What exactly do you mean by ahistorical? Would the Illiad count with the Amazons and Memnon and the Aethiopians?
Ooh, interesting choice. That’s definitely a case of putting in a ‘diverse’ character that’s from a group important to the people reading and writing the story (Crusades era) but that’s not necessarily likely for the era the story is set in (if we can actually figure out when that is).
I’m pretty sure that the King Arthur stories are generally a fairly historically-fluid hodgepodge anyway (like Shakespeare, in fact)
I’m assuming “reasonable for the era it’s written in, but would be weird for the era the story is supposedly set in”. In other words, an instance of “presentism” - lack of knowledge about specific differences in the past
lingyi, the point is that it’s specifically the diversity that’s ahistorical. Like, nowadays, if you serve in the Army, you’re likely to have whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all in the same barracks, so a writer nowadays telling a story about a WWII platoon might give his cast the same mix, even though it wouldn’t have actually been that way in WWII.
I don’t have a specific example in mind, but I’m sure that plenty of works based on the Bible replaced the Jewish middle easterners with whatever ethnicity was most convenient. Blonde, blue-eyed Jesus is still a thing today, and certainly an example of ahistorical diversity, if not for the reasons usually associated with the practice.
Then it strikes me that the OP is just a backhanded way of saying, “Look how racist the USA has been.” Because different minority ethnicities have always been present around the world. Maybe they were sailors; maybe they were slaves; maybe they were the masters (Vikings then Normans, anyone? Romans?) Until relatively recently, people didn’t give two hoots about your skin colour, your ethnicity, or whatever. Unless they were at war, of course. Again, I refer you to the Illiad and the Trojan War. The laws of Hammurabi differentiate between slave and free but make no mention of race.
Sure lets veer off course a sec. I quibble with “didn’t give two hoots about your ethnicity”. Old Testament has more than one occasion where God is very displeased with intermingling of ethnicities. Whether at war or not.
Couple points:
-
Someone brought up Palomides, a dark-skinned man among the Arthurian knights. I don’t want to defend this as “realistic,” exactly – we are talking about legends here. But it’s a common mistake to underestimate the presence of what we’d call non-white people in pre-modern Europe. A blogger/tumblrer/twitterer named medievalpoc does some interesting work on publicizing examples from pre-modern art…
-
I think “demographic anachronism” or the like might be a better descriptor than “ahistorical diversity?” Unless the OP only wanted examples where the anachronism is the presence of non-white people – I can’t quite tell.
-
Demographic anachronism is pretty common in medieval European depictions of bible stories. (Someone already mentioned this w/r/t the blue-eyed Jesus phenomenon.) For instance, this 12th-century painting of the Magi as European royalty: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/The_three_Magi_(Balthasar%2C_Caspar%2C_Melchior).jpg .
Nonwhite people in the Mediterranean area, sure. But a Saracen in England is pretty far-fetched.
Not to mention that the ‘Saracen’ lands - Middle East in our terms - were civilised places close to the centers of power, and Britain was kind of nowheresville. Going from Babylon via Rome to the backwoods of England is kind of like a hotshot New York lawyer deciding to spend a couple of years doing pro-bono work in Juneau.
Medieval readers of the Arthurian tales likely wouldn’t have cared about Palomides’ skin colour (which if he’s supposed to be from Babylon is probably white in any case) - it’s his religious affiliation that makes him “diverse”. And the function of diversity in the story would be very different from today too - by coming in as a pagan and then converting to Christianity, he shows Christianity is better than paganism, which is a big point of the whole Arthurian cycle.
The film “Pressure Point” made in 1962 starred Sidney Poitier as a prison psychiatrist and was set (mostly) in the WW2 era. It was based on a book in which the psychiatrist was Jewish.
Not really. Cornwall, for instance, had trade links to Egypt in the Bronze Age.
“Trade links” does’t mean that people from Egypt were traveling all the way to Cornwall and vice versa. Goods can travel vast distances through intermediaries without any trader having to go very far.
I don’t think it’s that far-fetched, really. I’m not going to pretend that medieval England was a hotbed of racial mixing, but there’s good evidence that the Romans soldiers were a wide ethnic mix- there’s records of a North African unit stationed in Britain in the 3rd century. The Romans left in 410CE, but the Arthurian legends are only set about 100 years later.
Also, although the Roman era in Britain ended in 410, there was still a lot of trade and movement of people all through Europe afterwards, as well as the inevitable descendants of a few hundred years of occupation. Nonwhite people would have certainly been a rarity in Britain in that era, but there is certainly evidence that at least a few existed.
After all, Palomides is hardly presented as just your average bloke on the street, he’s someone who had a personal quest and the money to indulge it.
Already mentioned, but whatever was the first depiction of Jesus as a white European.
I remember reading decades ago a retrospective review of Hazel which commented how unrealistic it was that all of the maids on the show were white.
Moors in the Iberian Peninsula could also be referred to as Saracens, so not as far as Egypt. A Moorish/Saracen of means expelled from Spain might take up questing…
Charlton Heston says…hold on here. I gotcha beat.
Maybe not Egypt, but the Phoenicians were good enough sailors to sail between their lands and Cornwall for tin. Intermediaries would’ve busted the monopoly.