Red, White, and Black in Symbolic Thought

The Tricolour Folk Motif, Colour Naming, and Trichromatic Vision

Bibliographic Data

ID8930964
AuthorsJessica Hemming (corresponding author)
Year2012
Volume123
Issue3
Pages310-329
Publication date2012-11-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFolklore (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0015-587X • E-ISSN: 1469-8315
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0015587x.2012.716599
OpenAlexW1985008300
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited29

The colours red, white, and black occur together in folktales, ritual contexts, and traditional art forms around the world. This article draws together research from folklore, linguistics, art history, vision science, perceptual philosophy, and primate biology to propose an evolutionary source underlying the symbolic resonance of these colours. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Professor Daniel Melia, Dr Antone Minard, and Professor Joseph Nagy for their many expert and provocative suggestions, and to Dr Caroline Oates for locating some hard-to-find references. Notes [1] Short precursors to this paper were presented at the California Celtic Conferences, UCLA, in 2010 and 2012. [2] There are very few cultures with terms only for black and white. The best-known example is the Dani of Papua New Guinea (Heider Citation1972a), whose two terms encompass the chromatic hues: “black/dark plus cool colours” and “white/light plus warm colours.” To reflect the composite nature of these terms, linguists now generally prefer “macroblack” and “macrowhite” (Witkowski and Brown Citation1977, 50–2). [3] See a representative sample in the volume edited by Hardin and Maffi (Citation1997), which also includes scores of further references to Berlin–Kay-inspired articles. [4] Regarding sequential lexicalisation, further research (linguistic and neurophysiological) has confirmed the Berlin–Kay sequence reasonably securely up to the division of a blue-plus-green term (like Welsh and Irish glas) into separate words for “blue” and “green.” Thereafter, the order seems to be less fixed and eleven is no longer accepted as the maximum number of possible basic terms. [5] This is common knowledge, but has been examined in detail in the medieval French context by Alice Colby (Citation1965). [6] Semantic “slots” for colours are more stable than the terms that fill them. See the discussion later in this paper. [7] The Indo-European roots for “white” and “black” are unidentified and there is a proliferation of basic terms in the daughter-languages (Shields Citation1979, 143). Many of the white terms are in origin brightness rather than hue words, such as the cognates Welsh gwyn and Irish finn [“white, bright, fair, holy”]. There is much still to be done on Celtic colour-terms (a useful start is Lazar-Meyn Citation1994). [8] Maria Tymoczko observes of LMU that the tricolour motif is extremely widespread and need not indicate any special borrowing from one text to another (Tymoczko Citation1985–6, 146–7 and notes 4–9, 12 and 16). She also notes the occurrence of another tricoloured male in the seventeenth-century Irish Duanaire Finn (Tymoczko Citation1985–6, note 9). Fionn's porter is describing Caireall son of Conbhrón: “Here are the colours of the man: the colour of a calf's blood in his cheeks, the colour of the raven in his brown hair, his body's colour as a lamb from the river” (Mac Neill Citation1908, 168). [9] The word she translates as “blue-gray” is vair, which is as problematic as glaukos, especially when applied to eyes. See Colby's comments on eye-colour in Chrétien where she renders vair as “sparkling” (1965, 41). [10] Her hair is “as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead” (“Song of Solomon” 4:1), which may possibly suggest a colour in addition to flowing downward movement. Later, her hair is “like purple” (7:5), which might be “dark,” or auburn, or perhaps simply “rich and luxurious” because purple in the ancient world was associated with the expensive Murex shellfish dye. [11] Indeed, it is possible that the medieval literary examples may have been influenced by the biblical prototype. [12] Non-basic (saturation terms) Irish gorm, “blue through black,” and Welsh gwrm, “dark (blue, brown, grey), dusky,” seem to derive from a word for “warm.” [13] Irish saturation terms provide an interesting comparison again: uaine [“bright/fresh spring-green”] may have originally carried connotations of “wetness, succulence.” [14] For a slightly more orthodox “forbidden” colours experiment to try at home, see Billock and Tsou (Citation2010). [15] Experiments on infants by developmental psychologists have long since demonstrated an innate human interest in strong dark/light contrasts. This led to the widespread vogue for black-and-white baby mobiles. [16] Note that the biologists here recognise implicitly that reddish-green is a perfectly perceptible colour. [17] Monkeys react affectively to colours much as humans do, becoming excited when presented with red and calm with green (Thompson Citation1995, 177). Red is exciting because it is edible

Art · Art history · Celtic languages · Color vision · Folklore · Irish · Linguistics · Literature · Mythology · Sociology · Trichromacy · Welsh · White (mutation · Anthropology · Artificial Intelligence · Categorization, perception, and language · Color perception and design · Computer Science · History · Multisensory perception and integration · Philosophy

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