Hawks, Horses, and Huns

The Impact of Peoples of the Steppe on

the Folk Cultures of Northern Europe
John D. Niles

ABSTRACT
As archaeological evidence confirms, the Germanic groups who
established kingdoms in northwest Europe during the Age of
Migrations were participants in a broad cultural zone extending well
into Eurasia. Elements of Anglo-Saxon culture in particular have
precedents among the semi-nomadic peoples of the steppes. This
paper explores these connections with an eye to the Huns as a catalyst
of change. KEYWORDS: Myths of origin, funerary archaeology,
animal style art, epic song, personal adornment.

It is a true honor to be invited to offer a tribute to Archer Taylor

(1890-1973) in an address to members of the Society that he
helped to found. The list of prior speakers in the Archer Taylor
lecture series reads like a “Who’s Who” of folkloric studies in
America, starting with Taylor’s friends and peers Bertrand Bron-
son (1902-86) and Wayland Hand (1907-86) and carrying on with
Archie Green (1917-2009), Roger Abrahams, Barre Toelken, and

John D. Niles is Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University

of Wisconsin—Madison, and Professor Emeritus of English at
the University of California, Berkeley.
Western Folklore 75.2 (Spring 2016): 133-164. Copyright © 2016. Western States Folklore Society
134 JOHN D. NILES

other distinguished North American folklorists, several of whom

are with us in this very room. These are among my heroes in the
academic profession, and I count it as one of my blessings that I
have come to know some of them personally.1
Although I never knew Archer Taylor personally, I have
made good use of the books he wrote, especially his defini-
tive studies of the proverb and the riddle (Taylor 1931; Taylor
1951). I also have reason to be grateful for his having left much
of his personal library, which is representative of his interests
in both folklore and medieval literature, to the University of
California. Taylor was not just a superb Germanist. His broad
horizons encompassed the language groups of the world as well
as remote corners of the past. His academic genealogy goes
back to George Lyman Kittredge (1860-1941), with whom he
studied at Harvard; through Kittredge to the great ballad scholar
Francis James Child (1825-1926), who was one of the founders
of the American Folklore Society; and beyond that to the great
Germanist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863)—the effective founder
of what were then the twin sciences of Germanistik and Volks-
kunde—whose lectures in Berlin in the year 1850 are said to
have been attended by Child. So when we trace this thread we
are looking at a distinguished lineage indeed.
Significantly for my theme today, Taylor’s vision took
in Asian as well as European folklore. This dimension of his
scholarship is exemplified by his book Comparative Studies in
Folklore: Asia-Europe-America, an anthology that treats riddles
and riddle collections garnered from the Cantonese community in
San Francisco as well as from various parts of Asia (Taylor 1972).
Taylor was also the world’s leading authority on the Shanghai
gesture, on which he published a monograph in the Folklore
Fellows series (Taylor 1956; cf. Bäuml and Bäuml 1997:215-19).
I am referring not to the 1941 film noir of that name—Josef von
Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, which plums the icier depths
of upper-class depravity in a pseudo-oriental setting—but rather
to the irreverent gesture itself, which involves strategic use of the
thumb, the fingers, and the nose. Though you may not know of
that gesture by that name, you have probably made good use of it
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 135

at some point in the past. When things degenerate in the lecture

hall, it can be a handy recourse on either side of the podium.

PUTTING PRESSURE ON THE C AT E G O R Y

OF THE GERMANIC

Despite the breadth of Archer Taylor’s scholarly interests, the

present talk is not one that would necessarily have pleased him
as a Professor of German in an academic tradition going back
to the Grimms, for what I intend to do is to put pressure on the
category of the Germanic. For close to two centuries, this cat-
egory has often been taken for granted in the academy, but for
no good reason except in the field of comparative and historical
linguistics. And even in that specialization, the delineation of the
Germanic languages as a branch of proto-Indo-European is not
as straightforward a matter as is often assumed, given the number
of non-Indo-European linguistic elements present from an early
date, in languages customarily labeled “Germanic,” that are like-
ly to reflect a pre-Germanic substrate (Hawkins 1990). But—I
sense your relief—Germanic linguistics is not my subject today.
What my remarks do pertain to is the Germanic as a cultural
category, including the realms of folklore and mythology. In
this sense the term can be traced back to ancient Roman authors
including the late-first-century Roman historian Tacitus, who
described in detailed and somewhat idealized fashion the barbarian
groups living to the north and east of the Empire’s Rhineland
frontier (Tacitus 1999). As is now widely acknowledged, Tacitus
wrote his treatise the Germania partly so as to disseminate real
knowledge about those peoples among his countrymen and
partly as a form of cultural critique aimed at the improvement
of Roman morals. About fourteen centuries later, after Tacitus’s
treatise was recovered from near-oblivion, the idea of the
essential unity, the virtues, and the portentous destiny of the
Germanic-speaking peoples of the world fired the imagination of
no few European thinkers. The leading figure in that program of
cultural revival was Jacob Grimm, who published an edition of
Tacitus’s Germania in 1835 and in that same year brought out
the first edition of his own great scholarly work the Deutsche
136 JOHN D. NILES

Mythologie, which sought to reconstruct the original mythology of

the German-speaking peoples of Europe. A comparable impulse
motivated the publication and continued reworking of his and his
brother Wilhelm’s collection of German folktales, the Kinder-
und-Hausmärchen (1812-1815, with many subsequent editions).
In turn, certain thinkers of subsequent generations, influenced by
Darwinian evolutionism and pseudo-scientific doctrines of racial
determinism, created a kind of shibboleth of racial Germanitas.
Like the myth of Arthurian chivalry that was in vogue in the later
nineteenth century in England as well as Germany, the illusion of
a Germanic race occupying a special niche among the peoples of
the world led straight to the catastrophe of the First World War.
Since this aspect of European intellectual history is well
known, I would not allude to it today were it not that certain of
its foundational elements remain in place. In the early medieval
context that is my specialty, many scholars still apparently assume
that the category of the Germanic is a solid one, to judge from
their manner of using that term with few signs of analytical rigor.
My purpose today is to contribute to a current in recent scholar-
ship that undermines that assumption (see for example Lee and
McLelland 2012).
My thesis in brief is that what the peoples and cultures that
are often called “Germanic” (or, with more specific reference to
my own academic specialty, “Anglo-Saxon”) actually represent,
in the early medieval context, is a fusion of various elements both
eastern and western in origin. While certain aspects of the early
medieval cultures of the Germanic-speaking peoples of northwest
Europe were more-or-less autochthonous, and while what many
other aspects represent are borrowings or adaptations from Rome,
there are yet other elements in this hybrid picture that relate to
peoples inhabiting the region extending from the steppes of Cen-
tral Asia to the Carpathian basin. Much of my current research is
directed to ascertaining what these more easterly elements were
and how, during the period of the fourth to seventh centuries AD,
they entered so fully into the fabric of the society of the social
elites of northwestern Europe as, in current scholarship, to be
absorbed into the category of the Germanic.
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 137

EURASIA WITHOUT BOUNDARIES

IN THE AGE OF ATTILA

Let me begin with some remarks on geography. The cultural

hybridity that is my theme today cannot well be understood
unless Europe is conceived of not as a separate continent, which
it most assuredly is not, but rather as one part of a broad Eurasian
geographical zone that has long been characterized by multiple
influences working in multiple directions.
For a moment imagine yourself consulting a topographical
map that encompasses the whole of Europe and Asia. Much of this
landmass, extending to the north of a series of mountain ranges
extending from the Alps to the Altai mountains, is known to ge-
ographers as the Great Lowland Zone. At its extreme western end
this zone extends as far as lowland Britain, while toward the east it
encompasses the plains of Mongolia and Siberia. Over a period of
roughly three and a half millennia (from ca. 2000 BC to ca. 1500
AD), once the horse was domesticated and a technology enabling
overland travel by carts or wagons was fully in place, cultural
interchange in this part of the world was facilitated by the central
“highway” of the steppes. This situation remained relatively un-
changed until the sixteenth century, when Spanish and Portuguese
galleons opened up maritime routes linking the coastal regions
of all five continents of the world in what has since become a
global economy. Long before what can meaningfully be called
the Silk Road came into being, the steppes of Central Asia, with
their relatively easy access to certain main riverways of Europe,
offered routes by which the peoples of the Eurasian landmass took
part in a single complex system of exchange (Kuzmina 2008). The
people who inhabited the steppes, with their mobile and semi-
nomadic way of life, were the chief middlemen in this system.
When people traversed this region, they brought with them
not just material goods and livestock but also stories, ideas, and
cultural skills and practices. Moreover, sometimes complicating
and sometimes reinforcing the effects of peaceful interchange,
warrior elites whose homelands were in one or another part of
Central Asia periodically preyed on the great empires extending
to the east, south, and west of the steppes. Such groups also served
138 JOHN D. NILES

those empires as confederates or were hired as mercenaries, as

for example when Parthian archers or Sarmatian cavalry served
as auxiliary units in the Roman legionary armies. In these and
other ways, peoples of the steppes contributed to the circulation of
knowledge and goods over vast distances extending from Britain
in the west to the more remote parts of Central Asia in the east.
What I suggest, then, is that instead of promoting a fetish
of western Germanitas to be contrasted to a more nebulous and
threatening zone of eastern barbarism, what the medievalists and
folklorists of prior generations should always have been studying
is Eurasia.
“Eurasia without boundaries” is thus a key phrase in my
discourse today. As for my historical focus, it is the era known
as the “Age of Migrations,” or what speakers of German call
the Völkerwanderungszeit, using that term to refer to the two-
hundred-year period extending from about 375 to about 575
AD.2 Thanks largely to the import of unprecedented amounts of
Roman gold into northern lands whether through tribute, loot, or
payments to mercenaries, this was an Age of Gold for the peoples
of northwestern Europe, as any visitors to the national archaeo-
logical museums of Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom
can attest. This era was also a great Age of Stories for the peoples
of that region, for memories of the leading kings and heroes of the
Völkerwanderungszeit remained in circulation long afterwards in
the form of songs, heroic poems, and sagas.3 The Age of Migra-
tions—now known to some as the “Age of Attila” (Maas 2015) in
recognition of the key place of that king and his people, the Huns,
in these formative events—was a time when all the military elites
of the western world seem to have competing with one another
for wealth and prestige, alternately fighting against or forging
alliances with one another or with Rome. By one means or another,
members of these groups managed to siphon off a good part of the
wealth of the late Roman Empire, converting Roman solidi (gold
coins) into magnificent jewelry and other wearable wealth.
In modern historiography, the compelling importance of the
Age of Migrations lies in its aftermath, when certain elite groups
established nuclei of power that, over time, developed into the
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 139

modern nations of England, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden,

Norway, Spain, and Italy, to name just the leading ones from a
western European perspective. This is to see that former era
through the lenses of modern nationalism. Just as important is that
for a period of a few centuries, northern Europe became a dynamic
point of intersection for cultures both European and Asian in their
origins. Although many different ethnic groups were involved in
this ferment—the Goths come straight to mind, in their several
divisions, while Lombards, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, Gepids,
Angles, Saxons, Alamanni, Sarmatians, Alans, and other groups
also played key roles—my purpose today is to focus on the people
known to history as the Huns (Latin hunn ). For it is the Huns, a
people of Central Asian origins, who burst on the European scene
during these centuries, triggering momentous changes through
their military conquests and campaigns. To speak more precisely,
what triggered these changes was the emergence of a powerful
confederacy of peoples led by the Huns, for it involved indigenous
and migratory peoples of many different ethnicities, including
Sarmatians and Alans who had previously established homelands
north of the Black Sea. The impact of this invasion of Europe came
to a head under the Huns’ last, most feared, and most charismatic
leader, Attila (d. 453), who reigned over a vast northern empire
that for a while rivaled the power of imperial Rome.
The rest of my talk will progress in an interlaced fashion
through the following questions. First, who were the Huns, and
what were some key elements of their culture? Second, what was
their impact on the West, speaking in cultural rather than political
terms? And third, why should self-respecting folklorists like your-
selves care about these matters, anyway?

WHO WERE THE HUNS?

Whatever their antecedents may have been, whatever the exact
region was from which they came, and whatever language they
spoke (a Turkic language, most likely), the Huns enter European
recorded history during the fourth and fifth centuries, when they
progressively won control over territories north of the Caspian
Sea and the Black Sea before establishing their main base of
140 JOHN D. NILES

power in the Carpathian basin (also known as the great Hun-

garian Plain), an oasis of the steppe set in the heart of Europe.4
During their westward expansion the Huns established multiple
alliances and confederacies, at the same absorbing other peoples
into their armies and their hierarchy, so that they eventually ruled
over a multilingual empire extending for thousands of miles over
central and western Eurasia.
The Huns’ choice of the Carpathian basin as their European
base was a strategic one. Once securely established to the north
and east of the River Danube, which marked the limits of Roman
power, the Huns were well situated to do what they were spe-
cialists in doing: namely feasting, drinking, engaging in lucrative
mercantile activities, and terrorizing their neighbors, chiefly with
the aim of gaining either loot or tribute. They were the Vikings of
the plains, as it were; or with perhaps better justice, we might call
the Scandinavian Vikings of later centuries “Huns of the seaways.”
The Huns’ impact in the west came to a head during the
440s and 450s, when Attila’s armies made repeated devastating
incursions into both the Eastern and the Western Roman Empire.
One of their first objectives was the imperial city of Constantinople,
which they skirted in the year 447 but could not sack. Not long
thereafter, in the year 451, they invaded Gaul, sacking towns and
cities as far west as Orléans, where their advance was brought to
a halt by an alliance of Roman forces. The following year they
invaded Italy, proceeding up the valley of the River Po as far as
Milan. Each of these expeditions gained them untold amounts of
plunder, supplementing the annual tribute that the Eastern Roman
emperors were willing to concede to them for a number of years.
The Hunnic Empire was short-lived, however. After Attila’s
unanticipated death in the year 453, the military contingents that
had been united under his leadership seem to have split up in
multiple directions, taking with them whatever spoils they were
able to obtain.
When thinking about the Huns, it is important to keep in mind
that despite their special character and unique history, they were
one of a number of culturally homologous peoples of the steppe
(Basilov 1989; Khazanov 1994). Thanks largely to the ecosystem
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 141

of the steppe and the demands it puts on animal husbandry and

other aspects of domestic economy, one can trace a remarkable
homeostasis in the life-ways of this region over a period of sev-
eral millennia, from the period of the Scythians (a blanket term
associated with the period from ca. 800 BC to 200 AD) to the later
empire of the Mongols (ca. 1200-1400 AD). Here, as clearly as
anywhere else in the world, can be traced examples of what Henry
Glassie has called the “massive fact of continuity” that constitutes
a tradition (Glassie 1995:396).5 When one speaks of the culture of
the Huns, much of what one says is likely to apply to numerous
peoples of the steppe whose semi-nomadic way of life followed a
similar pattern.
To begin with the salient element in this picture: the Huns
were superb equestrians, as other peoples of the steppe have
been both before and since (see Olsen 2006; Fragner 2009). The
breeding, training, and sale of prized horses is likely to have
been the backbone of their domestic economy. Moreover, as the
vehicle par excellence of the ruling class and the military elite,
the horse has long had a central role in the folklore and mythol-
ogy of peoples of the steppe. In the epic songs of Inner Asia that
have been preserved in living tradition into the present century, a
hero’s closest companion is likely to be his semi-magical horse.6
When barely out of the cradle, for example, the hero of the
epic poem Manas is given a horse and is ready to ride, and his
wonder-horse is thereafter his most faithful companion, often
being singled out for praise. In a version of this epic recorded
by Wilhelm Radloff in the nineteenth century, a single set de-
scription of the hero’s horse occupies fifty-three lines of verse
(Chadwick and Zhirmunsky 1969:85).
In an aligned development, and again like other peoples
of the steppe, the Huns were superb archers (Torday 1997).
When conjoined to their superb equestrian abilities, their skill
in archery made for a lethal mobile strike force. The particular
bow that members of the Hunnic warrior aristocracy used with
deadly effect is known from the archaeological record and is
known to specialists as an asymmetrical compound recurved
bow: “compound” because it consists of three pieces of curved
142 JOHN D. NILES

bone alternating with two pieces of curved wood, with all these
parts bound together by sinew; “recurved” because of its special
shape, bending away from the archer in a manner that gives the
bolt added velocity; and “asymmetrical” because the lower part
of the bow is shorter than the top part, thus making the weapon
specially suited to equestrian use. A bow of this kind was not just a
formidable weapon. Like the double-bladed pattern-welded long-
sword, the Hunnic bow was a superb example of a handcrafted
object combining the functions of utility and aesthetics. When set
in a tomb beside a dead warrior, as such weapons sometimes were,
it was a potent symbol of status and identity.
Also like other peoples of Central Asia before and since, the
Huns were barrow-builders.7 Their barrows, or kurgans, must have
both dominated their physical landscape and figured importantly
in their mental world, just as these imposing structures have con-
tinued to loom large in the imagination of subsequent inhabitants
of the steppes. As folklorists are well aware, funerary art has a
profound capacity to delimit sacred spaces while at the same time
affirming continuity with a group’s sacralized past. Kurgans, in
particular, as monuments of the storied dead, are reminders of
the value customarily set on wealth, fame, and personal ancestry
among the peoples of Central Asia. Noteworthy examples of such
monuments are the fourth-century BC Scythian royal tombs at
Pazyryk, in the Altai mountains at approximately the meeting
ground of present-day Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and China.
These barrows were unearthed by the Russian archaeologist Sergei
Rudenko in the 1930s. Certain of their contents were remarkably
well preserved thanks to the permafrost in which they had long
lodged. Among the objects excavated at Pazyryk and now owned
by the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is the head of a
sacrificed horse, its skull and skin intact. Its remarkable trappings
include an elaborate brace of antler-like projections constructed of
leather and wood (Rudenko 1970; Barkova 2000).
Horse-burials and other sacrifices of living creatures very often
accompanied these burials. An example is the great kurgan dating
from about 600 BC that was excavated in 1897 at Kostromskaia
in the northwestern Caucasus. Here an earthen mound was built
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 143

up over a house-like wooden tomb. Found at the perimeter of the

mound were the remains of twenty-two horses as well as thirteen
human beings, all of whom had evidently been sacrificed at the
time of the funeral (Baumer 2012-15, vol. 1:228-29). Princely
barrows of this kind are not uncommon in this region; at least
sixty, mostly of Scythian date, have been unearthed in the region
of Crimea alone, north of the Black Sea (Tolochko and Polin
1999). These mounds were not just heaps of earth. When one
takes into account the feasting, ritual acts, games, and acts of oral
performance that were a traditional part of funerals in this region,
as well as the visual prominence of kurgans in the landscape and
hence their role in social memory, these tumuli were focal points
for a group’s construction of its identity.
Although subject to looting, kurgans of this type are an
invaluable source of information about the material culture of
social elites during this period. Wealthy people of the steppes
have a long tradition of wearing their wealth. Precious clothing
and splendid jewelry are ostentatious features of the archaeology
and ethnography of this region. Included in the collections of the
State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg are many handcrafted
gold objects that derive for the most part from burials of this
kind. Sometimes geometric in their design, sometimes decorated
with motifs in the animal style that is characteristic of this region,
some of these artifacts are among the most expressive examples
of “barbaric” style in existence. It is a fair inference, in fact, that
what brought the Huns as far west as to the northern shore of
the Black Sea and, in the course of time, to the Roman province
of Dacia and the banks of the Danube was the lure of gold, that
metal of solar radiance, together with the lure of the gems that
the goldsmiths of this era were adept at working into brilliant
polychrome jewelry.
What the Huns particularly cherished in their jewelry—and
what other peoples of this era likewise prized—was the combina-
tion of gold and inset garnets. Noteworthy examples from the
region of Kerch in the Crimean peninsula are among the treasures
of the British Museum (Dalton 1924), while additional examples
are on display in virtually all the major archaeological collections
144 JOHN D. NILES

of Europe. Although the gold of which these objects are chiefly

made could have been recycled from various sources, a good part
of it evidently derived from mines in the former Roman prov-
ince of Dacia—present-day Transylvania—where the Romans
undertook extensive gold-mining operations before that region
fell again under barbarian control. As for the deep red garnets that
are the other key element of this type of jewelry, they apparently
derived from the riverbeds of South Asia, particularly Sri Lanka,
an island whose natural stores of gems became available first to
Eastern Roman patrons, and then to people of high rank living
further to the west, via the Romans’ networks of maritime and
overland trade. The craftsmen who excelled in manufacturing
jewelry of this level of technical competence are thought to have
been inhabitants of Greek colonies located in the region of the
Black Sea, where the influence was felt of semi-nomadic groups
peopling the steppes.8
When the Huns gained control over the Pontic region, they
adopted this polychrome style as their own. One encounters it on
Hunnic horse harness, sword and sheath mounts, dagger mounts,
brooches, belt buckles, belt ends, necklaces, pendants, earrings,
clothing mounts, and shoe buckles worn beneath the lower hem of
the caftans that are a traditional part of Central Asian dress. It would
not be hyperbolic to maintain that the gold and garnet treasures
produced at this time and for another two to three hundred years,
and that were proudly worn by high-ranking Huns and their elite
confederates, bears comparison with the most stunning jewelry
ever produced by human hands.

W H AT WA S T H E H U N S ’ I M PA C T IN THE WEST?
It was not long before polychrome jewelry of this type came to
be worn by the elites of northwest Europe. Within about thirty
years of the death of Attila and the breakup of his empire (which
followed within two years of his death), gold-and-garnet jewelry
of a comparable quality came to be deposited in richly furnished
tombs in Gaul (Kazanski 1982). Beyond doubt, the most spectacu-
lar example is the set of treasures found in the furnished tomb of
Childeric (d. circa 482), the founder of the Merovingian dynasty
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 145

of kings from which the later kings of the Franks claimed their
descent (James 1988:58-64; Böhner 1981).
Childeric’s tomb was excavated in the year 1653 at the
present-day city of Tournai, Belgium, directly across the Chan-
nel from those parts of lowland Britain that were being settled
by Angles and Saxons. Although most of the treasures unearthed
there were stolen in 1831 and never recovered, a few items that
survived that event are on display in the Cabinet des Médailles
of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, while the lost ones had
previously been documented in a fine set of engravings made
right after their discovery. In terms of style and technical art-
istry, the superb gold-and-garnet polychrome jewels and fittings
found in this tomb have their closest parallels in fifth-century
tomb furnishings from parts of present-day Romania and Hun-
gary that were then under Hunnic control. Moreover, among the
polychrome treasures excavated from Childeric’s tomb were a
large number of cicada-style mounts—that is, small decorative
objects that might once have been attached to a horse’s robe, or
perhaps to a royal cloak. These ornaments are of a distinctive
type whose antecedents can be traced back through Central Asia
to China. The type was introduced to Europe by the Huns, who,
like other peoples of Central Asian origin, seem to have had an
interest in cicadas as omnipresent small creatures of the steppes.
Although certain other treasures found in Childeric’s tomb ges-
ture toward the maintenance of Roman tradition, the presence of
these non-Roman features points to a court that wished to claim
dual ancestry, as it were, Roman and Mediterranean on one side
and Hunnic on the other.9
Nor is the presence of gold-and-garnet polychrome jewelry
the only link between Childeric’s grave and the Huns. A new
round of excavations undertaken in 1983 in the ground closely
adjoining Childeric’s tomb revealed the existence of twenty-one
sacrificed horses. These were found at the edge of an area over
which a central tumulus apparently once stood. In addition, the
original excavations at this site had yielded skeletal remains of
a single horse right by the body of the king himself. Whoever
was responsible for planning this tomb complex as a whole—this
146 JOHN D. NILES

was most likely the king’s widow Basina, a native of Thuringia,

together with the highest-ranking members of the court—these
persons could scarcely have made a more emphatic gesture away
from Rome and in the direction of the former empire of the Huns.
Horse burial, though a commonplace of the funerary archaeology
of peoples of the steppes, was not a Roman practice, and it is at-
tested in western Europe only very rarely before this date.
Spectacular archaeological discoveries that pertain to the
late sixth and early seventh centuries confirm that the appeal of
Hunnic-style personal ornament extended beyond Gaul to neigh-
boring parts of Scandinavia and Britain. In 1939, to cite just one
celebrated instance, researchers investigating a cluster of barrow
graves at Sutton Hoo, East Anglia, made the archaeological find
of the century. Mount 1 of the seventh-century royal burial ground
at Sutton Hoo was discovered to contain an entire ship burial. At
the center of the ship, where the body would have lain, were found
exquisite examples of gold-and-garnet jewelry. While the practice
of ship-burial reflects influences emanating from early medieval
Scandinavia and lowland Germany, the vogue of gold-and-garnet
polychrome jewelry, as we have seen, goes back to Merovingian
precedent and, beyond that, to the work of goldsmiths based in
the proximity of the middle and lower Danube and the Black Sea.
Moreover, many of the objects found at Sutton Hoo incorporate
fantastic non-naturalistic motifs executed in an insular version of
the animal style that is characteristic of the arts of Central Asia.
Many other Anglo-Saxon artifacts known in the archaeological
record, some of them executed in gold and garnet, play varia-
tions on this same zoomorphic style, which often features stylized
raptors and beasts of prey.10
The art historian Leslie Webster, former curator of early
medieval antiquities at the British Museum, has characterized
certain prominent manifestations of the animal style as involving
“a carefully constructed artistic vocabulary and grammar” (Webster
2012:15). Moreover, she associates this style with a distinct
worldview and mythology, for “highly stylized animal ornament
was the main portal through which ideas about the cosmos, ancestry,
life and death were transmitted visually” (Webster 2012:81). The
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 147

worldview and mythology to which she alludes are rooted in

Eurasian barbarian traditions, for the animal art featured in these
artifacts could scarcely contrast more sharply with the naturalistic
arts of Greece and Rome, despite certain thematic connections
there as well.
Rooted in the eastern barbarian world, too, is the practice
of horse burial. The discovery of over thirty instances of horse
inhumation in early Anglo-Saxon England, along with many
additional examples of horse sacrifice or cremation, reinforces
one’s sense that what are often represented as simply “Anglo-
Saxon” or “Germanic” cultural practices might more properly be
identified as insular variations on practices that are well attested
in prior Eurasian tradition (Fern 2007, 2010). The appearance of
these practices at this particular time in the archaeological record
of northwestern Europe seems to owe much to the influence of
the Huns and their Germanic-speaking allies. Recent excavations
at Mound 17 at Sutton Hoo, for example, have uncovered the
burial, side by side, of a man and a horse (Lucy 2000:90-92). The
gilded horse-harness was decorated with animal-style art. Double
burials like this are yet another assertion of a cultural allegiance
extending eastward toward the former empire of the Huns, for
comparable high-end horse-and-man burials dating from a much
earlier period are known from the Altai mountains and other parts
of Central Asia.
It is not just the physical structure of the princely barrow
graves of northern Europe that calls to mind the kurgans of Central
Asia, however, nor is it just the practice of horse burial. Particular
artifacts found at these sites, too, have eastern prototypes. A
noteworthy example is the ceremonial stag from Sutton Hoo
(Bruce-Mitford 1975-83, vol. 2:328-39). This three-dimensional
figure once surmounted a ring and a finial that together formed
the top part of what is thought to have been a symbol of regal
power, the main part of which took the form of a great ceremonial
whetstone. Precedents for this beautiful stag, which might
otherwise be taken to epitomize Germanic art, are found in the
arts of the steppe going back to at least the fifth century BC, many
centuries before the first barrows were built at Sutton Hoo. Among
148 JOHN D. NILES

the many examples that could be cited is one from kurgan 2 at

Pazyryk. This one is of interest not just because of its physical
resemblance to the Sutton Hoo stag, but also because it served as
a poletop—that is, the finial of a staff of office of some kind, as
the deer images of Eurasia often did.11 If one examines these two
objects of power side by side with unbiased eyes, what one sees is
not a “Germanic” object juxtaposed with a more ancient one from
the Altai mountains, but rather a striking example of continuity in
the traditional arts of Eurasia.
Not only in its overall conception, then, but also in certain of
its particular furnishings, Mound I at Sutton Hoo is representa-
tive of a new style in funerary arts and practices, one that came
into favor in sixth-and seventh-century Britain after having been
adopted previously in Merovingian Francia as well as in regions
to the east of the Rhine (Carver 1999; Pollington 2008). The
closest analogue to the polychrome treasures unearthed at Sutton
Hoo is offered by the jewelry found at Childeric’s tomb. Like the
great Migration-Age tumuli of Sweden and southern Denmark,
these two very high-end burial sites testify to the widespread
adoption, by people of the highest rank in the new societies that
were then under construction in the West, of practices and styles
that are well attested in the Danubian regions conquered and
settled by the Huns. These sites, in turn, have close parallels on
the Pontic steppes and farther to the east, in those parts of Cen-
tral Asia where the Huns apparently resided before their entry
upon the European scene.

MUSIC, SONG, SHAMANIC RELIGION—AND MORE?

Thus far I have directed attention to funerary customs and material
artifacts. But what of the realm of intangible cultural heritage?
What of oral performance, in particular? Were the Huns a musical
people, and if so, could their traditions of heroic song, too, have
had an influence in the West?
This is not an easy matter to resolve. In a society that has no
traditions of literacy, music and song are ephemeral aspects of
social life that by their nature leave no trace. Still, the presence of
musical instruments in furnished warrior graves of both Central
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 149

Asia and western Europe, including the famous lyre from Mound
1 at Sutton Hoo, points to the importance of music and song to the
court society of both regions, including the members of a warrior
elite.12 By far the earlier remains of musical instruments are those
from Central Asia.
Moreover, if an eyewitness can be our guide, there can be no
doubt that the Huns were indeed a musical people. The one early
medieval writer who speaks with undoubted authority about the
Huns is the Greek writer Priscus. As a cultured aristocrat attached
to the early fifth-century court of the Emperor Theodosius II in
Constantinople, Priscus took part in a state mission undertaken
in the years 448-449 to Attila’s court, at a place in the Hungar-
ian Plain whose location remains unknown. Remarkably, Priscus
describes the Hunnic king’s court not as if it were a den of thieves,
but rather as a multi-ethnic society governed by elaborate rules of
etiquette. Of particular interest is Priscus’s account of a banquet
hosted by Attila. The affair was an elaborate one that lasted for
most of an afternoon and all that same evening. Toast after toast
was drunk in accord with the participants’ rank. Musical entertain-
ments ensued (Gordon 1960:95-96):

As evening came on pine torches were lit up, and two

barbarians, advancing in front of Attila, sang songs which
they had composed, chanting his victories and his virtues in
war. Those at the feast looked at the men; some took delight
in the verses, some, reminded of wars, were excited in their
souls, and others, whose bodies were weakened by time and
whose spirits were compelled to rest, gave way to tears.

This is the earliest account we have, from anywhere in Europe,

of feasting in a barbarian context. When read in its entirety it
gives a detailed impression of the workings of oral tradition in the
banquet hall of a great king of this era. One is tempted to compare
the equivalent scenes in the later Old English epic poem Beowulf,
where the narrator tells of “the clear voice of the scop,” or court
poet, performing in a Migration Age banquet hall appropri-
ately named “Heorot” (that is, “Hart” or “Stag”). These imagined
150 JOHN D. NILES

Beowulfian scenes likewise feature ceremonial speeches

exchanged by guests and hosts, and they too tell of the convivial
consumption of alcoholic beverages in the shelter of a splendidly
decorated wooden hall.
Western scholars have sometimes inferred that the singers
described by Priscus in this part of his narrative must have been
Goths, for eastern Goths were among Attila’s confederates at
this time. Modern ethnographic evidence points rather to the
likelihood that the singers who performed before Attila’s court
could have been Huns singing for Huns. Without any doubt,
the most vital traditions of oral epic poetry in the world today
are those of the Turkic and Mongolian peoples of Central Asia
and western China. Folklorists owe a great debt to the German
medievalist and folklorist Karl Reichl for publishing transcriptions
and translations of epic songs from this region. An example is
Reichl’s exemplary FFC edition of the Karalkalpak epic Edige
as performed by the singer Jumabay Bazarov (d. 2005), the last
man to have learned this whole epic from oral tradition (Reichl
2007). Until at least the mid-nineteenth century, oral poetry was
the chief means by which the peoples of Central Asia articulated
their history, ethics, and values. It has also been one of their chief
sources of entertainment, as well as being a source of ethnic
and national pride. It is no hyperbole to state that the identity
of the semi-nomadic peoples of Central Asia has been largely
constituted by song, to which they give a markedly privileged
place. Moreover, in their view, acts of singing can have beneficial
or even curative properties. It is not by coincidence that the
single word bakshi, in certain Turkic languages, serves equally to
denote the epic singer and the shaman (Reichl 2000:36).
The idea is thus worth raising that, in a manner analogous to
what can be seen in the realm of material culture, high-ranking
members of Attila’s empire, through their wealth and powers of
patronage, inspired Germanic-speaking peoples of Europe to cul-
tivate the art of heroic song to a greater degree and at a greater
level of magnitude than would otherwise have been the case. This
is an area of research, of course, where speculation can run rife.
Still, to look in this direction for sources and antecedents of the
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 151

Germanic epic tradition is at least as reasonable as to look to the

Mediterranean milieu of Virgil and Homer alone, as has been done
in the past.
A comparable suggestion has been made pertaining to shaman-
ism.13 If modern ethnography can be our guide, virtually all the
peoples inhabiting Central Asia in pre-Islamic times would have
been polytheistic and shamanic in their religious practices. Even
into the twenty-first century, shamanism has remained a persistent
aspect of the healing practices of certain of the people inhabiting
the Great Northern Lowland zone of Eurasia. Music and shaman-
ism are close kin, and metaphorical horse-riding is related to both
activities. A particular female shaman’s robe that is now preserved
in the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg illustrates
this point (Between Worlds 2006). Adorning its front is the image
of a mounted warrior with sword in hand, along with a giant snake
and a two-headed dragon. The concept of the horse as a vehicle for
travel between worlds is brought out in a brightly colored draw-
ing on the reverse side, which features animals that figure in the
creation myth of this Siberian people. While this is no more than a
single example, it illustrates the point that one of the functions of
the animal-style art of the steppes has been to assert links between
our time and myth-time, between ordinary healing practices and
the extreme ones associated with shamanic trance-journeys.
In her recent book Iron Age Myth and Materiality, the
Scandinavian archaeologist Lotte Hedeager has made a strong
case for the syncretistic nature of Old Norse religion and
cosmology (Hedeager 2011; cf. Hedeager 1999 and 2007). She
argues in particular that important aspects of what we think of
as Old Norse myth derive from the shamanic religious practices
of the Huns and other peoples of the steppe. Headeager goes so
far as to suggest that the Old Norse high god Oðin—the sexually
ambiguous, shape-changing god who is associated with divine
possession, poetry, runes, mead, human sacrifice, necromancy,
and ravens—is a fusion of some early divinity with Attila himself,
transformed into a god by his followers after his death.
Although few experts are rushing to accept that last aspect of
Hedeager’s argument, the line of inquiry that she has opened up is
152 JOHN D. NILES

an intriguing one. Her argument rests in part on the iconography

of Oðin as seen on the famous Swedish incised Tjängvide stone,
where the god is shown riding his magical eight-legged steed
(named “Sleipnir” in later sources) and holding something that
resembles a drinking cup. He is represented there in the company
of coiled serpents and a pair of female figures thought to represent
Valkyries.14 Shamanic associations have been traced, as well, in
the gold C-type bracteates that were produced in some quantity
at the early Scandinavian site of Gudme, on the island of Funen,
Denmark, between about 450 and 525 AD.15 Even more than other
gold treasures produced in barbarian contexts during the Age of
Attila, Scandinavian bracteates are expressive of an aggressively
non-naturalistic aesthetics. C-bracteates, in particular, seem based
on the central concept of riding between worlds in a universe per-
meated by animalistic powers. The central image of a mounted
rider—or, to speak more precisely, a disembodied head suspended
in profile over a mythological horse-like quadruped—represents a
fusion of the human-like, the animal-like, and the divine. More-
over, it is tempting to see Asian influence in the long braided hair
that is a common feature of this iconography.

FALCONS AND FACIAL HAIR

This brings us to falconry. Unlike the antecedents of Old Norse
mythology and religion, the origins of “that noblest and most
incredible of the hunting arts” are not in doubt.16 Although its
earliest manuals are written in Chinese, the art of falconry itself is
regularly traced to the high plateaux of Central Asia, the evident
homeland of the Huns before their migration west. The Huns are
thought to have had a role in introducing a fully developed version
of the sport to other peoples in their confederacy and, through
them, to the peoples of northwest Europe. The sport is properly an
equestrian one, for good practical reasons that have to do with the
distances that raptors can cover and the rough terrain over which
they can soar.
What the exact practices of falconry were as long ago as the
early centuries of the first millennium AD is difficult to know. With
hawking as with shamanism, a researcher has little choice but to
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 153

proceed cautiously from observation of present-day practices to

the reconstruction of ancient ones, drawing on living history in
an attempt to reconstruct the past. Still, art history can help to fill
out this picture somewhat. Supplementing scattered references to
hawking in the literature of this early period is the evidence of
the Bayeux Tapestry, the justly famed work that commemorates
William the Conqueror’s victory over King Harold Godwineson
of England at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Among the scenes
pertaining to the life-ways of the upper aristocracy that are worked
into the main narrative of this embroidery, several depict Earl Har-
old Godwineson of England on a hunting expedition in Normandy,
mounted proudly on horseback with a pack of hounds and with a
trained falcon on his wrist.17 These scenes confirm that by the late
eleventh century—and earlier than this, it is safe to say—hunting
with horses, hawks, and hounds had become a favorite pursuit of
members of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy.
Significantly, if one studies the Bayeux Tapestry in detail one
will note that both in these scenes and elsewhere, Harold Godwi-
neson is depicted as sporting a handsome moustache, as do some
of his followers. This is an image of iconic value, for it serves to
identify Harold as an old-school Saxon warrior. This feature of
the Tapestry’s art of portraiture is likely to reflect historical reality.
It is reasonable to surmise that Harold wore the moustache, and
is prominently represented as doing so, in multiple scenes of the
Tapestry, as an assertion of his group allegiance as a descendant of
the ancient warrior-kings of Anglo-Saxon England going back to
the late fifth-century English Conquest, which followed close on
the heels of the Hunnic conquests. To judge from this remarkable
example of eleventh-century textile art, the conquering Normans
styled their facial hair in a very different mode from Harold, pre-
ferring a clean-shaven look. The Norman look was perfected by a
hairstyle that was curtailed rather brutally above the nape of the
neck and that evidently served to mark out a Norman as a Norman.
This contrast is doubtless the only aspect of the Tapestry that will
remind one of the contrast of cavaliers and roundheads during the
era of the English Civil War, or of the hippies and rednecks of a
later era. In each of these historical instances, one hairstyle has
154 JOHN D. NILES

had very different connotations from the other, whether we think

of politics, religion, or lifestyle.
What I am directing attention to is a sadly neglected area of
modern scholarship: namely, the history and semantics of men’s
facial hair. There is a fascinating book waiting to be written on
that topic; and who knows, perhaps one of you will write it. If so,
you may appreciate the following notes toward a history of the
moustache—a cultural icon that, like the equestrian sport of fal-
conry and much else, may well have been introduced to western
peoples chiefly through the influence of mounted warriors from
the steppes. This discussion will serve as my last exhibit.
Going back several millennia in the more easterly parts of
Central Asia, though not in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, Meso-
potamia, Iran, South Asia, Han China, or prehistoric Europe, a
tradition of male portraiture can be discerned whereby the upper
lip is adorned by a distinct moustache. Please note that what I
am singling out for attention is the male face that bears a distinct
moustache but no other facial hair. Fully bearded men, or young
men with only wisps of moustache as the first sign of physical
maturity, or men with a moustache and a goatee fall into differ-
ent categories, ones that may merit chapters of their own in the
award-winning History of Men’s Facial Hair that I trust that one
of you will write.
It is reasonable to infer that this tradition of portraiture is based
on real-world practices. An example of the moustached male face
that is devoid of other facial hair features prominently in a felt rug
fragment from kurgan 5 at Pazyryk (Aruz 2000:14). This depicts a
male equestrian figure wearing a flamboyant Scythian-style cape
and sporting a dark handlebar moustache. One can only guess if
this figure is meant to represent a mortal man, a deity, or something
between the two, in that ambivalent space that kings have often
been thought to occupy. Similarly, the ancient anthropomorphic
stelae that are a remarkable feature of the prehistoric landscape of
the steppes regularly feature a male face displaying a moustache.18
Examples like these could readily be multiplied. They
encourage the thought that from an early date, inhabitants of
certain easterly parts of Central Asia shared the assumption that
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 155

male persons of heroic stature or aspirations ought properly to

wear (or ought to be represented as wearing) a moustache while
remaining otherwise clean-shaven. Thus it is that in the second-
and third-century Buddhist art of Gandhara—a region roughly
corresponding to present-day Afganistan and northern Pakistan—
the Buddha is regularly depicted as sporting a moustache. Since
in other parts of the ancient world the iconography of the Buddha
is quite different—Gautama is normally clean-shaven—it is hard
to account for a phenomenon of this kind except through a theory
of cultural substrate.
What does this feature of “Turkic” personal adornment have
to do with the cultural history of the West, one might ask? Turning
to northern Europe during the Age of Attila, it is of interest that
certain faces that are carved into Scandinavian ritual objects made
of wood, or else that are depicted in the goldwork of that period,
can be seen to sport a prominent moustache.19 This is a matter
touched on by Rupert Bruce-Mitford in his account of the Sutton
Hoo mask-like faces (Bruce-Mitford 1975-83, vol. 2:358-60). The
Danish archaeologist Tom Christensen has had occasion to com-
ment on this aspect of Scandinavian cult objects in his analysis of
the remarkable Viking-Age silver-niello amulet known as “Oðin
from Lejre” (Christensen 2013). The moustache may have served
in some instances as an iconic marker for the god of many shapes
and names who is most commonly known under the name of
Oðin. It seems to have been an innovation in the iconography of
this period; one very rarely finds a human face or mask in the
pre-Migration-Age arts of northwest Europe that is beardless and
yet bears a moustache.
Like other emblems, the moustache can be read in different
ways while maintaining a core spectrum of meaning. Stripped
of its pagan mythological associations, it can identify as such
a man of the warrior class. When men of European nationality
began commonly wearing a Turkic-style moustache, it readily
took on the semantic value of a badge of allegiance to a heroic
ethos. Different versions of this style of facial hair have adorned
the faces of countless European military or civil leaders since at
least the time of Napoleon’s hussars, though Napoleon himself
156 JOHN D. NILES

remained clean-shaven in imitation of the style favored by Julius

Caesar and the emperor Augustus. In recent times one may think
of iconic photographs of Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata, or of
their contemporary Kaiser Wilhelm II, or of the Kaiser’s British
nemesis Field Marshall Haig, or countless other prominent men of
that era. Two twentieth-century political leaders who may come
to mind in this connection are Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph
Stalin, both of whom adopted a style of facial hair that connoted
military as well as civic leadership. Prominent scholars and men
of letters, too, have taken on this same style as part of a kind
of romance of heroic scholarship: among many examples one
might call to mind Charles Darwin, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or the
Russian archaeologist Sergei Rudenko, to whose excavations in
Central Asia the present paper is much indebted. Clearly there are
associations between display of a prominent moustache, on a face
that is otherwise clean-shaven, and heroic aspirations of some
kind—aspirations that sometimes breathe an “attitude” to the
point of verging on the reckless or lawless. The look in question is
familiar enough to be exploited in Hollywood films, as in the 2007
film There Will be Blood, starring a moustached Daniel Day Lewis
as a high-rolling fortune-hunter in the oil fields of nineteenth-
century America. And even the occasional esteemed folklorist of
our own time has been known to adopt the moustached style as—as
one is free to imagine—a half-playful, half-defiant, anachronistic
gesture as well as a declaration of allegiance to something other
than bourgeois values.

CONCLUSION
To sum up the gist of my talk: whatever the impact of the Huns
may have been in the West, the possibility that it involved more
than terror and revulsion has long been suppressed by Western
scholars committed to narratives of origin that go back either to
Tacitus’s portrait of ancient Germania, with its robust men, its
pure women, and its supposedly free political institutions, or
alternatively to ancient Greece, with its brilliant thinkers, its
own supposed models of republican institutions, and its revered
aesthetics of naturalism. There is one common element in the
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 157

narratives of nationhood that have had currency in the West

during recent centuries, and this is their history of excluding nearly
all mention of Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Slavs, Turks,
and other peoples of eastern origin.20 It seems almost as though the
idea of Asia itself has been created just so as to exclude it from the
category of the European. All the same, upon reflection, no few
elements of Western culture have clear antecedents among peoples
whose homelands were farther to the east, in the direction of the
steppes of Central Asia. And if it is possible to single out a single
period during the first millennium AD when the conditions for cul-
tural interchange between west and east were particularly favorable,
then that was the Age of Attila, the storied king of the Huns.
In closing, what I wish to emphasize is that what I have had
to say is very much a work in progress. My thoughts about the
Hunnic impact on the formation of early medieval Europe—that
is to say, once again, the impact of a number of different ethnic
groups who made up the Hunnic confederation—represents a
sharp new turn in my research, one that makes me feel at times
like an explorer dropped into a little-known land, trying to find
his way about on the basis of no more than a few shreds of a map,
some petroglyphs, and his own powers of observation.
Still, the agenda for research that I have outlined here is worth
pursuing. I have no doubt of that. Everyone who has looked into
the matter agrees that the period from the mid-fourth through the
mid-sixth centuries in northwest Europe was one of unprecedented
transformation. This was a time when a new cultural ecology was
emerging in a region that soon became organized into the king-
doms, and eventually the nations, whose names are so familiar to
us today as to seem like second nature. Importantly—and this is a
point that is sometimes lost on those who have no background in
folklore—this new ecology had to do not just with state formation,
but also with such varied matters as religion, mythology, funer-
ary customs, the ethos of the men’s hall, poetry, equestrianism,
sports, clothing, and body art. At the heart of these changes was
the adoption, for several centuries at least, of innovative artistic
styles. These included the decidedly non-naturalistic animal style
that had its origins in Central Asia and that, in its essence though
158 JOHN D. NILES

not necessarily in each of its individual manifestations, embodied

a magical way of looking at the world.
What medievalists need now, it can be argued, is a new vocab-
ulary of social change to draw on when speaking of this period of
history. In order to be useful, this vocabulary should be grounded
in the language spoken by folklorists. This is as much to say that
it must have the capacity to deal both with patterns of long-term
stability, or what we call tradition, and with innovative cultural
practices, or creativity, on the part of many individuals who are
conscious of their membership in one or more overlapping groups
endowed with a common past and a shared sense of identity.
Among all researchers in the humanities and social sciences,
folklorists are well situated to do this kind of work, for folklor-
ists are not boxed into the intellectual paradigms that have long
dominated disciplines mistakenly viewed as being more central
to the mission of the humanities. Or perhaps what I should say is
that folklorists are ideally situated to do this kind of work as long
as they do not box themselves into comparable comfort zones of
their own making. In particular, the H-word, “history,” needs to be
in their core vocabulary alongside such other keywords as “text,”
“context,” “performance,” “tradition,” and “group.” Folklorists
can then deploy their expertise diachronically, with reference to
how groups constantly define themselves with reference to the
storied past. The alternative to such a scholarly orientation is to be
locked into the solipsistic discourses of presentism alone.
Archer Taylor, I believe, would have been quick to assent to
that part of my argument, whatever he would have thought of the
rest. And if he could have been with us today, I suspect he would
already be at work on a definitive history of the moustache to set
beside his book on the Shanghai Gesture.

NOTES
1. In its original setting in Los Angeles in April 2015, the present
essay had the form of an illustrated lecture including many visual
images. Interested readers will find many of these same images,
as well as other relevant ones, in the publications cited in this
revised version of the talk.
H AWKS, HORSES, AND HUNS 159

2. For an overview of this historical period based chiefly on the

archaeological record, see Diesner 1982.
3. The afterlife of the Huns in story and fantasy is explored by the
contributors to Bäuml and Birnbaum 1993, a book that approach-
es Attila as a polysemic symbol for Western peoples, conceived in
terms of the alien and frequently demonized.
4. For overviews of these historical developments within the context
of Central Asian history as a whole, see Sinor 1990 and Baumer
2012-15. Certain earlier studies of the Huns should be used with
discretion in the light of recent archaeological discoveries and
changing currents in historiography.
5. Glassie’s essay forms one part of the special issue of Journal
of American Folklore titled “Common Ground: Keywords for
the Study of Expressive Culture,” subsequently published as an
independent volume (Feintuch 2003).
6. Essays representative of current research into these epics are
included in a special issue titled “Living Epics of China and Inner
Asia,” edited by myself, forthcoming as JAF 129 (2016), issue 513.
7. On the funerary archaeology of the Huns see especially Bóna
2002. Also recommended are two German museum catalogues,
Hunnen und Awaren (1996) and Attila und die Hunnen (2007).
8. The hybrid culture of this region is emphasized by the contributors
to Greeks on the Black Sea (2007), a well-illustrated exhibition
catalogue.
9. Hybrid influences in the arts of this period are traced in Brown
1995 and in Brown, Kidd, and Little 2000.
10. The large literature on this subject includes Rostotzeff 1929;
Bunker, Chatwin, and Farkas 1970; Reeder 1999; and Aruz 2000.
11. For a photo see Aruz 2000:269; or, alternatively, the exhibition
catalogue From the Land of the Scythians (1975), item no. 127.
Made of wood and leather, the figure was originally covered
in gold.
12. Rudenko (1970:35) notes that among the many objects included
as furnishings in the great shaft grave at Pazyryk was a stringed
musical instrument of lyre type. For a full description of the
remains of the Sutton Hoo lyre with notes on its modern
reconstruction, see Bruce-Mitford 1975-83, vol. 3:611-731, and
for a review of parallels see Niles 2008:235-36.
160 JOHN D. NILES

13. For a concise overview of the subject see Dubois 2009. For an
account of Siberian shamanism featuring remarkable Russian
archival photographs, see the catalogue Between Worlds (2006).
14. The image is featured on the cover of Hedeager’s book and is
reproduced elsewhere, for example on the Wikimedia website
“Tjängvide image stone.”
15. A reliable short guide to the iconography of Scandinavian
bracteates is provided by Axboe 2007. The German scholar
Karl Hauck (1916-2007) argued in a series of studies that
the bracteates embody an evolving Scandinavian cosmology
centered on a pre-Viking Oðin, a shaman-like god of healing,
magic, and warfare.
16. Quotation from a Spanish treatise on falconry as cited by Morel
2008: 21. See further Åkerström-Hougen 1981.
17. See Wilson 2004:3 (the scene labeled #2 on the upper border of
the Tapestry itself), among other scenes.
18. For many examples see Zwalf 1996; select examples are
highlighted in Baumer 2012-15, Vol. 1: 79, 254 and Vol. 2:267
and elsewhere.
19. See Jensen 2013:855 (wooden figure of a deity from Rude
Eskildstrup, central Zealand), 918 (bronze matrix from Torslunda,
Öland), and 1022 (metal fitting of the eighth or ninth century
construed as “Oðin from Ribe”).
20. Not excluded from this generalization is the work of Patrick J.
Geary (1988, 2002); see however Hummer 1998, who takes issue
with Geary in this regard.

WORKS CITED
Åkerström-Hougen, Gunilla. 1981. Falconry as a motif in early
Swedish art: its historical and art historical significance. Figura
[= Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis] n.s. 19:263-93.
Aruz, Joan, ed., et al. 2000. The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian
and Sarmatian Treasures from the State Hermitage, Saint
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