Yeah yeah, I’m a bit late to the game with this one, but it’s been in my sketch book for a while so it had to be released sooner or later. >)
So… most of us have heard the controversy of this for a while now, but if you haven’t… In the movie Thor (a darn good movie btw), the character Heimdall (the guardian of the gateway) is played by Idris Elba… Why does this matter? Well, Heimdall is a white Norse god while Idris is an African-American actor. Why does this matter? Well, who the hell knows! Apparently some people were angry cause the director broke canon to cast an actor of a different race and some were angry cause he was a different race. Either way it’s just ridiculousness! The movie was good. He was awesome. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter much. I say it was good decision.
I won’t get into the whole “well of course Norse Gods were whiter than white… what else did they know of? for all they know, their Gods could have been purple catpeople” thing… So instead, lets talk about breaking canon. Race aside, what are your thoughts about breaking canon in retelling of stories. Such as many of the re-imaginings of the old comic books, movies, or tv shows. These seem to be met with a lot of mixed emotions, like Xmen or Star Trek or Battlestar… And god help us should they ever re-imagine Starwars…
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To a point — I still can’t really forgive Peter Jackson for making Faramir a jackass, at least at the beginning ;)
lol!
I thought he was right on. I always thought of him as a bit of a jackass in the books.
It’s easy to guess that the original stories from the Norse mythology would depict white peeps; the Norse gods lived “above” Scandinavia (you had to use the rainbow as a bridge to get there) and since everyone in Scandinavia at the present time were white, they most likely pictured the gods as white as well. But, the Vikings did trade with large parts of Europe and will, without doubt, have seen all sorts of skin colour along their journeys. Maybe they did reflect over skin colours, maybe they didn’t - It was several years since I read any of the Norse mythology, but from what I recall, there were little to no sayings about the skin colour of folks in the stories (although I do recall something about some blue giants, may have gotten that elsewhere though).
As for the poll - why would a change of unimportant details (such as skin colour) break the canon? As long as the story is the same and they don’t change any important details (as example: giving Sleipner (the horse of Odin) four or six legs instead of eight, as the number of legs is a detail that is often emphasized in the stories due to making the horse “extra-mega-ultra-fast”). For me, it’s a bigger break of canon to make Thor into a Marvel super hero as “the real deal” is much, much cooler ;D
Noticed that I managed to edit away a part of the text while writing (and I have no idea how to edit a posted post).
I do know that Heimdallr sometimes is said to be “the whitest of the gods” (and that it could be considered an important detail to keep), but one have to remember that the use of “white” and “black” in the Norse mythology almost always refers to your alignment and not your skin colour (such as good white witches and evil black witches) - Being whitest of the gods only means that he’s pure and “untaintable” by the dark side, a trait that I’m positive that Idris Elba can give to the character (haven’t seen the movie yet though ~_^)
very good write up there! and you bring a very interesting point to the table about how it could be just purity and nothing to do with skin color. I hadn’t thought about that!
Well, it is important to remember that words do change base meaning over time - one example is the very name of Snorri Sturluson (the person famous for, among other things, writing down most of the Norse mythology). He was from Iceland and at that time, Snorri (spelled “Snorre” in Swedish) was an acceptable name that came from the word “snurra” ["spin", "twist" and/or "tumble" in English] (generally interpreted as either “someone with a wild imagination” or “wild child” - i.e. it likely refers to that he had his mind or body in constant motion and either was a menace kid or that he told good stories).
Nowadays, however, no one in Sweden would ever be allowed to be named Snorre, as it now instead is considered slang and roughly translates to English as “weiner”.
What I want to point out with this is that we cannot read the old texts with our modern interpretation of the words - we either need a very skilled person to update the old texts (someone who have to be extremely careful when updating the words to use, as every change of word inevitably means that one risk loosing the original meaning of the text) to more modern words that still keep the original meaning, or that one have to really make an effort as reader to read the old texts as someone “back then” would have had interpret it. If we don’t keep that in mind, we risk misinterpreting and to shift focus from the important parts to completely irrelevant stuff.
And either way - should it turn out that the Vikings actually were incredibly racistic (which I hardly believe, based on how I’ve been taught the Norse mythology*) and actually only referred to the skin colour on Heimdallr, I don’t see any reason why we should keep that part of the canon - we’ve come far enough in our development to have no excuse for racism and we can just as well use the definition of white as that he’s pure and good hearted.
* = Baldur, as example, have also been referred to as the bright/glowing/ white god. One of his main trait is that he’s so good and nice that no one wanted to harm him and he was given immortality as reward (although he was slain due to that the immortality wasn’t perfect, something that Loki found out and couldn’t resist testing).
very good point!!!
uhg… just imagine if it was retranslated today… “hmm, says here they would seek console with a mystical oracle for knowledge… obviously that means they had Wikipedia!”
Ah, Thor! One of the few super heroes that no Scandinavian can take seriously…
what? he’s the awesomest! well… except for that winged hat and strange armor…
but I guess it would be like having the Buddha as a superhero in some parts of Asia…