Haakon Sigurdsson was a real historical figure. He was the ruler of Norway from 975 to 995, and he was most certainly Nordic. However, in the Netflix series Vikings: Valhalla, Haakon Sigurdsson has been turned into a black woman. This is as ludicrous as Chris Hemsworth portraying a Zulu king in a show about African warriors.
The original Vikings series came out in 2013 and many White people latched onto it, as it was a show featuring a White cast, portraying White culture. As many of us know, the version Norsemen shown in Vikings was not historically accurate and actually made White people look bad, but still it was something of a breath of fresh air for the average White person, who was drowning in a semitic sea of mulitcultural media. The original Vikings series would eventually throw in a little diversity, with Ragnar race-mixing with an Asian slave before eventually killing her for getting him hooked on drugs, but still it seemed historically plausible.
The original History Channel show had lots of fans, so of course when the show came to an end, it needed to be rebooted, this time on Netflix. The new Vikings: Valhalla show takes place sometime after the events of the original series, and involves Leif Erikson and other notable figures from our real history. This show, however, has no regard for actual history when casting its characters, with black vikings becoming a thing.
Newsweek attempts to answer the question of whether Jarl Haakon was a real historical figure (their answer is “yes and no”):
The article goes on to try to convince us of the reality of black vikings.
Ha! Black people “may have joined them on their journeys.” Sure.
The actress who plays Jarl Haakon, Caroline Henderson, says:
It was amazing because somebody like that could actually have existed. I don’t know. But it’s exciting.”
No, a black queen ruling over the Norse people did not exist and could not have actually existed.
Netflix tries to add some historicity to the black queen:
In real life, and as depicted on the show, Vikings often traveled and settled down all around the globe in the Middle Ages, stretching across Constantinople, Russia, North Africa, Spain and even Canada. While other characters are based on real people, Estrid Haakon is an invented character, whose Viking grandfather met her royal African grandmother while in the great trading city of Alexandria, Egypt. They fell in love and returned to Kattegat, eventually passing on ruling duties to her. […] The common vision of Vikings has seldom included the truth, that the transnational empire was more diverse than modern media often depicts. “The Vikings were not a necessarily homogeneous, fully white group of people; they were multicultural and multiracial,” says series creator Jeb Stuart. “The Vikings went all over the globe: We know, from DNA evidence, that there’s Viking DNA all around what we considered the known world in the Middle Ages; we know that they were in Palestine and Constantinople.”
Yes, vikings went around the world, and we can find DNA evidence of that. What he have zero evidence of, however, is that they were a multiracial group, with black queens ruling over them in their homelands.
Since the Vikings didn’t have a written language, or many depictions that weren’t made by folks they defeated, we have little knowledge of what they looked like.
I think we have a pretty good idea what vikings looked like, as we can see still find their descendants in the Nordic countries, where their culture is being displaced and their people being genocided by the mass invasion of brown and black migrants.
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