TRUE MYTH

About the Book

Why is it that encyclopedias assert the Vikings, or Norsemen, landed in parts of North America, yet the Vikings have never been credited with its “discovery”? Historians bestow this honor on Christopher Columbus, who ventured here five hundred years after the Vikings, having never set foot on the continent! True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages takes the reader where he or she has never been before. We have always been told that Vikings, or Norsemen, were tall, blond, white and blue-eyed—an image that has been presented to us in books and films. Now comes a book that challenges this centuries-old assertion, presenting evidence that these vaunted warriors were not the people popular historians have told us they were. The author presents evidence that white-skinned peoples in England, Ireland, and Wales referred to Vikings as black pagans and black devils. The extent of their dominance in Europe is examined—in fact, the author presents a reassessment of Europe that some readers will find difficult to believe, beginning with man’s migrations into the continent and examining a number of black-skinned peoples who called Europe home from very ancient times almost to the present. The reader has never read a book like this—filled with quotations from noted historians as well as from several Icelandic sagas—that will take the reader on a journey he or she has never imagined! A more accurate picture of Europe has never been presented before. The writer revisits the last ice age, presents evidence of the heavy presence of blacks in ancient Europe, and revisits ancient Greece, Rome, and areas of Asia, discussing the presence of black-skinned peoples in them before arriving in Viking-age Scandinavia when Norsemen embarked on a three-century-long assault on the continent and began migrating to Iceland and other areas of North America. Once the reader has completed True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages, he or she will have to question what he or she has been taught, historians once thought to be trustworthy, and the notion that the races were strictly divided and had never intermingled. There has never been a truer picture of Europe written, and the reader now has the opportunity to embark on the most thrilling journey he or she will ever take.

About the Author

Nashid Al-Amin, author of True Myth: Black Vikings of the Middle Ages, is a native New Yorker, born and raised in Harlem. A Vietnam era army veteran who served three years, he was stationed in France and Germany during the mid-1960s and spent time in four other European countries—including a two-week leave in Copenhagen, Denmark. Upon leaving the army, he pursued acting for a number of years but had also begun studying history—especially the black man’s role in it. Although he was an honor student in high school, his family did not have money to send him to college; however, he continued to pursue acting and to study history on his own before entering college at thirty years old. Earning a master’s degree in English, he began teaching in colleges as an adjunct English professor, currently at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey. He is a divorced father of three who has now studied history on his own for more than forty years. He began focusing on the Vikings in 1991, spurred by the buildup for the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus “discovering” America. Wondering why the Vikings were not accorded this achievement, he wrote a twenty-page research paper to try and find the answer, reading it to a class he was teaching to see their reaction. However, it was when he began a second draft that he found information that the Vikings had, in fact, been black skinned—not the blond, blue-eyed whites he had always believed. The paper expanded to sixty-five pages; then he decided he had enough information to write a book. Through financial difficulty and two lost apartments, he finally restarted work on the book in 2003 and presents the reader with startling information about the Vikings and other peoples who have inhabited Europe.