What Is the Significance of Blond Hair and Why Is It So Desirable All Over the World?
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Such fair skin and hair was probably developed from an albino mutation, which is well known among the dark tribes of Africa; but while in Africa it is a disadvantage, in Scandinavia it had its merits and spread through the population, together with straight hair and thick beard. The initial settlement in Northern Europe is said to have taken place toward the end of the last ice age, while the ice was beginning to retreat, around 12,000 before the present; at that time, the settlers were fairly isolated from the rest of the continent, thus developing into a pure blond, hardy race. With the melting of the ice these people started moving out, searching for more territory with the food it can provide. It may be assumed that their hardy bodies and minds, being used to the harsh conditions of the North, made them stronger than other races and fit them to overcome any clash between tribes. Such clashes, either by violence (rape) or by mutual consent, lead the to the mixing and assimilation of races, thus creating all kinds of shades of hair that appear throughout the European population: fair, gold, carrot, copper and chestnut, the result of blond mixing with black and brown.
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Following sun worshipping, many gods and heroes representing it were considered in many places around the world as having blond, or golden hair; and since the sun represents fertility, so did also the figures symbolizing Love as a mark of fertility. This is how Robert Graves presents the White Goddess in charge of fertility among the rest, in his book by that name: “The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair…” (p. 24). This description is very close to the appearance of a Viking woman, even though Graves fixes her origin in the Mediterranean basin, among dark-haired population. The Love goddess Aphrodite is said to have climbed out of the sea at Cyprus, and according to many original paintings from ancient Greece, she is supposed to have had dark hair – as she is indeed often presented; Botticelli, however, painted his famous picture of hers with golden hair.
Similar to Aphrodite is the Celtic figure of “Niamah with the Golden Hair”, whose name means “Sun Tear”; her divine personality is expressed in the story that tells how she led the hero Oisin on her horse to the post-death “Islands of Happiness”. The dark or chestnut haired Celts had also a Sun god named Lugh, who was described as having golden hair that gleamed in the sunlight. Like him, on a 14th cent. French goblin, the figure of the Welsh King Arthur appears with golden hair, even though the Welsh are usually dark haired; the whole picture is infused with the golden atmosphere of the sun. Arthur was originally known as a military leader from the 5-6th cent., and the medieval royal ambiance takes him completely out of his original tribal belonging, putting him instead in a connection of golden regal-divine environment; the Arthurian myths connect him with the dying and reviving Sun god, and even with the figure of Jesus as symbolizing the sun. It is well known that Jesus was consistently painted by Christian artists as having golden hair, in blunt contrast to his Mediterranean origin.
The Sun deity could be, then, either male or female; in Semitic myths there were both the Babylonian Shamash god and the Canaanite Shamash or Shapash goddess. An Amerindian story of the Sun deity is told about a Mexican goddess named Chalchuialico, who was a fourth Sun goddess to rule after the three before her had vanished; but before she became a Sun goddess she was a Water goddess dressed in green, who had copper hair. For hundreds of years that Sun goddess supplied light and heat, while women and men appeared on the earth. But other gods envied her, and the God of Darkness (reminiscent of the Scandinavian Hodder), bothered her until she shed tears to the earth and everything vanished in darkness. In the end, the gods decided to create a fifth sun, and for that purpose they had to make a sacrifice, which would bring into being the sun and the moon. The sacrifice to the sun was to be the little goddess Nanna (again, reminiscent of an old world deity connected with the Nordic Balder). While the gods were burning their sacrifice, an eagle (one of the most prominent symbols of the sun) took out her body from the fire in the shape of a ball of fire, fixed it in the sky as she was wrapped in her golden hair.
Many golden haired figures appear in folk tales, which have developed from the ancient myths; one such legendary woman was Isolde, Tristan’s lover, famous not only from medieval poetry and a novel by the 19th cent. French author Joseph Bedier, but also from Wagner’s Opera. The legend tells that when Mark, the king of Cornwall, saw Isolde’s golden hair in a bird’s