Blond Hair, Blue Eyes:  Some Thoughts on the Aryan Ideal

What is beauty?  Specifically, what is it to be a beautiful person?  This has long been considered one of those imponderable questions, akin to asking about the meaning of life.  But this does not mean that we cannot have a valuable and substantive discussion.  Beauty, of course, is partly subjective, but it is also partly universal.  There are good reasons, biological reasons, for this.  Hence we can make a meaningful inquiry into the matter.  This, despite the fact that discussing beauty in the context of the White race is politically incorrect in the extreme.  Western political elites are currently doing all they can to push the supposed virtues of dark-skin aesthetics, and to offset or displace any visible presence of White beauty.  Despite this, they will fail—for good biological reasons.

When we observe peoples all around the world, we find at least one thing in common:  people everywhere value lightness.  People want light-skinned partners, light-skinned children, and they do everything possible to lighten their own skin.  Skin-whitening is big business globally, growing from around $8 billion to nearly $12 billion within the next few years.  (I set aside for the moment the desire of Whites for a tanned-body look; this is a special case that I will examine later.)  Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all seek light skin, either of their own races or of the truly White-skinned north Europeans.  Along with this come ancillary values:  blond hair and blue eyes.  People of dark-skinned races frequently dye or lighten their hair, wear blond wigs or hairpieces, and otherwise employ various tactics to appear light-haired or blondish.  Blond hair is indeed rare; only around 5% of White adults are naturally blond.  And yet, some 60% to 70% of White women dye their hair blond at some point.

Blue eyes are more common, existing in something like a quarter of White Americans and perhaps half of White Britons.  And they do appear in many other racial groups; approximately 10% of all humans globally have some shade of blue eyes.  The percentage is highest, unsurprisingly, in the Scandinavian countries, where up to 90% are blue.  As with blond hair, blue eyes are almost universally seen as attractive.  We can rest assured, if there was some way to change eye color as there is with hair, millions would do it.

It is striking, then, that these universally-accepted qualities of beauty derive from, and primarily reside in, Whites of northern Europe.  The White race, it seems, contains within itself the global standard of beauty.  Whites could indeed be justifiably seen as the most beautiful race in the world.  This fact should be a source of pride for Whites everywhere, something they should never want to hide or diminish.

And yet, in our PC world of today, we are not allowed to speak this way.  It sounds far too “supremacist,” far too “racist,” for sensitive ears.  Our media and academic elites are far more concerned that the races and ethnicities lacking such qualities—virtually all blacks, and the vast majority of Arabs, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews—might “feel bad” if we highlight or praise White beauty, so they do everything conceivable to accentuate black, dark brown, and mulatto characteristics.  The result is that White beauty is disparaged, and the world everywhere becomes that much uglier.

One might ask:  Why is this even important?  Why the emphasis on blueness of eye color?  Or on blond hair?  Are such things just “pretty”?  And even if they are, why do so many people find blue eyes and blond hair attractive—as they undeniably do?  These are pregnant questions.  I will argue here that such features are not “just” appealing; or rather, they are appealing for very real and consequential reasons.  In this essay, I want to examine a number of diverse but related aspects of the blond-haired, blue-eyed ideal—an ideal that also goes by such names as ‘Nordic,’ ‘Scandinavian,’ and more controversially, ‘Aryan.’  Let’s first start by taking a look at the physiology of the Aryan people.

The Science of ‘Aryanism’

The Aryans have an interesting history, no doubt.  Consider the basic etymology involved here.  The root of the word, arya, is Sanskrit.  Originally, circa 2000 BC, it meant simply speakers of Sanskrit language; later it became associated with the lighter-skinned peoples of central Asia.  Due to their superior abilities and intelligence, and capacity for culture-building, the term ‘Aryan’ became synonymous with ‘the best’ or ‘the noble.’  As they expanded southward and eastward, they became the dominant ruling people.  In this sense, the Aryans are indeed rulers or masters of others; but it was by dint of their superior skills, intelligence, and morality.  In a way, it was a justly-earned dominance.

Scientists today almost uniformly avoid all talk of Aryans, preferring to reserve that term for linguistic and perhaps cultural groups of people.  And of course, the Nazi association makes the term largely taboo, in any case.  But science, thankfully, has the power to overcome taboos.  Recent scientific research has shed new light on the biological and historical origins of the light-skinned people of the north.

Let’s take the long view for a moment.  The human legacy goes back at least 7 million years, to the earliest appearance of the genera Australopithecus and Ardipithecus.  These were not yet of the genus Homo—‘human’—which would appear only around 2.5 million years ago.  But they were proto-humans, and were our common link to chimpanzees, who are our closest genetic relatives.  These proto-humans were, like modern chimps, fully hair-covered, with silky black hair.  Their skin, though, was light—even white.  Even today, if we were to shave bare a chimpanzee, he would be white.  The biological reasons for this are clear:  dark skin, like dark hair, is an evolved characteristic to protect from strong sun.  The dark pigmentation comes from melanin, which exists in two forms:  eumelanin and pheomelanin.  The former has a dark brown tone, the latter reddish.  The amount and combination of these two determine the actual color of one’s skin, hair, and eyes.  Functionally, melanin protects the body, the eyes, and specifically the DNA from damage by intense ultraviolet solar radiation.  It can be produced in a short-term and temporary manner, as in tanning, but over millennia, it can come to be a genetically-heritable, and thus “permanent,” change in skin tone or hair or eye color.

Melanin production, though, is biologically costly.  It takes effort and energy for the body to produce and maintain melanin, something it would rather not do, so to speak.  Having evolved in the equatorial regions of central Africa, proto-humans would have needed to incur the cost of heavy melanin production in their hair and eyes—but not their skin, being fully hair-covered.  Hence they, like modern chimps, would have had white skin, black hair, and dark brown eyes.

By around 2 million years ago, the first humans began to appear, in the form of Homo habilis and Homo ergaster.  They started to walk upright and to run, and perhaps as result, began to lose body hair—when the thermal cost became too high.  (Rather like wearing a fur coat in summer.)  But shedding hair exposed the skin.  Thus, melanin production increased, and our skin became black.

Black-skinned early humans migrated into Eurasia around 1.8 million years ago, and as they moved north, likely experienced a lightening of their skin.  They would have first travelled through the Middle East, at about 30 or 35 degrees north latitude, and then on into Europe, at 45 or 50 degrees north.  There is a substantially weaker sun at such latitudes, and thus within a few thousand years, humans would have gradually lost melanin—in skin, in hair, and in eyes.  In a sense, human skin began to revert to its evolutionary natural tone—white.

In the North, something else happened:  humans first experienced winter.  That is, cold weather, ice, and snow.  As black Africans, we had no evolutionary experience with such things; but now, these intrepid northerners needed to adapt:  to stay warm, to cook and preserve food, and to build suitable shelters.  The intellectual and cognitive burden increased, and undoubtedly this new evolutionary pressure pushed us to think more, to think in more sophisticated ways, and thus to have more-evolved brain functions.  It also increased the need to cooperate, to trust one’s neighbors, and to create reliable and durable social networks.  In short, the northerners became more sociable, and they became smarter.[1]

Today we have evidence of light-skinned, ‘white’ people that lived in the Middle East around 25,000 years ago.  (Undoubtedly they existed long before that, but we lack the evidence to prove it.)  A separate group of humans apparently entered Europe via Spain around 19,000 years ago, and we have evidence that they had bluish eyes; this is our earliest indication that eye color had begun to lighten, upon reaching 40 degrees latitude or so.  (I note here that hominid eyes are “naturally” blue, that is, when lacking the protective melanin.  Blue is not a pigment or color per se, not like a ‘dye,’ but rather simply the absence of the darkening melanin.)

As people pressed further north into central Eurasia—say, above 50 degrees north latitude—skin and eyes would have naturally continued to lighten, and eventually the hair as well.  About the same time as bluish eyes appeared in Spain, blondish hair began to appear in north-central Asia.  By 8,000 BC, the ‘westerners’ that had come up through Spain, and the ‘easterners’ that came via the Middle East, met and began to interbreed in north-central Europe.  These people, now called Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers, would have had all-white skin and a predominance of blue eyes and blond hair.  A final wave of immigrants, the Yamnaya, arrived around 3,000 BC; as they blended into the existing hunter-gatherers and began to settle into fixed agricultural communities, they formed the core of modern-day north Europeans.  These people, circa 3,000 BC, would have been the first true Aryans.  Over the next 2,000 years, they would come to dominate the scene in all of north-central Europe.

The result is striking, even today, and especially in the Nordic countries—those that lie above 55 or 60 degrees latitude.  I have spent some time in these countries in recent years, and the predominance of very blond people, especially blond women, is obvious.  (Women tend to have lighter blond hair than men, and children more than adults due to relative lack of testosterone.)  In my travels, it was not uncommon to see groups of three or four college-aged women, all of whom had long, flowing, pure blond hair.  I have seen young children with astonishingly blond hair—so depigmented as to be almost white.  They almost appear as albinos, but of course they are not.  The effect of the sun on human appearance and human genetics is truly amazing.[2]

Divine Northerners

For all of recorded history, people have told myths and stories of others living in the far-off lands of the north.  These would have been based on actual experience with these mysterious and striking people, some of whom would have traveled south.  Hardened to the rigorous climate, intrepid, smart, and able to construct civilizations and cultures, it is no wonder that such people took on a mythic quality.  And their striking physical appearance came to be the visible sign of such a noble personage.  In this way, blue eyes, blondness, and very white skin came to be seen as good, rare, desirable, and beautiful—perhaps divinely-inspired, perhaps godly.[3]

When it came to formalizing the official gods and myths of the various European cultures, then, it is unsurprising to find that the southern Europeans, in particular, would construct their gods and heroes in the image of these divine northerners.  This is reflected, very explicitly, in their writings.  Consider, for example, the incomparably important writings of Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey, circa 800 BC.[4]

When we review the Iliad for relevant references, we find around 15 mentions of light-colored hair.  Most of these are applied to the Spartan king Menelaus, but also to the gods Apollo and Demeter, to the demigod hero Achilles, and to the figures of Meleager and the woman Agamede.  In all cases, Homer uses the same Greek word: xanthos.  Formally, xanthos means ‘yellow’ or ‘bright’, as in our English word ‘xanthic’ (“of, or relating to, a yellow color”).  Technically, every usage by Homer of xanthos should be translated as ‘blond.’  But, for poetic effect, the various translators of Homer have chosen a variety of related terms and phrases.  Thus, for example, we find reference to the “fiery hair” of Apollo (1.235), the “golden hair” of Meleager (2.737), the “red-haired Menelaus” (3.338), “blond Demeter” (5.575), “blond Agamede” (11.880), and the “red-gold” hair of Achilles (23.162)—all xanthos.  And this, in a single translator’s edition![5]

One also finds other translated references to “fair hair,” which we might presume to mean ‘blond.’  But in these instances, Homer uses the word eukomos, which literally means “good hair.”  This, of course, need not be blond, so we are left with an uncertain picture in mind.

Regarding light-colored or blue eyes, we find in the Iliad a single reference:  in Chapter One, Homer refers to the goddess Athena and her “clear grey eyes.”  In Greek, the word is glaukopis—literally, blue or blue-green (glaukon) eyes.  More often today we might refer to someone with “steel-blue” eyes, which is more flattering than “grey”—but the point is the same.

In the Odyssey, we find fewer references to xanthos hair (e.g., the “yellow locks” or “russet curls” of Odysseus [13.455]), but more to the glaukopis of Athena (e.g. 2.424, 2.475, 13.325).  In all there are about half as many such references as in the Iliad.  But notably, in both works, the characteristic features belong to gods, goddesses, and heroes.  They are clearly marks of distinction and noble birth.

Homer’s contemporary, Hesiod, makes a handful of similar references in his much-shorter Theogony.  There we find four mentions of the glaukopis of Athena (lines 10, 575, 890, and 924), and he also writes of the “xanthos Ariadne” (line 950), presumably meaning her hair.  He then adds one new term:  khrusokomes, or ‘golden-haired.’  This is applied to the god Dionysus (line 950).

Other such ‘Aryan’ references would follow in subsequent centuries.  Around 525 BC, the philosopher Xenophanes examined the customs of the Thracian people—modern-day Bulgarians, roughly.  He wrote that “their gods are blue-eyed (glaukos) and red-haired (pyrros)”.[6]  The use of the word pyrros—from pyr, ‘fire’—is interesting; the gods no doubt had “fiery-red hair.”

Into the 400s BC, two great lyric poets of the ancient world, Pindar and Bacchylides, made several relevant references.  In Pindar we find mention of the xanthos Graces, xanthos Achilles, xanthos Danaans, khrusokomes Apollo, xanthos Menelaus, and for the first time ever, xanthos Athena—blond gods and heroes all.[7]  Regarding blue eyes, Pindar makes only three such mentions, all of the glaukopis of Athena.[8]  For his part, Bacchylides writes of xanthos Briseis, xanthos Athena, khrusokomes Apollo, khrusean Aphrodite, the surprisingly xanthai Spartans, and more generally of “the mortal men who crown their golden (xanthan) hair.”[9]  Bacchylides makes no reference to the blueness or greyness of anyone’s eyes.

Pindar, furthermore, was among the first to give the mysterious blond and blue-eyed northerners a name; he called them Hyperboreans.  This name means, literally, those dwelling beyond (hyper) the north winds (boreas).  His first and oldest ode (Pythian 10), circa 498 BC, provides an extended and fascinating account of these people:

Neither by ship nor on foot could you find the marvelous road to the meeting-place of the Hyperboreans.  Once Perseus, the leader of his people, entered their homes and feasted among them, when he found them sacrificing glorious hecatombs of donkeys to the god.  In the festivities of those people and in their praises, Apollo rejoices most, and he laughs when he sees the outright arrogance of the beasts.  The Muse is not absent from their customs; all around swirl the dances of girls, the lyre’s loud chords, and the cries of flutes.  They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully.  No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles, they live without fear of strict Nemesis.  Breathing boldness of spirit, the son of Danae [Perseus] once went to that gathering of blessed men, and Athena led him there.  (lines 29-46)[10]

The Hyperboreans are thus beloved by the gods, happy and joyful, full of life, and free from pain and strife.  They are, indeed, a “sacred race” (hiera genea).

Sometime around 425 BC, the great historian Herodotus issued his classic text, Histories.  There he discusses the characteristics of many peoples and nations across the known world, including those of the Budinians, who were marked by their glaukos eyes and pyrron hair (4.108).  The specific location of these people is unclear, but they apparently hailed from just north of the Black Sea, in the southern part of modern-day Ukraine, an area identified as the original staging ground for the Indo-Europeans/Aryans on the basis of recent population genetic research.

Notably, Herodotus too elaborated on the Hyperboreans.  In his same work, he details a story of two Hyperborean girls who travelled south bearing gifts for the Greeks, only to end up dead in Delos—accident or murder, we are not sure.  A portion of his tale is as follows:

Concerning the Hyperborean people, neither the Scythians nor any other inhabitants of these lands tell us anything, except perhaps the Issedones. …  But Hesiod speaks of Hyperboreans, and Homer too in his poem The Heroes’ Sons, if that is truly the work of Homer.[11]

But the Delians say much more about them than any others do.  They say that offerings wrapped in straw are brought from the Hyperboreans to Scythia; when these have passed Scythia, each nation in turn receives them from its neighbors until they are carried to the Adriatic Sea, which is the most westerly limit of their journey; from there, they are brought on to the south, the people of Dodona being the first Greeks to receive them.  From Dodona they come down to the Melian gulf, and [ultimately] to Delos.  Thus, they say, these offerings come to Delos.

But on the first journey, the Hyperboreans sent two maidens bearing the offerings, to whom the Delians give the names Hyperoche and Laodice, and five men of their people with them as escort for safe conduct. …  But when those whom they sent never returned, they took it amiss that they should be condemned always to be sending people and not getting them back, and so they carry the offerings, wrapped in straw, to their borders, and tell their neighbors to send them on from their own country to the next. …  I know that they do this.  The Delian girls and boys cut their hair in honor of these Hyperborean maidens, who died at Delos…  In this way, then, these maidens are honored by the inhabitants of Delos. …

I have said enough of the Hyperboreans.  I won’t tell the story of Abaris, alleged to be a Hyperborean, who carried an arrow over the whole world, fasting all the while.  But if there are men beyond the north wind, then there are others beyond the south.  (4.32–36)

Not quite the “sacred race” of Pindar, but still a people portrayed as generous, noble, and exceptional.[12]

By the late BC and early AD period, Roman writers were making note of the same distinctive qualities.  Horace (23 BC) describes one Pyrrha in terms of her flavam comae—blond hair.  And he speaks of a Phyllis as having similarly flavae hair.[13]  In 100 AD, the great Roman historian Tacitus, in his highly consequential discussion of the Germanic people, refers to their caerulei oculi (“fiery blue eyes”) and their rutilae comae (“red hair”).  Two decades later, in his Satire 13, and speaking of the same people, Juvenal deployed the terms caerula and flavam to refer to the Germans’ blue eyes and (now) blond hair.  These were the first explicit historical connections between Germanism and Aryanism.

Such were the views of the ancient world.  Little changed, biologically, over the next two millennia, given that there were no major waves of migrations, nor yet any high-speed transport that would have enabled rapid population movement.  During this time, the superior Europeans set about creating Western civilization, advancing technology, and creating art and culture on an unprecedented scale.  Into the mid-nineteenth century, Aryanism had gained scientific credibility, and was taken mainstream by such men as Arthur de Gobineau, most notably in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853).  Some decades later, Houston Chamberlain’s influential work Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) further advanced the Aryan thesis.  Chamberlain placed particular emphasis on the Aryan-Germanic peoples who, he argued, had been responsible for the most significant advances in Western culture.  It was this belief in German superiority that led him to join the National Socialist party early on; Chamberlain was in fact a great supporter and advocate of Hitler, until his death in 1927.

It was via such men as Chamberlain and, later, Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, that the concept of ‘Aryan’ became so closely associated with ‘Nazism.’  Thus it was that both the culture-building, idealistic Aryan and the Nordic-Scandinavian blue-eyed blond aesthetic were blended into the overall National Socialist worldview—for good or bad.  From then on, the Aryan ideal of beauty was stained with the supposed Nazi conception of a master race.  I will address this whole topic in a follow-up essay.

Closing Thoughts

What is the legacy of all this today?  Firstly, I think it shows that the Nordic/Aryan aesthetic is not just a matter of “good looks.”  It is a reflection of a long genetic history in northern climates, and is a parallel marker with several positive human qualities:  creative, trusting, culture-building, sociable, intelligent.  The same evolutionary forces that gave people blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin also gave them a number of salutary virtues.

Second, it marks a sharp contrast with the popular, Jewish/Hollywood image of mixed races, Blacks, Asians, mulattos, and generally “people of color.”  Jewish Hollywood wants to foist on Americans—and the whole world—an ideal of random race-mixing.  They do this via many images and storylines that simultaneously promote racial mixing and disparage White ideals, especially the classic Aryan/Nordic aesthetic.

For example, Hollywood loves to play up the “dumb blonde” stereotype.  Blondes are ok, but they have to be stupid, or naïve, or superficial.  But as a factual matter, this seems to be untrue.  In fact, there is some data for the contrary.  In an interesting paper from 2016 titled “Are Blondes Really Dumb?,” author Jay Zagorsky draws from a large national database to show that “blonde women have a higher mean IQ than women with brown, red, and black hair.”  Furthermore, blondes “are more likely classified as geniuses” than people of other hair colors.  The differences were more pronounced among women than men.[14]

Additionally, there is an old study—from almost 100 years ago—that argues for a similar result.  Professor G. Estabrooks compiled data on nearly 1,000 boys and girls, ranging in age from 9 to 16.  Based on a coarse sorting between “light” and “dark” hair, the light-haired children had an average IQ of 109, versus 106 for the dark-haired.  He also looked at correlation with eye color, and by this measure, the blue-eyed group had an average of 109, versus 105 for the brown-eyed.[15]  Obviously we would need further data to draw firm conclusions, but indications are that the ancient Aryan advantage has carried down, in some degree, to the present day.

And then we can look at entire nations.  Not long ago, Lynn and Meisenberg (2010) calculated average IQs for 108 countries.  Looking just within Europe, we find a significant difference between the four Nordic nations (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark) and, for example, four south-European nations (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal); the former average 99, and latter 95.  Not a huge difference, but still significant.[16]  Once again, this is in line with our expectations.

Thus is my brief study of Aryan beauty.  I have no grand and glorious conclusions to offer, other than the simple observation that beauty matters.  Physical appearance is an expression of one’s genetic inheritance, and thus reflects the kind of person one is.  The same genes that give a certain physical appearance also give a certain state of mind, certain behavioral tendencies, and certain motivations and values.  Beauty is not just “skin deep,” as our PC crowd like to say.  Beauty matters.

Classic markers of White, Aryan beauty have been valued for millennia, and this likely was for very real, very objective, and very evolutionary reasons.  The blue-eyed blonds were smarter, more skilled, more industrious, and more robust.  They were more creative.  They were idealistic and altruistic.  They knew how to build and sustain civilizations.  They were, in short, better people.

Jews and leftist liberals don’t want to hear any of this—especially Jews, who are notably lacking in blond hair, blue eyes, and Aryan personality traits.  For leftists and Jews, everyone is “equal.”  For them, skin tone is little more than a biological paint, laid over a physical body that is otherwise identical in all humans.  This is sheer nonsense.  Privately, Jews know this, of course; but outwardly they all maintain a façade of egalitarianism because this significantly aids their cause among the Gentile majority.  When you are a Jewish supremacist, it is best to make outward proclamations of equality even as you project supremacist thinking onto your primary opponents, Aryans and Whites.

Whites everywhere need to relearn about their own glorious legacy and to regain an appreciation for their outstanding physical and intellectual virtues.  As a whole, Whites are the most beautiful, most productive, and most virtuous race on the planet.  This is acknowledged, directly and indirectly, in a million different ways, by people all across the Earth.  We are indeed “children of the gods,” as Plato proclaimed.  We are indeed a “sacred race,” as Pindar recognized.  We need to cast off those who would denigrate and debase us, reestablish our long-lost sense of self-confidence, and reclaim our rightful place in the world community.

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Thomas Dalton, PhD, has authored or edited several books and articles on politics, history, and religion, with a special focus on National Socialism in Germany.  His works include a new translation series of Mein Kampf, and the books Eternal Strangers (2020), The Jewish Hand in the World Wars (2019), and Debating the Holocaust (4^th ed, 2020).  Most recently he has edited a new edition of Rosenberg’s classic work Myth of the 20^th Century and a new book of political cartoons, Pan-Judah!.  All these are available at www.clemensandblair.com.  See also his personal website www.thomasdaltonphd.com.

[1] Today this is known as the ‘Cold Winters Thesis’.  See, for example, “Only in America: Cold Winters Theory, race, IQ, and well-being” (B. Pesta and P. Poznanski, 2014), Intelligence 46; and R. Lynn, Race Differences in Intelligence (2015).  This idea is sometimes viewed as a modern reactionary theory, but in fact it goes back at least to Arthur Schopenhauer.  In 1851, he said

Only after man propagated his stock during a long period of time outside his natural [African] habitat between the tropics and extended it…into the more frigid zones, did he become fair and finally white. …  The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races. …  All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.  This they had to do in order to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization. (Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, Oxford University Press, pp. 157-159).

[2] In notable contrast to the native Scandinavians are the imported black African and Middle-Eastern “refugees” that are now quite visible in all major cities there.  One cannot help but feel that there is something profoundly anti-natural about this situation, that somehow these recent immigrants simply do not belong there.  It feels like a crime against nature.

[3] This, in fact, was exactly Plato’s view.  In his Republic we find a passage in which he is discussing various physical attributes of boys and young men, including skin tone.  Some boys are swarthy and dark-toned, but “the pale ones are children of the gods (leukous de theōn paidas einai)” (474d).

[4] We believe that Homer lived sometime around 800 BC in the region called Ionia, comprising the far west coast of modern-day Turkey.  This area had been part of the Greek proto-empire since at least the 1000s BC.

[5] Robert Fagles’ translation (1990).  The line numberings of Fagles are slightly different than other translations, unfortunately.

[6] Fragment 3, from Clement, Miscellanies.

[7] Source information:  xanthos Graces (Nem 5.55), xanthos Achilles (Nem 3.45), xanthos Danaans (Nem 9.15), khrusokomes Apollo (Olym 6.42; Pyth 2.15; Olym 7.34; Isth 7.49), xanthos Menelaus (Nem 7.30), and, xanthos Athena (Nem 10.8).

[8] Source information: Nem 7.30; Olym 7.34; Nem 10.8.  Note:  If Athena is now both blond-haired and blue-eyed, she is surely the definitive Aryan goddess.

[9] Source information:  xanthos Briseis (Ode 13.135), xanthos Athena (Ode 5.90), khrusokomes Apollo (Ode 4.1), khrusean Aphrodite (Ode 9.70), xanthai Spartans (Ode 20.1), and “the mortal men who crown their golden (xanthan) hair” (Ode 9.20).

[10] Further brief references to Hyperboreans occur in Isthmian 6 (circa 484 BC) and Olympian 3 (circa 476 BC).

[11] Any such references by Hesiod or Homer are lost to history.

[12] I note in passing that no less a figure than Nietzsche was evidently inspired by this same northern people.  At the very beginning of his landmark essay Antichrist, he states “We are Hyperboreans.”  “We”—Nietzsche and his followers—intellectually dwell among the ice and snow, far away from the comfortable, complacent, so-called civilized people; “we know very well how far off we live,” he says.

[13] In Odes 1.5 and 2.4, respectively.

[14] In Economics Bulletin, 36(1): 401-410 (2016).

[15] “Intelligence and pigmentation of hair and eyes in elementary school children,” American Journal of Psychology 41(1): 106-108 (1929).

[16] “National IQs calculated and validated for 108 nations,” Intelligence 38:353-360 (2010).  Particularly striking is a comparison of ‘light-skinned nations’ with ‘dark-skinned nations.’  But I will leave this for another time.