How did the Norse view skin colour?

by sRazors96

As many of you know, the Asatru religion has thousands of racist followers. It is a sad fact of life.

Now we know that the Norse traveled all over Europe and then some, from North America to North Africa to the Middle East. My question is how did they view the people who lived there?

EyeStache

The short answer is that we don't really know how the pagan Norse viewed skin colour, as they didn't leave any records about them. Christian sources (i.e. the sagas) tend to make the distinction less between skin colour and more between religion. Blávus from Viktors saga og Blávus, for example, is described as a black man, once, but afterwards his skin colour is not mentioned.

The Native Americans were referred to as skrælingar, or wretches, in the Vínland sagas, but are never described, apart from having a dislike of milk.

mutokangius

While EyeStache is correct in saying that we have no concrete information on Norse racial theory, I think it's worth mentioning that the Vikings, like everyone else in Europe in the late Iron Age, almost certainly did not have an idea of unified races such as a "white" race or a "black" race. The idea of lumping all Europeans or Africans or whatever together would not have made sense to the Norse; they considered themselves different from the skraelingar or the Arabs they encountered in the same way they were different from, say, Franks, people from the British isles, or even neighboring Lapplanders.

Which is to say, there was no idea of Europe as a single cultural category, especially since the Vikings certainly didn't constitute a part of "Christendom" for a long time. TL;DR they were aware of ethnicities and religious and cultural differences, obviously, but they didn't think about race in the same way as we have since roughly the early modern period.

EDIT: Someone who knows more about the history of neopaganism can maybe go more into depth here, but I assume that a lot of white supremacists are interested in Asatru because they view it as an "authentically white/european" religion, as opposed to Christianity, which they have to avoid because they are anti-semitic. I do kind of wonder when this began, though. It seems that the Nazis were interested in some aspects of Germanic paganism, and that interest could possibly be traced back to Wagner, but how well known were the ancient Germanic religions amongst conservative Europeans in, say, the 1700's? Was the revival in interest a result of Germanic nationalism in the 19th century?