© 2019 James LaFond

Whiteness & the Norse

A Norse Reader

3:14 AM (8 hours ago)

Mr. LaFond,

I salute you! Still following and enjoying your work. It has been most enlightening regarding the subject of race, among other things. I have two questions for you, if you would be so kind.

In one of the most recent articles you talk about the term "white" beeing used as an insult by the invaders of England, which makes sense in their case. But did not the Norse way beforehand call Jesus the "Kivtekrist", the " white Christ"?Official sources link it to white beeing the color of purity, but kvite also means womanly, as in kvinna = woman. So basically the vikings were using the term "white" already to denote someone as as a sissy. How did we go from "woman-christ" to what basically amounts to Jesus as the leader of the heavenly host in the high middle ages? Also I think it's fucking funny seeing the viking fetish common among "white nationalists".

The Rigsthula/Rigsmol is also offen cited by these peole as proof of racial awareness of our "white" germanic forefathers, with nobility/freemen/thralls basically beeing depicted by the norse as white/brown/black people. Since you make a convincing point about "white identitiy" originating in the slave trade to the plantations, how is one to interpret the erlier contradictory evidence?

Just curious, if you have the time, Sir. Good luck with the training, by the way.

Wulf Skoal

Sir, this is hugely helpful.

To reflect, in ancient literature amongst the Arуan races white is a rare and simple adjective, to describe a particularly pale group by Tacitus and as a contrast study in environmental adaptation by Aristotle. It is literally nowhere else, yet today, "whiteness" is everywhere as a Macro-Racial Noun, a vast grouping of people which dominates our public discourse and dooms folk like us to pariah status based on the circumstances of our birth. Just as "black" is not an accurate, but a polarizing racial descriptive, so is "white." These are neither of them colors, one being the absence of color and the other the absence of light, marking their inception as racial terms an act of semantic aggression and intentional slander. People, except for albinos who are rendered pinkish due to their condition, are all people of color. I run from beige to tan on the Crayola Crayon scale. Of my fighters, Erique is burnt sienna, and Oliver raw umber, etc.

I will look at three views of skin tone:

Primal

Agrarian

Industrial

The primal view was held by the Amerindians of the Eastern Woodlands, who were in close if intermittent contact with the people of Northwestern Europe from about 8,000 years ago, as the shared nautical proximity, shared housing structures, high tolerance of matriarchy and mutually inclusive myth, such as those of the Skraelings and the Stonish Giants demonstrate.

These folks used the following metaphysical color scheme:

Blue = Life

Red = War

Black = Death

White = Soul-magic-afterlife-purity-wisdom

Iroquois held white animals sacred and used them and their hides in sacred rites, as did Hungarians the white stag. When the white clouds which sweep forever up the coast and which take the ascending dead to the place of ancestors, brought pale men in house boats under white sails, in which they kept their magic books of doom [black ink] printed on white pages of wisdom, the term white was sometimes applied to these people, though "wearers of leg coverings" "long knives" and "hat-wearers" and "English" were more common. Also, white was the sign of "peace" or parley. Think of the White Flag, the ultimate form of submission, as an ancient holdover from a tradition of sacred parley and truce-making. So, to a large degree, "redskin" as a descriptive of Indians had as much to do with the use of red war pant as the pages of the bible and the sails upon his ships and the clouds under which he arrived had to do with the perception of the European as a "magic man" or "white man."

Also, people who live furthest north tend to lighten in tone and the northland, or Land of Bears [Arctic], being the seat of the north wind is a place steeped in many mythologies as magical.

In agrarian society the darker a person is the more has he been accursed by God to labor in the fields and die young. Note the Song of Solomon in which his bride apologizes for her tan! So, in agrarian society, the concept of high class status is wedded with the primal concept of white as purity, which also applies to a sheltered woman being more pure as she has not been molested by the sun, seduced by Zeus or defiled by men in the fields where her body was also sullied by labor.

The ancient Hellenes took a counter-culture view of this and preferred men bronzed by the son in naked toil, but their feminine beauty standard remained focused on sequestered women, pale from lack of contact with the rays of The Shinning One. Even the Pythia, oracles of the Sun God were supposed to be pallid. This reverence for sheltered women and the pale beauty standard echoes down through the ages amongst Arуan peoples who have an ingrained high tolerance for the feminine as compared to all other cultures and seems to have become conflated in the High Middle Ages as an image of militant and austere purity reflected in some images of Christ and perhaps encouraged by the ascetic orders of monks who were as pale as any high caste woman.

So, in the agrarian setting, white becomes a badge of high class and an imprinter of beauty upon a woman, setting up the socio-economic shade scheme you described above. Of course, the paleness of monks and fairness of sequestered women would generate a sissy connotation for the term white, which goes back to Xenophon's comments on the softness of pale and overdressed Persians compared to the rugged and tanned Greeks.

In industrial society the tan becomes a badge of class honor, indicating the leisure to go to the beach. This revolution occurred even as the most famous explorers spent time mingling on dark continents and the highest status servants of the superrich were more often people of darker hues.

I am reminded here of the Seminole myth of the three sons of God, the white man choosing the book, the red man choosing the weapons and the black man being left with the tools, as a mythic justification for the social order of the 1700s in which pale, sissy bookmen ordered the tanned warriors to police the more deeply tanned laborers. This is depicted in all parley and treaty illustrations of the 1700s, such as the treaty which ended Pontiac’s Rebellion. In most cases the Indian chiefs were tanned and painted English and Irish adoptees fighting against higher caste members of their parent race.

This aristocracy of hue has continued most notably in the African American population, where dark-skinned men have lower status, lighter-skinned men enjoy more middle class and celebrity rankings, and light-skinned women, often known as “redbone bitches” are the beauty standard. I spake with a construction worker today who has had the same experience as I, that every ebon man we have worked with has, at some time or another, declared himself “thirsty fo a redbone bitch.” My lady Ajay’s mother had a choice of two sororities, lighter or darker than a brown paper bag. This beauty hierarchy extends to light-skinned girls being beaten and killed regularly in Baltimore by, or on the orders of, a dark-skinned queen jealous of her rival’s high status complexion. An hour ago I walked by a house in a neighborhood where, three years ago, 17 women, youth and girls stormed through the front door of a house to beat a girl for being “fine” and “light-skinned,” beating down two grandfathers and a police officer in the process.

In the end, the curse of our day tells the story of why European peoples let themselves be hoodwinked into agreeing to an erasure of ethnic identity in favor of a supreme economic identity: "White Privilege" is above all an economic caste designation which assigns the ancient notion of purity associated with the sheltered virgin and the unique white beast such as the Great White Buffalo and the White Wolf to the people who direct society. It was then turned upon the descendants of the once tanned agrarian working class who were shoved into factory hells and mines and now offices to labor under artificial light as a curse originating from a privilege which was assigned to their betters of yore and an insinuation that the pale working man shared the moral weakness and physical meekness of his managerial master.

Just as “black” has been an attack upon African identity since 500 B.C., “white” has likewise been an attack upon true European identity since A.D. 1550, when the term began to seep from Arabic, via Spanish into Dutch and English, and the Turks, Berbers, Arabs and other Middle Eastern and North African slave drivers enjoyed unprecedented military and naval access to vast populations of European slaves. At least 2 million Western Europeans and 3 million Hungarians were sold into sexual, artesian and military bondage after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The mind staggers at the numbers of other races, such as the Serbs, Greeks, Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians which must have been swept up in this tide of racial negation, spiritual eradication and human bondage. The imprint is deep and I see no cultural or masculine advantage to claiming to be the bleached ideal of the Islamic sodomy slave of the early modern period, particularly since the sins of the European elite of old have now, by way of this macro-racial noun, been assigned to the lowly scions of their slaves.

As a final note, the best and strongest man I’ve known, Bob Johnson, half Norwegian, with blonde children and grandchildren, has, from his years of hunting and working in the high country, a complexion a mere shade lighter than most of the African Americans in Baltimore County. This, I believe, along with the ancient Arуan reverence for the man “bronzed” by the sky god in his battles, treks, hunts and toils under the sun, was what Robert E. Howard had in mind when he wrote his heroic yarns. Howard’s every hero, most notably Conan the Barbarian, was like Bob, hard of body and burned bronze by a life in the wastelands, no doubt as many of the oilfield roughnecks [of which Bob was one for some years] which Howard’s doctor father treated for their injuries and he used for the template of his greatest protagonist.

Let’s leave off with Howard if we are to disabuse ourselves of the ethnically emasculating notion that we are to assign the greater portion of our “Western” Arуan heritage to sissy British intellectuals—of the type who famously hated Richard Francis Burton for his dark “gypsy” looks and rugged physicality—who managed a darker, more masculine world between tea parties for some pasty-faced queen:

“No civilized hand ever forged that headpiece. Nor was the face below it that of a civilized [read, sissy] man: dark, scarred, with smoldering blue eyes, it was a face as untamed as the primordial forest which formed its background.”

This passage from Beyond the Black River, describes the type of Iroquois [most of their chiefs being Caucasaian] fighting man which friar Lejune in 1638 had described as being as tanned “as a French vagabond or peasant.”

That is the heritage of most of us palefaces, that of the working man, the fighting man and before that the hunter, not the soft sissy with his powdered cheeks and gay wig whose kind raped a world and left us with the blame and the bill.