Heill, Gerald,

It's quite common that different languages have different ideas about colour. Irish, for instance, uses 'glas' for both green and blue - there is no distinction between the two - at least not in the language.

'Blár' is both blue and blue-black, whereas 'svartr' covers dark brown and brown-black, thus 'blár' can be applied to ravens, but I think in clothing would cover something like navy blue to woad blue (a very common blue dye of the time). Truly black clothing I believe was very rare to non-existent in the Middle Ages.

Gerald Mcharg wrote:

Good evening all

 

Will you pardon me if I don't submit my translation this time? I've done it in pen and ink (biro, really) but I find it's a long mechanical process putting it on computer at a time when I'm in the process of translating Egil's Saga - I've got half of it done and it's very exciting.

However, bleary-eyed as I am from just finishing Chapter 54, It's very refreshing to read other people's Hrafnkels and their observations on the blue/back dress code. The first reference I came across to blue being black was second hand. It's mentioned as a foot note in 'the Long Ships', a novel by Frans G.Bengtsson, translated from the Swedish by Michael Meyer in 1955, I think. Here it is mentioned that negroes were referred to by the vikings as 'blue men'.

From my own observations, I've noticed that the colour of persons with the very blackest of skins and the hair of some white people which is of the deepest black colour, can in some circumstances, by a trick of light, appear blue. Whether this applies to clothes or not, I don't know. Is there anyone in the field of optics who could shed some light on this?

In the Iliad and other works in AncientGreek, the word 'glaukos' can be construed as 'grey' or 'blue', so the matter of colour confusion isn.t restricted to the northern world

Cheers

Jed

 

Kveðja,

--

Daniel Bray

dbray@...

School of Studies in Religion A20

University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." H. G. Wells