Hi Mona,
Here is some evidence of black goats:

"Hafr áttu þrévetran, svartan at lit," sagði Oddr.
"Hann vil ek drepa láta ok flá belg af bæði með hornum ok klaufum."
{you have a 3 year old goat, of black color -- said Oddr --
I want him killed, and his skin flayed and made into a bag,
with his horns and hooves still on it..}

So they did have animals with a black wool.
But the wool was called svartr and not blár.
It seems to me now, that blár usually refers
to cloth dyed to a dark color.

Perhaps it wasn't the skin of the Africans that was blár.
A better explanation is that it referred to the blue
dress of the Touaregs of North Africa. (in Snorri's Heimskringla,
first chapter)

Best regards
Xigung

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "mona striewe" <mona@...> wrote:
> wow, this thread is really interesting. thanks for all the responses
from a mostly silent reader of this list :-)
>
> some minor comments: to the gaeilge / gàidhlig question: yes, the
words for colours are the same in irish and scottish gaelic, the
languages are close enough for that. by the way it is a common thing
that different languages use different divisions of the colour
spectrum. it is not, that they "use the same word for two or more
different colours" - that's just how it appears from the perspective
of another language with a different perception. in gaelic there are
words like "gorm", "glas", "liath" and "dubh" to cover the broad range
of blue, green, grey and black shades which are manifold in nature.
the differences between the words are not easy to explain by
translating, because the perception and division of the colour
spectrum in english is different. i only learned it when gaelic native
speakers gave me examples, like what would you say to this colour of
grass or that colour of the sea or the sky on a certain day, and so on.
>
> another question mentioned was the possibility of dying real black
clothes in medieval times. i remember a similar discussion about that
in a medieval forum for experimental archaeology, and most of the
people there agreed that black was a really rare colour, it is not
possible to be dyed with early medieval methods, and later, when it
became more possible, it became the colour of clerical people and was
usually not worn by others (but this is a matter of dress codes which
only developed during the middle ages and were not fully existent in
early medieval times).
> in that forum they also discussed the possible existence of sheep
with black wool, and if i remember it right, it was unsure whether
such races of sheep existed in northern europe in early medieval time.
i think they agreed at least on the existence of dark grey and dark
brown :-)
>
> just my two shillings to the discussion :-)
> mona