One point that I think has been missed is that racists often have friends from the groups they hate, which they justify by claiming that “he/she’'s not like those other people.” It’s possible (in fact I would go so far as to say that’s what probably happened) that Lovecraft’s wife was in his opinion, an exception his usual anti-Semitism.
BTW, my first thought whenever I think of medieval anti-Semitism (related to what we’re discussing here due to the roots of a lot of Western European fantasy being in medieval romances) is the ballad “Little Sir Hugh; Or the Jew’s Daughter” and now I’m trying to think out how a fantasy version of “Little Sir Hugh” would go. Probably the murderer would be a troll’s or dwarf’s daughter ([del] since we all know trolls eat children [/del] and Hugh would be called Hugi. He would go under the hill in search of his ball and the evil dyrgja (Dwarf woman, Dwarf girl) or trollkona would kill him and throw his body into a hot spring. It would be found by his mother and eventually buried (and the ballad would contain a load of references to both Christianity and Norse mythology).
Certainly. My point is more that Lovecraft was an odd duck, even by the standards of his time, and that his racism wasn’t limited to only certain races - he could find something to hate in almost anybody.
This seems a strech to me. Why would medieval Scandinavians need a separate word for the darkest shade of black people? In medieval Scandinavia, would you really need the vocabulary to differentiate different shades of black people?
The old norse word for black is “svart”. “Svardalfar” were the darkelves. Bluemen as a term for a people seem more likly to refer to the Tuareg/Garamandes if they were using that dye of theirs back then. Or in the case of supernatural beings, the blueish color that frozen or drowned dead can be for a bit.
The association “Blamenn” = black men sounds more like someone leapt to a conclusion based on how it sounded to english speakers, and it became a meme. False cognate.
Some Black Africans have a bluish undertone to their skin. I’ve met at least one person who did-- he was Ugandan IIRC and came to my school to give a speech when I was in high school. That might have been where the word came from. That said, there’s a question of whether the slaves captured by Hasteinn were Black African or Tuaregs and the term can also refer to Saracens.
IIRC (and as I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong) the word svartr literally means “black” but rarely if ever referred to a Black African person’s skin colour. Instead it tended to be a description of a Norse person’s hair colour (Snorri says Halfdan The Black was called that because of his hair colour), their skin colour if their skin was slightly darker than the “typical Scandinavian complexion” or even their temperament. It’s mostly used to refer to Norse or Celtic people rather than Black Africans. Norse and Celtic people are never referred to as “blamenn.”
Yes, that is quite true. However, such a skin color tends to be found in Subsaharan populations. While the Norse traded and raided along the coasts of the mediterranean, skin tones here tend to be admixed with mediterranean types. Today, we see the continent of Africa as a single continental unit, but back in the days of the Vikings the big geographic barrier was the Sahara.
While it is certainly possible that the Norse encountered people of this hue, I think these must have been rare and individual encounters.
I would guess that the reason why the word svart were not used by the Norse to refer to people with black skin, but instead were used for hair, temprament, etc is that there were not enough people with black skin in the norse lands to require a group name. Today it does refer to people with black skin.
What I am saying is that the notion that the Norse referred to black people as “blue men”, based on a few black people in areas not reached by the Norse having a blue tinge to their skin seems a strech. Color seems fairly fundamental in human naming, I cannot think of any cases where flowers, ores, jewels etc has been considered to be of different colors in different languages.
Given the fact that the word “Blamann” sounds, and looks, similar to the word “Blackman” in the language where you find the notion, I think a linguistic misunderstanding is far more probable.
Only a few weeks ago I came across an academic who asserted that the word “Draug” referred to a barrow-ghost of some kind!
Don’t quote me on this but I’m pretty sure (in fact positive) I read somewhere that there were Black African slaves in North Africa in the 9th century. The Norse certainly did raid the Kingdom of Nekor, where they could have found Black slaves (as well as Tuaregs) which they then sold to Irish and Norse-Irish nobles.
Doesn’t the whole blamenn thing just come from that one guy you talked about. . .Hasteinn, who raided in the Med and got his hands on some Africans? Maybe it was just a term he used, and not something in common usage?
I mentioned this paper (Snorri and the Jews) earlier in the thread and in another thread. Here it isfor anyone who wants to read it.
As an additional point: the portrayal of RL ethnic groups as non-humans, a convention which dates back to the Middle Ages when Sami people were described as jotnar, risar and trolls in sagas.
