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Dear Cecil:
Many years ago my grandmother told me that her grandfather's
ethnicity was "Black Irish." Recently I've heard three different
explanations concerning the origin of the term:
(1) It refers to a
mixture of Irish and Spanish blood dating from the time of the
Spanish Armada, when many shipwrecked Spanish sailors were washed
up on the Irish coastline and wound up staying.
(2) It refers to a
mixture of Irish and eastern European blood.
(3) It refers to a
mixture of Irish and Italian blood from the time of the Roman
Empire.
No books have been written on the subject, and no entry is
to be found in either the Encyclopedia Britannica or
the Oxford English Dictionary. So naturally one turns
to you. --Christian Ard, San Francisco
Dear Christian:
We dance here on the
fine line between science and folklore, a locale all too
familiar to us here at the Straight Dope.
The Black Irish seem to be mainly a U.S. thing. The Irish natives
I've heard from say the term is new to them.
People talk about the Black Irish as though they constituted a
mythical race on a par with the lost tribes of Israel. But in fact
all they mean (usually) is that somebody named McNulty has dark,
and in the classic case black, hair.
Even if we make the dubious assumption that dark hair genes
were completely absent in the original Gaels, it seems likely that
the incidence of dark-haired folk in a nation whose population only
slightly exceeds that of the city of Los Angeles could be accounted
for strictly by routine mixing due to immigration, trade contact,
and so on.
But you can see how exciting an explanation that makes.
So people have come up with all kinds of fanciful tales
instead.
The wildest notion is that black hair is evidence of
Spaniards marooned in Ireland following the wreck of the Armada. As
we've had occasion to discuss in the past, the number of
shipwrecked Spanish sailors who remained in Ireland for any length
of time was trivial.
I have also heard it said the black Irish were the first settlers
of Ireland--maybe the Phoenicians. The red Irish, meanwhile, were
descendants of the Normans, and the blond Irish are descended from
the Vikings. One of many drawbacks to this theory is that it seems
to leave the Gaels completely out of the picture.
A more plausible but still essentially unprovable
take on this idea is that black hair is a vestige of an
indigenous population of short dark-haired types overrun by the
fair-haired Gaels. Supposedly there are more black Irish in the
western part of the country, which fewer Gaelic invaders reached.
There is archaeological and, I'm told, linguistic evidence of
pre-Gaelic settlement. But how it was concluded that they were
short and black-haired I do not know. Seems like a silly thing to
make a fuss over in any case.
--CECIL ADAMS
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