Black Vikings / Literature

• Arthurian medieval literature has featured Saracen and Moorish (i.e. Middle Eastern and African) knights since about the 13th century.
  • By far the most important example due to appearing in multiple derivative medieval works is Sir Palamedes (or Palomides), a Saracen frenemy of the Cornish Sir Tristan who joins him at the Round Table after competing for the Irish lady Isolde's hand. Palamedes's father Esclabor is sometimes said to be King of Babylon, and his brothers Safir (or Safere) and Segwarides also join the Round Table. Like all such non-antagonistic examples in Arthurian literature, they eventually convert to Christianity from "paganism".
  • One-off characters in various works include Sir Morien (Moriaen), the half-Moorish son of Sir Aglovale, nephew of Sir Percivale and grandson of King Pellinore. Certainly he has a Punny Name, and he appears in a self-titled anonymous Dutch romance. Another half-Moorish knight is Percivale's half-brother Feirefiz, son of the Moorish queen Belacane and future father of the fabled Christian king in the East, Prester John, in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, a work most scholars date to the 1310s. But here Percival and Feirefiz's father is named Gahmuret.
• In the medieval romance King Horn, Saracens invade Suddene (a mythical kingdom in the British Isles). This is probably a Race Lift as the villains act just like Viking conquerors, but by the time the story was written down Vikings had become passé and the Crusades were the new hot topic.
• In the same vein, in Sir Thomas Mallory's Le Morte D Arthur, an early war between the newly installed King Arthur and an alliance of rebel British petty kings and lords is defused after Saracens invade the latter's lands. In much earlier tellings such Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, the invaders are Saxons not Saracens.
• The later Sven Hassel novels introduced Stabsgefreiter Albert Mumbuto, a black soldier in the German army of WW2. However, the website Porta's Kitchen mentioned a documentary where several black Germans were interviewed, including at least one soldier. Germany had had an African colonial empire until 1919 so there were a number of African-Germans long after that. This matter surfaces in Istvan Szabo's movie Mephisto, taking place in the 1930s, in which the protagonist, a famous theatre director, has an African-German mistress and is therefore chastised by an angry Hermann Göring. Though it might surprise a modern reader, while Nazi racism toward black Germans is well-documented and horrible, this wasn't as systematic as their persecution of the Jews.
• Lampshaded and Justified in Everworld:
  • There are Vikings of all different races because Everworld's transplanted cultures have a vastly different geography from "the Old World" (our world), so that Everworld-Vikings regularly raid Everworld-Aztecs, Everworld-Africans, and apparently Everworld-Asians; this results in many new people entering the Viking society as slaves (who may gain freedom and work their way up) or from mixed marriages between Vikings and captured women. Their king, Olaf Ironfoot, is actually black.
  • The Amazons are described as similarly having children with whatever men they happen to conquer. The queen, Pretty Little Flower, is mixed-race.
• A black Moorish woman prosecuting attorney named Brunhild (!) appears in the eponymous Die Morin, written by German poet Hermann von Sachsenheim in the year 1453. She is supposed to prosecute love cases for the goddess Venus and her lover, King Tannhäuser (!!), who, according to legend, lived in a subterranean kingdom under some mountain in Germany. Probably Sachsenheim assumed that a servant of Venus was a pagan, and a pagan was a Muslim, and a Muslim was a Moor, and that "Brun-hild" meant "brown-maiden" (instead of "byrnie (=mail-coat)-warrior").
• A Peter David novel about King Arthur in modern times, Knight Life, makes Percival, the Grail Knight, a Moor. Everyone is totally surprised by this in the novel and a scholar or two "refutes" it in front of him.
• Characters with red hair and blue or green eyes are fairly common in classic Chinese novels such as Water Margin. This may be justified given the ethnic makeup among the peoples of Central Asian regions bordering China during the Middle Ages, and mentions of giant men with red hair and light eyes on their far western borders, sometimes believed to have been, yes, Vikings (not entirely implausible, since the Viking trade routes down to the Black Sea went quite deep into modern Russia, and once the Kievan Rus' (founded by Vikings) was established in the 9th century, it started developing eastwards too.
• Ranec, from Jean M. Auel's The Mammoth Hunters, is a black Cro-Magnon living in Ancient Russia north of the Caspian Sea. Justified by the fact that, in his youth, Ranec's father made a long journey to the region that is now Ethiopia, married a woman there, and returned to Russia with his son after his wife's death.
• Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which has protagonists that are a black Abyssinian and a very white Eastern Frank, both Jewish, who travel the world as bandits and mercenaries and end up in the Caucasus. The Khazars, a nation of Turkic Jews, also features heavily in the plot. It was Chabon's intention to explore the lesser-known branches of Jewish lineage.
• Sanya, one of the knights of the Cross in The Dresden Files, is a black Russian. He himself notes that his color would turn heads in Moscow and that he couldn't go to rural villages without causing traffic accidents.
• Black servants play a significant part in the series of Angélique novels by Anne Golon, set during the reign of King Louis XIV. They existed in Real Life in 16th century Paris, as former slaves acquired from the Mediterranean Turkish and Arab traders, or children of former slaves, and were much sought-after by the French aristocracy as exotic "pets" / status symbols. In the books, they display fierce loyalty to anyone who treats them as human beings, including the eponymous heroine and serve them as spies, couriers, and bodyguards.
• Children's novel Surviving the Applewhites has, as one of the subplots, a performance of The Sound of Music with color-blind casting. This leads to, among other things, an ad-libbed line that the von Trapp children are all adopted.
• The 16th-century Italian epic Orlando Furioso has Ruggiero, an Arab, as one of Charlemagne's knights.