im 52 years old. I just assumed it means a norwegian-african person. We have a lot of immigration from east africa, due to refugees from wars. And we have lots of middle eastern refugees and immigrants, but they can hardly be called black, although they are darker in skin than most norwegians.
I haven’t heard it either in 47 years of being Norwegian, 42 of them living in Norway. The OP was about having heard the term used by Norwegian-Americans though, and if he was right it was used about Sami. Which entirely plausible, though I doubt it’s a common term. We’re 22 years from the question being asked and even then it was second hand so we can’t dig much deeper.