A Black Astrid? The True History of Viking Diversity and Black Vikings

Another casting announcement, another racist freak-out.

Nico Parker was announced as the live-action version of Astrid in the upcoming How to Train Your Dragon film, and of course, people who want “historical accuracy” got irate.

At this point, with the “controversial” castings we’ve had over the years, you know how the cycle goes. A Black person is cast as a traditionally-white character, white racist edgelords get upset, and the actor in question has to weather a firestorm of nonsense, all for the outrage to die down as soon as the film comes out and people talk about how great the actor was in the role. In between the stages of the cycle, folks online (including me, on this occasion) point out how hypocritical and ridiculous the outrage is.

First of all, no one had a big to-do when the original How to Train Your Dragon animated films were cast and America Ferrera, a Honduran American actress, voiced Astrid. Is the problem just that it’s an actress of African descent playing Astrid now? Is the anti-Blackness in the anti-Nico hate even more concentrated?

Secondly, angry people asking for “historical accuracy” to their Vikings are asking for this in a fantasy film meant for families (and kids, especially). As far as we know, dragons aren’t real. (And if they were, they apparently resided in Asia to begin with.) So why does it matter if the Viking characters aren’t all Scandinavian?

And, honestly, history tells us that Vikings weren’t all comprised of pale Scandinavians anyway. Indeed, according to archeological findings, Viking populations were more diverse than traditionally thought. This means that shows like Vikings, which features fictional Black Viking character Jarl Haakon (played by Caroline Henderson) and other media that showcases diverse Viking populations are more historically accurate than not.

In this article, we’ll dive deep into the science and history behind diverse Viking populations and we’ll answer the question about if there were Black Vikings.

The science behind diverse Vikings

First, let’s talk about some of the inaccuracies involved in portrayals of traditional white Vikings. Nordic Perspective, a website run by Nordic native and Nordic history enthusiast Karl Andersson, wrote how some common Viking tropes aren’t accurate to history. Some of those tropes include the “mohawk-ponytail hairstyle” found in Vikings and The Last Kingdom.

Andersson states there’s no evidence of a Norse person wearing their hair in a mohawk or having tattoos that resemble a heavy metal musician, nor were Vikings “grizzled warriors,” as he describes them. Instead, he wrote that according to the Danish National Museum, “analysis of skeletal remains show that the Norse had more gender-neutral facial features than Scandinavians today, meaning males and females had more similar characteristics.”

Here’s where things get interesting. Andersson states that people calling themselves Vikings weren’t exclusively people with Scandinavian heritage. The word “vikingr” means pirate, and that means that you can be of another ancestry and still call yourself a Viking. Andersson writes that while studies have found that many Vikings were blond or red-haired Danes, Vikings were also found to be “more dark-haired than Scandinavians today,” according to a Nature 2020 study.

“The DNA study of 422 Viking skeletons reveals that while Viking bands were mostly sourced from Scandinavia, they could also be comprised of some Picts [ancient Scottish] and Britons, and although the study even found Southern European and even Asian ancestry, a later 2025 study published in the same journal rebukes these findings and attributes to them to pre-Viking Age migrations from Central and Eastern Europe instead,” he wrote. “Either way, both the 2020 and 2025 study indicate that Vikings intermingled with people they met on their explorations, both on-location but also by bringing them home to Scandinavia in some cases.” He also wrote how Vikings were a highly diverse population, especially in trade cities such as Zealand, Gotland and Öland.

Spells and Spaceships also cites the same 2020 study regarding diversity within Viking populations. The site quotes from Ars Technica, which states that the study illustrates how Vikings “mingled pretty freely, and on a large scale, with the people they encountered on their travels. They were also willing to welcome outsiders into their own culture.”

Historical accounts of diverse Vikings

Darker-skinned Scandinavians are recorded in history, according to Spells and Spaceships. But apart from darker-skinned Scandinavians, there are also immigrants from other nations, including Africa.

“People with dark skin, other than darker-skinned Scandinavians pre-existing in the region, made their way there as willing travelers,” according to the site. “Dark-skinned people from Northern Africa and certain places in southern Europe like Spain, explored unknown areas just like other Europeans and Asians who sought to discover what foreign lands were like.”

Some of these explorers would settle in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, becoming part of the surrounding culture. Other darker-skinned people were also captured as slaves. However, slavery in this sense isn’t exactly analogous to slavery in North America and other Western countries–according to the site, the second and future generations of Scandinavian slaves were able to assimilate into the culture.

An example of a person of color who lived as a Viking was Geirmund Heljarskinn, aka Gerimund the black-skinned. According to Spells and Spaceships as well as Avaldsnes’ official site, Geirmund was a Norwegian-Mongolian man who was essentially a prince–his father was King Hjør of Avaldsnes in Norway and his mother was Ljufvina,a Bjarmeland princess. Ljufvina descended from the Sikhirtya people, a Mongolian indigenous population in Siberia.

I highly recommend reading the history of Ljufvina and her husband at Avaldsnes, since there is a lot of discussion about Ljufvina’s actions regarding her sons and their appearance, including trading her sons with the son of a fair-skinned Scandinavian slave, making Hjør believe the boy is his son until he learns the truth from Ljufvina and poet Brage the Old. But the point of this article is to prove that people beyond light-skinned Scandinavians existed.

Spells and Spaceships also provides another example of archeologists finding numerous pieces of Viking funereal clothes with the word “Allah” stitched into them. Obviously, this means that some Vikings originally hailed from Islamic strongholds, since some of the DNA from some remains proved to be of Persian descent. Also for some Vikings, its entirely possible a white Scandinavian converted to Islam.

But were there specifically Black/African Vikings?

Seeing how there were Muslim Vikings, it stands to reason that some of these Vikings had North African and Middle Eastern ancestry.

According to Heritage Daily, an 11th century book by Abu Abdullah al-Bakri, the Book of Roads and Kingdoms, describes a Viking raid in AD 859, which included the fleet hitting up the Iberian Peninsula (another place Vikings would have encountered Islam due to the Islamic colonization of the area), the Mediterranean, and eventually the African outpost of the Emirate of Nekor. According to the site, the Vikings landed at present-day Morocco and headed to Nekor, which is now part of the present-day location of the Abdelkrim El Khattabi dam. The city was rich in Arabic culture, which means that if Vikings were there, some might have felt called to convert. But let’s also be honest about the nature of the alleged raid–it wasn’t to learn more about religion. According to al-Bakri, the Vikings took over the city in eight days, with many of the citizens taken as slaves. Hastein, the leader of the fleet, also purchased “blámenn,” or “blue men,” to sell in Irish slave markets. The “blue men” were possibly Tuaregs or Soussians.

With all of this said, archeologists have yet to find physical evidence to support al-Bakri’s story–a story that has been written before and after al-Bakri’s account. But the only scarce bit of information that could be taken as “evidence” is the DNA from skeletal remains of mice in the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira, which is close to Morocco. According to the study, the mice’ mitochondrial DNA share similarities with other mice in Scandinavia and northern Germany, instead of Portugal. The evidence suggests that the mice could have been transported on a Viking ship and when the ship landed in Madeira, the mice eventually colonized the area.

The Viking Herald also talks about this alleged account from al-Bakri as well as other stories that back up his account, such as a 11th-century Irish text, Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, that claims the raid was the reason why many North Africans were brought to Britain. Also, a 9th century account, the Chronicle of Alfonso III, describes “Northman pirates” who attacked Nekor, adding that “they killed a vast number of Muslims.” Also, as recent as 2013, archeologists analyzed a human skull found by a group of boys who happened to be at the River Coln in Fairford, England, an area also known to be a Viking camp between the mid 9th to early 11th centuries. The skull turned out to be that of an 18-24 year-old sub-Saharan African woman. Two other skeletal remains found in the area were also pointing to sub-Saharan and North African origins.

So what does all of this mean? It means that it’s impossible to rule out that weren’t ever Vikings with African heritage. With the number of times Vikings traveled to the East and South, it’s impossible to think that no Viking ever intermingled with the local natives and took wives (with “took” being used in a lot of different ways, since who knows if some of these wives were enslaved). And since we do know of Vikings with Asian descent and darker-skinned phenotypes, then why is it such a far reach to say that Vikings with North African or sub-Saharan heritage didn’t exist?

Of course, there will be differing opinions on this, such as Nordic Culture, which claims that “studies” show no DNA tests of Viking populations have found any sub-Saharan African ancestry. The article didn’t source any studies outside of a site called Eupedia.com¹, and if I’m reading the article’s DNA pie graphs correctly, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish people still show “Greek-Near-Eastern, North African” ancestry. Digging more into the DNA distribution from Eupedia, the Scandinavian region as a whole has between 1-5 percent of the E1b1b haplogroup, which is found prominently in Morocco, Somalia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, with smaller but still sizeable percentages in Eastern European countries and the Mediterranean.

So, as far as I’m concerned, the other archeological findings and historical figures discussed in my article provide a lot of evidence for the diverse populations of Vikings. While there might not have been a lot of African Vikings, since it would make sense for Vikings to travel to places closer to home in Europe more often than the East or South, that doesn’t mean there weren’t ever any African Vikings.

Viking history is much more than blonde hair

With the historical context for African Vikings established, it makes sense why Vikings star Caroline Henderson, who plays African-Norwegian Viking queen Jarl Haakon, said how her character is a way for viewers to look at the real, multicultural history of Vikings instead of the whitewashed version of Viking history that has been wrongfully commodified by right-wing sects.

“There might have been a Black Jarl Haakon or a Russian Jarl Haakon or somebody from Asia or Native American, most likely,” she said to Tudum, according to ScreenRant.”If you want to know more about stuff, what really happened, there’s so much research and interesting stuff that you can dig into.”

As ScreenRant also points out, Henderson is a Black Scandinavian herself. Her family is more modern–her parents are African-American and Swedish. But if cross-cultural and cross-racial pairings happen nowadays, why is it so hard to assume humans weren’t doing the same thing eons ago?

Interracial humans aren’t a modern phenomenon, and the diversity within Viking clans proves it. Learning about the cultural and racial differences within Vikings can help us foster a better, more complete sense of history and humanity. And, of course, it can help some of us to not be ready to march with pitchforks just because a young woman with African ancestry is playing a Viking in a film for kids and families to enjoy.

1. I can’t speak to how above board Eupedia is as a resource, so I wouldn’t recommend using it as a research tool, personally. Some of the users in the forums seem dodgy at best, and another site I’ve found that used the Eupedia map found in the Nordic Culture article was very 4-Chan adjacent. But I wanted to include its data to show how even if someone is trying to argue against the idea of African presence in Scandinavian Viking strongholds, their own data sources prove otherwise. Just because Scandinavian regions aren’t comprised of 25 percent or more African DNA doesn’t mean that African DNA has never touched Scandinavian shores. Clearly, if North African DNA is present, even in minute amounts, it means North Africans made it to Europe. ↩︎