To this day, natural blondes are reasonably common in Italy, especially further north, though that could be linked to tribal migrations after the Fall of Rome (Unnatural blondes are so common in all parts of Italy as to form a plague)

The racial makeup (and tolerance) of Carribean pirates is a somewhat disputed issue. The last book that I read on the subject (Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations, which is excellent) cited some examples of African pirates (checking quickly, Rediker says that Edward Condent’s ship made use of a mostly black boarding party), but said that racial attitudes probably were not as egalitarian as the last round of historians might have believed. No idea what the current consensus on the subject is.

Once upon a time I took myself off to Salt Lake City to study with the second smartest man who ever lived. Being the new guy in town I picked up the campus paper and tried to get my bearings. What I read was, to me as an Eastern Liberal, a bizarre conundrum:

The film reviewer panned the Kevin Costner pic “Robin Hood” on the grounds that casting Morgan Freeman as the blackamoor was an idiotic sop to those America-hating PC hand-jobs. His arguement was that it would be retarded to think that a darkie might have made it all the way from Africa to England at the turn of the millenium.

Ummm…. we might criticise that on many grounds, the first of which might be ‘if Costner made his way from England to Syria, why could not an ethiop make his way from Syria to England?” To be a little more scholarly, Lord Pelinore in the Arthur cycle was dark and clearly arrived from a different place – as did the Numidians who participated in the Roman conquest of Britain.

Besides which, at the turn of the millenium there were so many swedes in Constantinople that they today have their own name for the city: Miklegaard.

I focus on this incident only because it was my first experience of the lunatic backlash against the supposed excesses of PC liberalism. It gets worse, believe me.

MvH, Theo

Well, the effect on my digestion was certainly “interesting.”

fnd: I’m thinking of Pirates of the Caribbean, for example, which gave us an all-but-Aryans Only version of the West Indies in the 18th century.

Yes and no. The slave economy is conspicuous by its absence, but then the economy generally tends to be conspicuously absent from any action movie. OTOH the pirates themselves seemed reasonably diverse, though how much so compared to the historical Caribbean is hard to say. Pirates of the day were a more diverse and accepting lot than society at large, but that doesn’t mean that maroons were always or even often welcome among the buccaneers. (Presumably there’s a reason why “maroon,” derived from the Spanish word for “escaped slave,” became both a racial slur and a verb meaning “to stand someone on an island.”)

Of the screenwriters quoted in the initial, I’d have to say I like John Rogers’ attitude the best; going out of your way to capture the zany diversity of the world as it exists has a lot to recommend for it that can’t be achieved by trying to work out formulae or tiptoe past this or that censor. If you don’t have a “real” world to work with per se, but rather are inventing a fictional setting, then by the same token it makes sense to capture the zany diversities that are possible in your fictional reality. If you’re working with received fiction, like Earthsea or Middle Earth, then it makes sense to respect and try to do some justice to the background you’re working with. (The lack of such an attempt is what made the Earthsea mini-series so objectionable.)

Your question called to mind the meaning and alleged origins of my surname. I’m not sure that was your intention. Still, in light of your question, the information below might be of some interest. Obviously, the “historic” account is extremely one sided, and some parts are sensationalist to the point of hysteria. The truth, one can be sure, is much more nuanced, but unfortunately I could not immediately locate a more respectable and serious narrative. I venture to say that if Boru hadn’t got lucky at Clontarf, fair and balanced accounts of the developments the text purports to describe would be much more available.

“Many colours appear in Gaelic surnames… Dubh, however appears so frequently in surnames … that it is worthy of particular attention…A very common name following this pattern is Ó Dubhghaill, desc[endant]. of the black foreigner (the foreigner in this case appears to be Viking ), anglicised Doyle or Doole. “

The Doyle Page – The Meaning of the Name

At dusk on a summer’s evening in the year 795 AD, a sinister looking high-prowed ship ploughed into the sands at Lambay Island just north of Howth Head on the east coast of Ireland near Dublin. Immediately from the body of the Longboat, the oarsmen rushed to attack the monastery of Saint Columkill. They slaughtered the monks, plundered the monastery for for all the gold and silver vessels they could find, and then disappeared back into the Irish Sea. The Irish Annalists, referring to the incident, describe the unwelcome arrivals as “dubh-ghaill “.

The first “Doyles” had arrived in Ireland!

This was the beginning of more than two centuries of attack and invasion which had devastating effect on Ireland, and on the Irish monasteries in particular. [ Pointedly neglected here are the innumerable benefits and advantages that have accrued to the people of Ireland as a result of the Scandinavian initiatives. That these far outweigh any temporary incidental inconveniences, no reasonable person would deny.]

Viking (from the Old Norse Vikingr) means “sea-rover” or “pirate”, and this precisely what these people were. …. From the eighth century, their plundering raids terrorized much of the known world, reaching as far as America, North Africa and Constantinople.

Doyle … [comes from] …” Dubh-Ghaill” … the Irish Gaelic words meaning ” Dark/Evil Foreigner”; [ !] and this is just what the indigenous Celts called the Danish Vikings who started settling in Ireland and Scotland more than 1,000 years ago. [ Caed mille failte, indeed.]

In Ireland, the annalists distinguished two groups among the raiding Vikings, the Lochlainn, or Norwegians, and the Danair, or Danes, the Norwegians being described as fair, the Danish as dark (because they wore chain-mail armour). Initially, the Norwegians dominated…In 852, the Danes wrested control of one of these settlements, the military and trading post of Dublin, from the Norwegians under their king Olaf … and founded the Danish Kingdom of Dublin which was to last three hundred years, until the coming of the Anglo-Normans.

Digressing, John Wayne made an interesting Genghis Khan. Which likely helped kill him, but that’s yet further digression.

I completely agree. The offensively artificial interactions between the young white guy and the protective black authority figure made me want to rip my own face off, I was cringing so hard. Awful! Those “No, Timmy, it’s too dangerous. I’ll go” parts reminded me of the Troy McClure-and-little-boy parodies on the Simpsons. And that’s what was supposed to make us not mind the movie’s later blatant racism?

Peter Jackson Disappointed Me Too. We should start a club.