99.9% pure Hollywood baloney!
One of my colleagues in the chess world has alerted me to a TV series depicting Haakon Jarl–a late 10th Century warlord of Norway, supplanted by King Olaf Trygvesson–
–as a black woman (https://screenrant.com/vikings-valhalla-jarl-haakon-true-story-black-ruler/#:~:text=In%20addition%2C%20Jarl%20Haakon%20actress,York%2C%20before%20settling%20in%20Paris.). With a capital B.
I resist the urge to bang my head against the wall. The Viking Age was my special field of study, the topic of my honors thesis, defended before a panel of professors. So I know what I’m talking about here.
Would you believe that this howling crapola had six seasons on the freakin’ History Channel? History? What kind of “history” is that? And now yet another season is being shown on Netflix or someplace. And reviewers are spouting arrant drivel about “the fact [fact??? What fact?] of Black [sic] Vikings…” And “Many [???] legendary Viking heroes were women.” That astounding “fact” somehow managed to elude the attention of every historian, every saga-composer, every court poet living at the time. I defy the babbling ninnies out there to produce one “legendary Viking hero” who was a woman. I triple-dog dare you.
By the way, “Viking” was not an ethnicity. It was a profession. Today we’d call it armed robbery. And they didn’t wear helmets with horns on them. Trust me.
They’re always messing with the Viking Age. Back in 2017 another duffle-brained “scholar” asserted there were “Muslim Vikings” (https://leeduigon.com/2023/10/12/muslim-vikings-baloney-says-scholar-2017-2/). This nonsense was exposed pretty quickly.
What’s next? Midget Vikings?
Anyone who thinks you can “learn” by watching television is barking very, very loudly up the wrong tree. The only things you can learn there are things that aren’t true.
This really is drivel. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I had ancestors of this nationality, and they would be horrified to hear about this.
Being called a Viking isn’t exactly high praise. Sure, they were tough as nails, but as you say, they were essentially armed robbers. People with lineage in northern latitudes tend to be fair skinned. It is thought that this is because fair skin absorbs more sunlight and helps the body to produce vitamin D. Fair skin is a disadvantage in places where there is a lot of sunlight.
Most of my family was from Scandinavia, and I have fairly light skin. I don’t live in the north, for the most part, because the gloom of winter in such climates doesn’t agree with me. When my parents moved to Colorado, I found that many of the people there were from places south of Scandinavia. When their families emigrated to the US, they sought out climates similar to where their families had lived in Europe. In the case of Colorado, there were a lot of people of Italian extraction, and many of these had an olive skin tone. One of my very light-skinned relatives married someone of Italian descent, and the children of that marriage have olive skin.
We are one species, and while physical characteristics, such as skin color, may vary, it is a superficial difference. Just as it happened in my family, these traits can be mixed or matched, easily. Attributing character to racial characteristics is the very definition of racism. In the meantime, let the Vikings be as they were; we don’t want them to be deficient in vitamin D. 🙂
Always consider the source, every time. If it is on the MSM or History Channel take it as a grain of salt. Vikings were masculine, so get over it wokesville.
The History Channel has deteriorated steeply over the years. I used to watch it, years ago, but then they became the Hitler channel, and I lost my taste for it, completely. More recently, from what I can tell, they seem to have become fixated on UFO shows, and these, at least from what I’ve seen on YouTube clips, are basically speculation and a lot of deliberately non-committal statements, so you hear “may” or “could be”, but they never actually say anything. I’ve heard this sort of nonsense too many times to find it amusing.
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard call the History Channel the Hitler Channel. I don’t think they employ historians.
A&E and the History Channel used to be worth watching. These days, they reek as badly as anything else on TV. Hitler was an important figure and we should know about what happened, lest these horrors be repeated. But endless programs about him serve only to glorify him, and I want no part of that. Beyond that, many of those programs were not truly informative, but merely played upon bizarre aspects of what happened, instead of actually telling the history of it all. There were bizarre aspects to it, but more importantly, the historical context was significant.
Wouldn’t this count as blackwashing?