Medieval Irish chronicles refer to dark-skinned individuals known as ‘Blámenn’ appearing alongside Norse raiders in the ninth and tenth centuries. Who were they, where did they come from, and what were they doing in early medieval Ireland?
Some 500 years after the Romans left The Irish annals record (Fir gorma) the Blue Men who were seized by the Vikings in Morocco.
The Irish Annals classify Gorm as a black Dane or black Gall (stranger). Dubh Gall means (Black foreigner)
The name Gormund is derived from Grim. The modern derivative of this is Graham or Graeme. In old Irish Grim means black.
It is said that Grahams Dyke was named after Septimus Severus, the Libyan born Roman Emperor.
In the Scandinavian sagas, Grim, son of Kveldulf, is described as black. He had a broad jaw, dark complexion, broad nose and curly hair.? The term Grim or Gorm was used to describe anyone with a dark complexion.
Whilst it cant be known whether he was of African stock, the Vikings were known to raid into Africa, so his mother could potentially be an African captive, though this pure conjecture.
In the medieval scriptoria of Irish monasteries, monks recording the events of each year did not only write about kings and saints. They also noted the arrival of strangers, the outcome of battles, the ravaging of coastlines and the appearance of new peoples. Among the strangest and most debated entries in the great Irish annals are the references to *Blámenn* — dark men — appearing in Irish history in the ninth and tenth centuries AD alongside the Norse raiders the Irish called *Gaill* (foreigners).
The word *Blámaðr* (plural *Blámenn*) is Old Norse. It literally means “dark man” or, more precisely, “blue-black man” — the Old Norse *blár* could indicate not just darkness of skin but a dark, almost bruised colour, related to the English word “blue.” In the Norse sagas and in the Irish annals that record Norse activity, the term appears consistently enough to suggest these were recognisable, recurrent figures in the Norse world: not mythological beings, not a metaphor, but people.
The Annals of Ulster
The *Annals of Ulster* — one of the most reliable and extensively studied of the medieval Irish chronicle sources, compiled from entries beginning in the fifth century AD and running to the sixteenth — contains several references to Blámenn that have drawn the attention of historians of early medieval Ireland and the Norse world.
An entry for 862 AD describes a raid by *Dubgaill* (Dark Foreigners, one Irish name for the Norse) in which Blámenn are mentioned as part of the raiding party or as people brought into Ireland by Norse activity. A later entry, for 977 AD, describes Blámenn as participants in a battle at Limerick alongside Norse forces.
The historian Alfred Smyth, in his major study *Scandinavian York and Dublin* (1975), was among the first anglophone scholars to systematically examine these references and ask what they meant. Smyth proposed that the Blámenn were Africans — specifically, people of North African or sub-Saharan African origin — who entered the Norse world via the well-documented Norse slave trade and eventually appeared in Ireland as part of Norse raiding and trading networks.
How Did Africans Enter the Norse World?
Several routes of entry have been proposed and are not mutually exclusive.
**The Volga Trade Route**: Norse traders — the *Varangians* of the eastern routes — penetrated the river systems of Eastern Europe as far as the Caspian Sea, where they traded with Arab merchants. The Arab Islamic world maintained an extensive trans-Saharan slave trade that brought enslaved Africans from sub-Saharan regions to the Arab heartland and to the Mediterranean. Norse traders in contact with this trade could have acquired enslaved Africans and brought them back into Scandinavia and the Norse Atlantic world.
**Iberian Contacts**: Norse activity in the Iberian Peninsula is extensively documented. Norse raiders attacked Seville in 844 AD and returned in 859–861 AD, during which time they raided the coast of Morocco and North Africa. The historian Neil Price, in *Children of Ash and Elm* (2020), notes that Norse forces definitely encountered North African and possibly West African populations during these Iberian campaigns. Some of these individuals could have entered the Norse world as slaves, mercenaries or through other means.
**The Mediterranean Connection**: By the ninth and tenth centuries, Norse traders and mercenaries were active throughout the Mediterranean world, including in Sicily, southern Italy and North Africa. Contacts in these regions could have facilitated the movement of Africans into northern European Norse networks.
Ali and Ali: Extending the Argument
Among researchers who have engaged most directly with the question of Black African presence in the pre-medieval northern European world are scholars working in the tradition of what might be called revisionist African history — a tradition that includes the pioneering work of J. A. Rogers, Ivan Van Sertima and others who challenged the assumption of African absence from ancient and medieval European history.
Two researchers known in this tradition as Ali and Ali have argued that the *Blámenn* references in the Irish annals and Norse sagas should be read more expansively than mainstream medieval studies have typically allowed. Their position — advanced through published essays and public lectures — is that:
- The frequency of *Blámaðr* references across Old Norse and Old Irish sources indicates a more substantial and recurrent African presence in the Norse world than scholars have acknowledged.
- The standard interpretation, which treats Blámenn as enslaved individuals, underestimates the agency and variety of roles that Africans may have played in Norse society — including as soldiers, traders and free members of Norse communities.
- Linguistic evidence suggests that *Blámenn* were distinctive enough to name as a category, implying they were not so rare as to be simply anomalous.
This position is contested by mainstream medievalists, some of whom argue that *Blámenn* may simply denote particularly dark-haired or dark-featured Europeans rather than Africans, and that the frequency of references does not necessarily indicate large numbers. The debate reflects a broader tension between revisionist approaches to Black history — which rightly push back against the assumption of African absence — and the constraints of evidence in pre-modern history.
The Genetic Evidence
A landmark 2020 study published in *Nature*, drawing on ancient DNA from over 400 individuals from Viking-age archaeological sites across Scandinavia, the British Isles and the wider Norse world, found genetic evidence of individuals with ancestry from outside northern Europe. While the study’s primary finding was the diversity of genetic origins within Viking-age populations more broadly, it also found individuals with genetic profiles inconsistent with purely northern or western European origin — raising the possibility that some represented the kind of movement of people the Blámenn references describe.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which contributed to this research, has been cautious about inferring skin pigmentation from ancient DNA in these populations, noting that the genetic determinants of skin colour are complex and that appearance cannot be read straightforwardly off a genetic profile. Nevertheless, the genetic heterogeneity of Viking-age populations demonstrated by the study is consistent with the textual evidence for a diverse Norse world.
What the Blámenn Reveal About Early Medieval Britain and Ireland
The significance of the Blámenn references is not simply that they provide evidence for Black Africans in ninth and tenth-century Ireland and Britain. It is that they reveal the early medieval world as far more connected, mobile and ethnically diverse than the standard narrative of a homogenous “Dark Ages” Europe suggests.
The Blámenn were products of a world of long-distance trade and violent displacement — of slave-taking and slave-trading on a continental scale, of commercial networks that linked Scotland to Morocco to the Caspian Sea. They were present in Ireland not as ambassadors of some imagined African civilisation but as individuals caught up in the turbulent, violent and cosmopolitan world of early medieval Europe.
Their presence in the Irish annals is fragmentary, ambiguous and disputed. But it is there. And for anyone tracing the deep history of Black presence in the British Isles, it is a thread worth following.
Sources and Further Reading
- *Annals of Ulster*, translated and edited by Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill (1983), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
- Smyth, A. P. (1975): *Scandinavian York and Dublin*, 2 vols., Templekieran Press / Irish Academic Press
- Price, N. (2020): *Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings*, Basic Books
- Winroth, A. (2014): *The Age of the Vikings*, Princeton University Press
- Sikora, M. et al. (2019): “Population genomics of the Viking World,” *Nature* 585: 390–396
- Ibn Fadlan (922 AD): *Risala* (Account of the Rus), translated by James Montgomery (2012), in *Two Arabic Travel Books*, New York University Press
- Rogers, J. A. (1940): *Sex and Race*, vol. 1, self-published, chapters on African presence in pre-modern Europe
Related Links
- Osprey Publishing – Blue MenAfrican
- Roots of Ireland – Blue Men
- Tha Bla-Maors – The Black Vikings
