Interrogating The Germanic'

Interrogating the ‘Germanic’
Ergänzungsbände zum
Reallexikon der
Germanischen Altertumskunde
Herausgegeben von
Sebastian Brather, Wilhelm Heizmann
und Steffen Patzold
Band 123
Interrogating
the ‘Germanic’
A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity

and the Early Middle Ages
Edited by
Matthias Friedrich and James M. Harland
ISBN 978-3-11-069976-0
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-070162-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-070173-9
ISSN 1866-7678
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946663
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Contents
List of Contributors VII
James M. Harland and Matthias Friedrich

Introduction: The ‘Germanic’ and its Discontents 1
Michael Kulikowski
The Marriage of Philology and Race: Constructing the ‘Germanic’ 19
Roland Steinacher
Rome and Its Created Northerners 31
Stefan Donecker
Re-inventing the ‘Germanic’ in the Early Modern Era: Omnes Germani sunt,
contra fabulas quorundam 67
Cătălin Țăranu
The Balloon that Wouldn’t Burst: A Genealogy of ‘Germanic’ 89
Otávio Luiz Vieira Pinto

What Can Cultural Anthropology Do for Medievalists? A Methodological
Discussion of Ethnicity Applied to Late Antique and
Early Medieval History 111
Michael J. Kelly
From Rhetoric to Dialectic: The Becoming ‘Germanic’ of Visigothic
(Legal-)Literature, and (Postulating) the End of a ‘Truth’ 127
Veronika Egetenmeyr
Sidonius Apollinaris’s Use of the Term Barbarus: An Introduction 145
James M. Harland
A Habitus Barbarus in Sub-Roman Britain? 167
Steve Walker
A Farewell to Arms: Germanic Identity in Fifth-Century Britain 189
VI Contents
Sebastian Brather
Germanic or Slavic? Reconstructing the Transition from Late Antiquity to the
Early Middle Ages in East Central Europe 211
Ludwig Rübekeil
Linguistic Labels and Ethnic Identity 225
Nelson Goering
(Proto-)Germanic Alliterative Verse: Linguistic Limits on a Cultural
Phenomenon 241
Erin Sebo
The Limits of Obligation and Friendship: Hrothgar, Beowulf, and the
‘Germanic’ Ideal 251
Index 267
List of Contributors
Sebastian Brather is Professor of Protohistoric and Medieval Archaeology in the Institut für
Archäologische Wissenschaften, at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
Stefan Donecker is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Medieval Research, at the
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Veronika Egetenmeyr is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Historisches Institut at the

Universität Greifswald, Germany
Matthias Friedrich is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Prehistoric and

Historical Archaeology, at the University of Vienna, Austria
Nelson Goering is a British Academy Fellow in Linguistics in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology
and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom
James M. Harland is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Seminar für Alte Geschichte, at the
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany
Michael J. Kelly is Visiting Assistant Professor in Classics and Comparative Literature at the State
University of New York, Binghamton, USA
Michael Kulikowski is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Classics and Ancient
Mediterranean Studies, and Head of Department, in the Department of History at the Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Otávio Luiz Viera Pinto is Professor of African History in the Department of History at the
Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil
Ludwig Rübekeil is Professor of Germanic Philology in the Deutsches Seminar, at the Universität
Zurich, Switzerland
Erin Sebo is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social
Sciences at Flinders University, Australia
Roland Steinacher is Professor of Ancient History at the Institut für Alte Geschichte und
Altorientalistik at the Universität Innsbruck, Austria
Cătălin Țăranu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, at
the New Europe College, Bucharest, Romania
Steve Walker is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham, UK
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-203
James M. Harland and Matthias Friedrich
Introduction: The ‘Germanic’ and its
Discontents
The origins of this volume lie in a chance meeting between the two editors, while
both were postgraduate students at the University of York in 2015. A copy of another
volume from the RGA Ergänzungsbände, Philipp von Rummel’s groundbreaking
Habitus barbarus, is ultimately responsible.1 One, walking by the other’s desk,
spied a copy of that volume, and expressed surprise that a British scholar should
have interest in archaeological research coming out of Freiburg, which has been no-
table in Germany in recent years for its challenges to interpretative paradigms re-
garding ethnic and cultural identity in the late Roman and early medieval periods.2
Neither of us had met at this point, and Friedrich quickly outed himself as a
Freiburg graduate. Harland was shocked meanwhile, that he had not only encoun-
tered another graduate student of late antique ‘Germanic’ archaeology (neither of
us, ironically, were based in York’s Department of Archaeology and students of this
theme were in any case rare in York at the time), but one who might actually agree
with him about the problems with using such labels at all.
This event (and, specifically, the excitement at finding a fellow dissenter) high-
lights how isolating it can feel to be sceptical about the notion of ‘Germanic antiquity’
today. This is a puzzling situation, because doubt about the validity of such an analyt-
ical framework is hardly new. The modern cultural construct of the ‘Germanic’ is an
invention of the early modern period, and owes its origins to the rediscovery, in the
fifteenth century, of Tacitus’s Germania. As Stefan Donecker shows us in his article for
this volume, even the early modern humanists who attempted to establish and iden-
tify ‘Germanic’ ethnographic traits struggled, despite their seemingly rich source
1 Philipp von Rummel, Habitus barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten im 4. und
5. Jahrhundert, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 55 (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2007)
2 For the Freiburg School, see, e. g., Sebastian Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der
Frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen
Altertumskunde 42 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004); Philipp von Rummel, “Gotisch, barbarisch oder
römisch? Methodologische Überlegungen zur ethnischen Interpretation von Kleidung,” in Archaeology
of Identity/Archäologie der Identität, edited by Walter Pohl and Mathias Mehoffer (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW,
2010), 52–53; Guy Halsall, “Commentary Two: Careful with that Axe, Eugenius,” in Cemeteries and
Society in Merovingian Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992–2009 (Leiden: Brill,
2010), 131–68; For the historiographical origins of modern ‘Germanic’ archaeology, Bonnie Effros,
Uncovering the Germanic Past (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012). For more critical views of the Freiburg
School, cf. e. g. Florin Curta, “Medieval Archaeology and Ethnicity: Where are We?,” History Compass
9, no. 7 (2011): 537–48 or Curta, “The Elephant in the Room: A Reply to Sebastian Brather,” Ephemeris
Napocensis 23 (2013): 163–74.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-001
2 James M. Harland and Matthias Friedrich
material, to reconcile a variety of competing narratives (which ranged from the bibli-
cal to the Hellenistic) with the new notions of autochthony that the “Tacitean para-
digm” introduced. This struggle resulted in a vision of the Germani that might,
Donecker suggests below, have been rather more fluid than the stable ethnonational-
ist categories which became fixed after the professionalisation of scientific philology
in the nineteenth century.
That such a struggle existed from the earliest stages of the invention of the no-
tion of a ‘Germanic’ people can today feel difficult to believe. For many, late
Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were the ‘Germanic world’. The fourth to sixth
centuries CE are usually portrayed, certainly in the popular imagination, and all too
frequently in scholarly discourse, as a period in which all-conquering ‘Germanic’
barbarians from the distant north overran and demolished the Western Roman
Empire, before founding new successor kingdoms in its ruins.3 But there is consider-
able debate concerning this range of historiographical assertions. Doubt concerning
what we now consider to be the traditional narratives of Völkerwanderung emerged at
the very latest in the early modern period and maintained a continual presence in
historiographical discourse into the nineteenth century, in reaction to historical anal-
yses which increasingly relied upon these narratives to rationalise German and
English nationalism. The French historian, Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulange, for ex-
ample, severely doubted the scale and impact of ‘Germanic’ migration that had been
proposed by his German contemporaries, and this perspective can scarcely be sepa-
rated from his hostility toward German expansionism in the wake of the Franco-
Prussian War.4 Such tendencies were a minority view outside of France, and it must
be emphasised that such dissenting views had very little to do with challenging of
the epistemological or ethical difficulties inherent to germanische Altertumskunde.
They were rather themselves fuelled by a nationalism no less pernicious than that of
the German variety. Indeed, Bonnie Effros has recently suggested that through cling-
ing to such anti-Germanist narratives, French scholarship produced an “absence of
tenable narrative about Germanic grave goods in France”, which “provided German
nationalist scholars with an opening that allowed them to exploit these significant
gaps”.5
The legacy of such processes is still felt. The general tendency in humanities
scholarship is, arguably, still simply to assume that the ‘Germanic’ is a self-explanatory
3 For an overview of this widespread and popular notion, see Guy Halsall, “Two Worlds Become
One: A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration,” German History 32,
no. 4 (2014): 515–32, 515–19.
4 Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, L’invasions germaniques et la fin de l’Empire (Paris: Hachette,
1904); Walter Goffart, “Rome’s Final Conquest: The Barbarians,” History Compass 6, no. 3 (2008):
855–83, here 858–59; Ian N. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2013), 174–91.
5 Effros, Uncovering the Germanic Past, 365.
label, which accurately describes phenomena including identities, social, cultural or

political groups, to material cultural artefacts, languages and texts, and even specific
chemical sequences found in human DNA. We need only to consider a few examples to
demonstrate just how pervasively this assumption still persists: an archaeological exca-
vation took place over the summer of 2018 near the village of Scremby, Lincolnshire, in
eastern England. The excavation was led by the Department of Archaeology at the
University of Sheffield, and the excavators discovered an inhumation cemetery which
contained numerous inhumations with grave-goods typically associated with early
‘Anglo-Saxon’6 material culture. For the directors of the excavation not just these
grave-goods, but the development of the cemetery in general, could be described, in a
press release from late 2018, as being clearly associated with “the early centuries of the
Germanic migrations to eastern England”.7
The treatment of the ‘Germanic’ as an axiomatic assumption has also found fa-
vour in publication outlets usually dedicated to the natural sciences. In particular,
in articles concerned with using ancient and modern genomic evidence to answer
questions about historic population movement and ethnic change. There has been
an enormous increase in studies drawing upon such work in order to study the
so-called ‘Migration Period’ in the past decade, and one still frequently finds refer-
ences to ‘Germanic peoples’ in such works.8 Indeed, when trying to discuss the as-
pects of historic ancestry that might be demonstrated by the modern DNA samples
that they have studied, Leslie et al. even go so far as to refer to the putative
6 This term, too, is one fraught with great difficulty due to its use as a racial classification in order to
justify white supremacism and colonialism. The most comprehensive and up-to-date survey and analyt-
ical intervention on this issue is Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction
of the Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), especially 1–28. See
also, e. g., María José Mora and María José Gómez-Calderón, “The Study of Old English in America
(1776–1850): National Uses of the Saxon Past,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 97, no. 3
(1998): 322–36, and Howard Williams, “‘Burnt Germans’, Alemannic Graves and the Origins of Anglo-
Saxon Archaeology,” in Zweiundvierzig. Festschrift für Michael Gebühr zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by
Stefan Burmeister, Heidrun Derks and Jasper von Richthofen (Rahden, Westf.: Leidorf, 2007): 229–38.
Susan Reynolds, “What Do We Mean by ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Saxons’?,” Journal of British Studies
24, no. 4 (1985): 395–414.
7 University of Sheffield, “Remains of an Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Discovered,” 27 November 2018.
Available at: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/remains- anglo-saxon-cemetery-discovered
-1.818242, accessed 29 March 2019.
8 E. g. Stephen Leslie et al., “The Fine-Scale Genetic Structure of the British Population,” Nature 519
(2015), 309–14. Stephan Schiffels and Duncan Sayer, “Investigating Anglo-Saxon Migration History with
Ancient and Modern DNA,” in Migration und Integration von Urgeschichte bis zum Mittelalter/Migration
and Integration from Prehistory to the Middle Ages, edited by Harald Meller, Falko Daim, Johannes Krause
and Roberto Rische. Tagungen des Landesmuseums für Vorgeschichte Halle (Saale) 17 (Halle: Landesamt
für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, 2017); Carlos Eduardo G. Amorim et al.,
“Understanding 6th-century Barbarian Social Organization and Migration through Paleogenomics,”
Nature Communications 9, no. 3457 (2019).
‘Germanic ancestry’ of the descendants of so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ migrants as a

phenomenon that would be manifest in the survival of particular genetic haplo-
types in the modern population.9 The persistence of such assumptions in outlets
such as Nature is at least seeming to cause discomfort among some researchers, as
the journal recently felt the need to publish a statement on “the use and abuse of
ancient DNA”. In this statement, Nature’s editorial board directly expressed concern
about the possibility for this research to be used in a similar manner to that in
which the Culture Historical framework, devised by Gustaf Kossinna, was employed
by the Third Reich. The statement recognises the risk that such studies pose for the
potential non-empirical reification of putative ethnic groups from the ‘Migration
Period’. The editors thus urge researchers to do more to refute the deployment of
genetic evidence in manners “that can be used politically to justify disrespect, or
worse, to groups of people.”10
The letters ‘RGA’, which emblazon the spine of this volume, are also testimony
to the dominance of the ‘Germanic’. The Reallexicon der germanischen
Altertumskunde first began as an encyclopaedical project initiated by Johannes
Hoops (1865–1949), professor of English philology at Heidelberg, in 1908 with four
volumes published between 1911 and 1919,11 which aimed at providing a “compen-
dium of the culture of the Germanic peoples from most ancient times until the end
of the Old High German, Old Low German, and Old English period”.12 The chronologi-
cal and geographical scope of the RGA increased significantly with the introduction of
the second edition in 1973, of which the last volume was published in 2007 amounting
to a total number of 35 volumes.13 In 2010 the RGA reached the World Wide Web as
Germanische Altertumskunde Online (GAO) providing the full text of the second edition
9 Leslie et al., “Fine-Scale Genetic Structure”: “The Germanic ancestry these migrations brought
to what is now France would have been Frankish, rather than Saxon […] it thus seems unlikely
that ancestry in the UK arising from the Saxon migrations would be better captured by FRA17
than by people now living near the homeland of the Saxons (represented by GER3) […].”
10 “Editorial: Use and abuse of ancient DNA,” Nature 555 (2018): 559.
11 Heinrich Beck, s.v. “Hoops, Johannes,” in Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, 15:
109–11.
12 On the history of the RGA, see Rudolf Schieffer, “Das “Reallexikon der Germanischen
Altertumskunde” in der Typologie geisteswissenschaftlicher Enzyklopädien,” in Altertumskunde,
Altertumswissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft: Erträge und Perspektiven nach 40 Jahren Reallexikon der
Germanischen Altertumskunde, edited by Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich and Heiko Steuer,
Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 77 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012),
5–19: “Das Reallexikon soll eine Gesamtdarstellung der Kultur der germanischen Völker von den
ältesten Zeiten bis zum Ende der althochdeutschen, altniederdeutschen und altenglischen Periode
[…] geben.”
13 Cf. Heiko Steuer, “Ein wissenschaftliches Großprojekt ist abgeschlossen: Das Reallexikon der
Germanischen Altertumskunde,” Archäologisches Nachrichtenblatt 13 (2008): 309–11; Timo Stickler,
“Zum Abschluß des Reallexikons der Germanischen Altertumskunde,” Historische Zeitschrift 292,
no. 1 (2011): 125–32.
print volumes, while new lemmata are being published online only. Here, the present
editors of the RGA take a different stand from the original aims of the RGA first
and second editions:
The question of “what we may describe as ‘Germanic’” had already become a problem for the
editors by the second edition. Today the concept remains important for linguistics, but is no
longer useful for archaeology or history. It is thus difficult at present to speak of an interdisci-
plinary germanische Altertumskunde. In any case, the temporal, geographical and content-
related boundaries of this encyclopaedia are not defined by the notion of “Germans” as the
bearers of a particular culture.14
The current volume has to be seen in the light of such critical approaches towards the
‘Germanic’. Both editors felt that, given this situation, and the sheer volume of historio-
graphical work that appears to have continually been ignored in certain spheres of so-
called ‘Germanic’ studies, a conference had to be organised to bring together (we
hoped) sceptics alongside champions of the ‘Germanic’ paradigm, to make an attempt
at producing a statement on the current state of the field. The resulting conference,
‘Interrogating the Germanic: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early
Middle Ages’, was held at the University of York from the 13th to the 15th of May, 2016.
The conference brought together twenty-three speakers of no fewer than ten nationali-
ties, working in the fields of history, archaeology, linguistics, literature, numismatics,
and art history. We discussed the relevance, applicability, and legitimacy, of using the
‘Germanic’ paradigm in our respective fields, attempting to establish an interdisciplin-
ary channel of communication through which to determine why a term which in
some fields could function simply as a categorisation for a set of characteristics could
in other disciplines function as a highly charged, arguably dangerous, set of political
ideas. Across the following pages we present fourteen articles based upon papers de-
livered at that conference.
The event was originally conceived as a follow-up to a conference held at the
University of Toronto at the turn of the new millennium, resulting in a volume pub-
lished by Brepols under the title On Barbarian Identity in 2002.15 This volume was ex-
plicitly framed as the first major volume in English-language scholarship dedicated to
14 “Schon für diese zweite Fassung war es für die Herausgeber ‘ein Problem geworden, was wir als
‘germanisch’ bezeichnen dürfen’ (Vorwort 1972). Heute ist der Begriff zwar in der
Sprachwissenschaft nach wie vor bedeutsam, in der Archäologie und der Geschichtswissenschaft aber
analytisch nicht mehr fruchtbar. Es ist daher gegenwärtig schwer, eine ‘germanische Altertumskunde’
interdisziplinär zu definieren. ‘Germanen’ als Trägergruppen einer Kultur jedenfalls können weder zei-
tliche noch geographische noch inhaltliche Grenzen des Lexikons klar bezeichnen.” Heinrich Beck,
Sebastian Brather, Dieter Geuenich, Wilhelm Heizmann, Steffen Patzold, and Heiko Steuer, “Vorwort,”
Germanische Altertumskunde Online (2013). Available at: https://www.degruyter.com/databasecontent?
dbid=gao&dbsource=/db/gao, accessed June 2019.
15 Andrew Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle
Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
responding to (and critiquing) popular developments on the study of late antique eth-
nicity (and its relationship with germanische Altertumskunde) that had been developed
under Herwig Wolfram and his students at the University of Vienna (building, of
course, on the work of Reinhard Wenskus).16 Early medieval scholarship does not need
another summary of the Toronto/Vienna debate. Such summaries are numerous and
detailed, and would not be improved upon by further detailed elucidation here.17 But
the debate is relevant here for two reasons: the first is that many sub-fields of early
medieval scholarship appear either to have ignored, or else completely misunderstood,
the attack made by the Toronto School upon the legitimacy of treating ‘Germanic’ iden-
tity as a coherent phenomenon. This attack, for all the controversies the attack pro-
voked, and targets sometimes unjustly caught in the authors’ line of fire, was surely
just. The blistering criticisms of such scholars as Walter Goffart or Alexander Murray
highlight the absurdity of believing that scant traces in later literary sources give us
windows into a broader, late antique pan-Germanic ethos for which the late antique
source material provides decidedly no evidence,18 yet in studies ranging from philol-
ogy to archaeology, such assumptions remain, as we have seen, firmly embedded in
contemporary scholarship.
The second reason the Toronto/Vienna debate matters to this volume is because of
the considerable controversy and acrimony that it produced. The ferocity of the attack
launched by the Toronto-based scholars against members of the Vienna School
was exceptional, associating Traditionskern Ethnogenesis Theory with intellectual
traditions associated with the Third Reich. Some of the arguments of the volume’s
authors occasionally veered into territory which risked asserting, baselessly, that
members of the Vienna School harboured sympathies for that awful regime, and it is
rumoured that the original draft of certain essays in the On Barbarian Identity volume
had to be edited to avoid making such explicitly libellous allegations. For many of us
who came of age as scholars in the wake of this conflict, it is difficult to see how such
allegations were possible. Later products of the Vienna School such as Walter Pohl,
for example, had clearly committed themselves to dismantling the notion of a unified
16 Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der Fruhmittelalterlichen

Gentes (Cologne: Böhlau, 1961); Herwig Wolfram, Geschichte der Goten, von den Anfangen bis zur
Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts: Entwurf ener historischen Ethnographie (Munich: Beck, 1979);
Walter Pohl, “Introduction,” in Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of the Ethnic Communities,
300–800, edited by Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 1–15.
17 In English, see, e. g. Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 14–19, 457–70, and Michael Kulikowski, this volume. In German, the
most useful account is Mischa Meier, Geschichte der Völkerwanderung: Europa, Asien und Afrika vom
3. bis zum 8. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019), 61–74.
18 Walter Goffart, “Does the Distant Past Impinge upon the Invasion Age Germans,” in Gillett, On
Barbarian Identity, 21–38; Alexander Callander Murray, “Reinhard Wenskus on ‘Ethnogenesis’,” in
Gillett, On Barbarian Identity, 39–68.
‘Germanic’ ethos in their other works.19 Moreover, the set of ideas which are, rightly
or wrongly, labelled by Toronto as ‘Traditionskern Ethnogenesis Theory’, whatever its
faults, was surely a horrified reaction against the evil to which notions of germani-
sche Altertumskunde had lent ideological justification under the Nazi regime.20
Moreover, some of the charges brought forward by Toronto about this work,
such as those relating to the arguments of Walter Pohl, are demonstrably false.21
Guy Halsall has pointed out that the hostility of the ‘Toronto’ School to the out-
put from Vienna appears to stem more from what the latter fails to say, rather than
the statements they explicitly make about differences between ethnic and non-
ethnic identities in the late antique world. But as Halsall points out, such silences
are no less present in the work of Toronto scholars, and a reading which attributes
to the work of Walter Pohl an active support for the ideas which underpinned the
Third Reich is quite misleading, to say the least! Nevertheless, even if one believes
the Toronto reading to be a distortion, it is at least possible to understand how
Toronto scholars were able to identify what they believed to be the ghosts of older
historiographical tendencies in the work of the Vienna School.22
The debate has moved on, and it is more important than ever to ensure that we
integrate our critiques into a new set of interpretative methods, rather than con-
tinue rehashing old arguments. Broadly speaking, advocates of both camps have
shared goals, and oppose the racist and ethnonationalist agendas which draw upon
interpretations of the late antique world as an ideological resource. Someone often
perceived as a member of the Toronto School due to his participation in On
Barbarian Identity is Michael Kulikowski (though he would protest this designa-
tion). In his opening article to this volume he notes that the ‘formative dogma’
which framed the research responsible for so much of this vitriol has vanished. A
more sociologically-attuned early medieval studies now more confidently faces the
complexities posed by late antique conceptual categories. Otávio Luiz Vieira Pinto
outlines in his contribution how much of the current scholarship on ‘barbarian’ eth-
nicity derives from a need to reconcile the ‘primordialist’ understanding of ethnicity
19 Walter Pohl, Die Germanen, 2nd ed., Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 57 (Munich: Oldenbourg,
2004), 50–51.
20 Pohl’s own response is instructive with regard to just how poorly the attacks against him seem
to have understood much of his argument. Walter Pohl, “Ethnicity, Theory, and Tradition: A
Response,” in Gillett, On Barbarian Identity, 221–40.
21 See Walter Pohl, “Von der Ethnogenese zur Identitätsforschung,” Neue Wege der
Frühmittelalterforschung: Bilanz und Perspektiven, edited by Walter Pohl, Maximilian Diesenberger and
Bernhard Zeller (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW, 2018), 9–34, 16–30, for his most recent, comprehensive rebuttal
of the attacks made on him by Toronto.
22 An explicit attempt at reconciling the two camps can be found in Guy Halsall, “Transformations
of Romanness: The Northern Gallic Case,” in Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval
Regions and Identities, edited by Walter Pohl, Clemens Gantner, Cinzia Grifoni, and Marianne
Pollheimer-Mohaupt, Millennium-Studien 71 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 41–58.
which seemed to early twentieth-century scholars to so well reflect what was avail-
able in the source material with many of the problems with understanding that
source material to accurately depict such phenomena. Pinto proposes that we can
treat ethnic identity as ‘fictive’, a construct sometimes more imposed upon those it
seeks to describe than necessarily descriptive of their own self-identification, a
move that would well align with recent trends in ethnic sociology which appeal
that we cease to rely on the statements of the emic member of a self-proclaimed
ethnic group, and suggest we should not assume that group’s actual existence out-
side the reality of those proclamations.23 Such approaches to ethnic sociology show
that we no longer need to take lumps out of each other over the unprovable convic-
tion that the work of Herwig Wolfram might be clandestinely harbouring some of
the more unsavoury ideas of Otto Brunner.
Moreover, there are real targets of concern, against whom we would do better
to direct our critical efforts. Our awareness of the dangers posed by previous inter-
pretative approaches to the early Middle Ages has only sharpened since the papers
contained in this volume were first presented in May 2016. The subsequent years
have witnessed the US president Donald Trump’s increased courting of white na-
tionalists. In August 2017, his supporters marched through Charlottesville, Virginia,
and intimidated and assaulted people of colour, Jews, and members of the LGBTQ+
community, all the while chanting “Jews will not replace us”. As they did so, they
carried shields which bore such emblems as the Odal Rune and the Sonnenrad,
iconic symbols from the Third Reich, representing the Nazis’ fascination with the
Germanic occult.24
These symbols still represent very real, murderous violence. Shortly after the
thorough routing of the fascists in Charlottesville by counter-protestors, a white su-
premacist in attendance at the rally ploughed his car into a crowd of peaceful
counter-protestors, in the process murdering 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injur-
ing 28 others. The perpetrator, James Alex Fields Jr. (who was already known in
high school for his National Socialist beliefs) had earlier that day been photo-
graphed bearing a shield emblazoned with the logo of Vanguard America. This rela-
tively young neo-Nazi organisation has called for “race war”, and espouses a
23 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Harvard, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004); Andreas
Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).
24 The Odal Rune was originally simply a means in the elder Futhark of representing the letter ‘o’.
It was used by two Waffen-SS divisions during the Second World War, and has subsequently be-
come immensely popular among white supremacist and neo-Nazi movements, possibly due to it
being a more inconspicuous signifier than the Swastika. The Sonnenrad is a well-known item of Nazi
iconography, consisting of 12 mirrored ‘sig’ runes, which formed part of a mosaic in Wewelsburg, a
castle refurbished by Heinrich Himmler. The symbol may owe its inspiration to early medieval
‘Alemannic’ Zierscheiben. Cf. Alexandra Pesch and Sigmund Oerhl, “Runen, Thorshämmer und
Schwarze Sonnen: Rezeption und Missbrauch frühgeschichtlicher Symbole und Zeichen,”
Archäologische Nachrichten Schleswig-Holstein (2017): 110–21.
typically Third Reich-inspired ideology, epitomised by its “Blood and Soil” motto.
Its members are sometimes seen bearing flags depicting a Sonnenrad superimposed
over the stripes of the United States’ flag.25 The worst crimes produced by the eth-
nonationalist obsession with germanische Altertumskunde continue to haunt us. If
there is any area of scholarship where we would do well to direct our critical efforts,
it is surely toward the recent attempts to apply the use of ancient and modern ge-
netic material to the study of the distant past with regard to questions of migration,
mobility, and ethnic identity, that have already been outlined.26 The considerable in-
terest the far-right have shown in this research, or, more usually, in response to the
widely shared reports on it found in mainstream media outlets, is substantial and as
Susanne Hakenbeck has recently demonstrated, still growing. As Hakenbeck points
out, “[s]cholars working on genomic population histories have so far not engaged
enough with the wider social context in which their work is received”.27 The possible
consequences of the emergence of a new scholarly hegemony, which seeks to unify
questions of the ‘Germanic’ past with cutting-edge DNA technology, the collection of
the modern population’s DNA data in mass databases owned by private, unaccount-
able multi-national corporations, as well as the mass surveillance of social media and
the manipulation of populations via such media, that we now know to be undertaken
both by governmental and extra-governmental organisations, when all considered in
unison, are utterly chilling. It does not take much to envisage how these practices
could be harnessed to the ethnonationalist and eugenicist ideologies of extermina-
tion that caused so much harm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; surely the
stuff of nightmares. For scholars of ancient genetics to engage with the historical con-
texts to which Hakenbeck refers to is surely a solemn duty, if we are to avert such
disastrous possibilities.
The irony, of course, is that those who would cite the ‘Germanic’ past to justify
their modern ethnochauvinism are simply repeating fictions that were no less mallea-
ble or fluid in antiquity than they are today.28 Roland Steinacher’s article demon-
strates that descriptions of Germani/Germanoi always, even from their early uses by
25 “Vanguard America”, Anti-Defamation League. Available at: https://www.adl.org/resources/

backgrounders/vanguard-america, accessed March 2019.
26 Sebastian Brather, “New Questions instead of Old Answers: Archaeological Expectations of
aDNA Analysis,” Medieval Worlds 4 (2016): 5–21.
27 Susanne E. Hakenbeck, “Genetics, Archaeology, and the Far-Right: An Unholy Trinity,” World
Archaeology 51, no. 4 (2019): 6.
28 Useful overviews of classical ethnography and the study of race in Antiquity include the intro-
duction and collected sources found in Rebecca F. Kennedy, C. Sydnor Roy and Max L. Goldman,
eds. and trans., Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in
Translation (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2013) as well as the articles in Rebecca F. Kennedy and
Molly Jones-Lewis, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical
and Medieval Worlds (London: Routledge 2016). For an overview of classical ethnography, notions
of identity, and their relation to late Antiquity specifically see Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, 35–62.
Julius Caesar, served as a tool for specific purposes in Roman political affairs, which
varied immensely based upon situation and circumstance but could always be identi-
fied as a construct which does not especially reflect any real sense of unity on the
ground. This being the case, the articles in this volume mostly reject the ‘Germanic’
as a meaningful and useful analytical category in application to phenomena from
the late antique and early medieval past, but there are two major obstacles which
should be overcome in order for such a goal to be feasible. The first obstacle is a
question of empiricism, as appeals to jettison the ‘Germanic’ label are always met
by the countering claim that such appeals allegedly fly in the face of the empirical
reality of what we find in the evidence from our period of study. Archaeologically
it is remarkably easy to demonstrate this not to be the case. Since the post-
processual advances of the 1980s and 90s, archaeology has become very comfort-
able with the idea that ethnic identity is a situational construct; archaeologists now
treat the material cultures which survive to us today not as the passive reflection of
static social groups but as active materials which were (and are) used to shape the
societies which use them. Nevertheless, the implications of this position are not al-
ways taken to their logical conclusion: accepting that ethnic identity is a situational
construct necessitates accepting that it is impossible to demonstrate the presence of
ethnic (and thus ‘Germanic’) sentiment, prima facie, through purely archaeological
means.29
Such observations have always been rather more difficult for linguists and phi-
lologists to accept, and not without good reason, as the materials with which these
scholars are concerned tend to offer what usually looks, at first glance, like quite
compelling evidence for ‘Germanic’ cultural unity. Whole corpuses of poetry and lit-
erature exist which appear, both through their structural frameworks and via the cul-
tural references which they deploy, to point to conscious cultural links shared
between diverse, sometimes distant, parts of the so-called ‘Germanic’ world.30
For the high Middle Ages see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle
Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018), especially 1–14 and 15–54. For the most recent
statement on questions of the study of race in the early Middle Ages, see Nicole Lopez-Jantzen,
“Between Empires: Race and ethnicity in the early middle ages,” Literature Compass 16, no. 9–10
(2019), which makes a compelling case for following the lead of Classical Studies and Later
Medieval Studies by introducing Critical Race Theory to the study of late Antiquity and the early
Middle Ages.
29 On this problem see Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the
Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1997), Bonnie Effros, “Dressing Conservatively: Women’s
Brooches as Markers of Ethnic Identity?,” in Gender in the early Medieval World: East and West,
600–900, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Julia M.H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2004), 165–184, Sebastian Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen, and Guy Halsall, “Ethnicity and
Early Medieval Cemeteries,” Arquelogía y Territorio Medieval 18 (2011), 15–27.
30 This assumption is so widespread and firmly embedded in axiomatic assumptions that it is difficult
to point to specific examples, but a good instance might be Brian Murdoch, The Germanic Hero: Politics
Alexandra Pesch, for example, defines this ‘Germanic’ world as “as a region (also
known more generally as ‘Germania’) where groups of Barbarians lived that are de-
fined by their related Germanic language”.31 But here, too, empiricism is not so
great an obstacle as it may seem, and the authors in this volume who deal with liter-
ary and linguistic material demonstrate in diverse ways that this putative coherence
is anything but real. Ludwig Rübekeil subjects a series of Germanic-seeming words
from classical antiquity to careful philological analysis, in order to explore just to
what degree historiographical ethnic data can be reconciled with linguistic changes,
drawing upon a careful historiographical analysis to deal with the difficulty that all
of our preserved early Germanic words are transmitted through Latin source material.
His results do not suggest the existence of a straightforward relationship between
Germanic language and a coherent cultural identity, but this does not mean that
valuable information about the relationship between modes of speech and possible
cultural groups cannot be found—Rübekeil clearly demonstrates dialectical differen-
ces that might originate from such group variation, for example. Erin Sebo takes us
much further forward in time, to explore the Old English epic Beowulf. She demon-
strates that notions of an overarching ‘Germanic’ system of honour, derived from a
Tacitean model, cannot be found in the text. She suggests, furthermore, that if such a
code were at play in the society described by the Beowulf poet, it would have been
enormously damaging. Nelson Goering’s article, meanwhile, ties the implications of
Rübekeil’s philological and Sebo’s literary analyses together. He offers an explana-
tion for how cultural references which appear (at face value) to be coherent, and
how the poetic structures by which they were conveyed, may have come to be uti-
lised by the diverse peoples who spoke Germanic languages across the first
millennium AD, without this requiring us to assume that this indicates some form
of shared cultural identity which Germanic speakers possessed.
A second obstacle is the proposal that we cannot simply jettison labels which are
so firmly embedded within the discipline’s discursive frameworks, however much we
might wish to. Michael Kulikowski’s opening to this volume, printed in the form of
the keynote which he delivered at the conference, tackles this issue by highlighting
that we need to develop an alternative form of adequate language to tackle the very
real differences that we do perceive in cultural phenomena, without re-inscribing the
essentialising assumptions that are usually relied upon to achieve this task. Otherwise,
and Pragmatism in Early Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). See also, Wilhelm
Heizmann and Sigmund Oehrl, eds., Bilddenkmäler zur germanischen Götter- und Heldensage,
Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 91 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015),
1–2.
31 Alexandra Pesch, “The Impact of ‘Wyrms’: Germanic Snakes, Drakes, Saurians and Worms in
the First Millennium AD,” in Tiere und Tierdarstellungen in der Archäologie: Beiträge zum
Kolloquium in Gedenken an Torsten Capelle, 30.–31. Oktober 2015 in Herne, edited by Vera Brieske,
Aurelia Dickers and Michael M. Rind (Münster: Aschendorff, 2017), 247, n. 1.
as he puts it, “the disciplines and subdisciplines represented in this volume […] may
continue to imagine that they are in dialogue with one another while in fact performing
a pantomime – hewing to specialist technical vocabularies each with its synecdochic
certainties, while in the world outside, others are ranting simplistically and danger-
ously about immigrant violence in the fifth century”.32 This problem—how to kick
against the very discursive frameworks which enable one’s engagement with a particu-
lar phenomenon—has long been discussed by poststructuralist philosophers.33 Cătălin
Țăranu’s article in this volume explicitly draws upon their scholarship by using a
Foucauldian analytical framework in order to offer a new means of working with these
labels, without reifying them as stable, oppressive categories. For Țăranu, the problem
of the ‘Germanic’ is not that it stands for something, but rather that it stands for too
much. Like an overinflated balloon, all meanings funnelled into the ‘Germanic’ super-
structure become too inextricably associated with it, precisely because the ‘Germanic’
signifier is, ultimately, entirely without absolute meaning. Țăranu thus proposes that
whenever we make reference to the ‘Germanic’, we should both historicise the term
and create a genealogy of the term. By this he means not a genealogy in the classic
sense, but rather the term as applied by Michel Foucault: not a search for origins but
for the relationships of hierarchy, contestations of power, etc, that operate in a given
structure. Țăranu regards the ‘pan-Gothic’ milieu of the ninth-century Carolingian
world as an ideal example to demonstrate these contestations at play. Drawing upon
the analyses of the new Carolingian interest in teutones made by such scholars as
Roberta Frank, Țăranu, like Steinacher, demonstrates the highly flexible and contin-
gent nature of the ‘Germanic’ signifier.
Similarly, Veronika Egetenmeyr offers us a close textual reading of the use (or
rather, the lack thereof) of such terms as barbarus and germanus in the literary
works of the fifth-century Gallic senator and bishop, Sidonius Apollinaris. Drawing
upon postcolonial theoretical approaches to depictions of ‘self’ and ‘other’,
Egetenmeyr demonstrates that despite scarce reference to stark, explicit ‘barbar-
ian’ terminology, Sidonius nevertheless constructs an ideological discursive nar-
rative of ‘the barbarian’ through allusion, imagery and the use of metaphor, which
clearly intersects with existing preconceptions of the ‘barbaric’ in Roman ideology.
Egetenmeyr reveals how Sidonius’s deployment of this narrative transformed as the
typical, normative Roman values of paideia came under increasing assault in the
fluid, turbulent context of fifth-century Gaul. On this basis, Egetenmeyr argues that
centuries of historiographical construction render our terminology inescapable. She
therefore proposes that a more effective route out of our current bind is a methodol-
ogy not unlike that proposed by Țăranu: careful, attentive analysis of the specific
discursive contexts in which terminology was (and is) deployed, and their
32 Michael Kulikowski, this volume.

33 See, e. g., Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967).
chronological alteration. The need for careful contextualisation is also outlined by

much of the archaeological work in the volume. Steve Walker takes issue with the
depictions of stark British and Saxon ethnic conflict depicted in such literary source
material as Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquest Britanniae or Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica
Gentis Anglorum, and his article offers a firm challenge to the notion that so-called
‘Anglo-Saxon’ material culture can be regarded as straightforwardly ‘Germanic’.
Walker’s basis for this is empirical, and he argues that distribution patterns within
which particular material cultural types appear do not appear to indicate straightfor-
ward patterns of division or ethnic strife, and Walker makes an appeal, on this basis,
for the interpretation of early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ material culture as indicative of the for-
mation of a new set of hybrid identities.
It can also be illuminative to contextualise the manuscripts in which the texts
purported to evidence the ‘Germanic’ past are contained. Michael J. Kelly’s paper ex-
plores the compilation and transmission of the codices, both medieval and early
modern, which contained the text and first scholarly critical editions of the Visigothic
Liber Iudiciorum. This complex set of legal codes had a history that defies a simplis-
tic attribution of its texts to a ‘Germanic’ tradition. Kelly, like Donecker, reveals
how the philosophies of history which concerned early modern editors were con-
siderably divergent. The editions initially collated by Pierre Pithou, for example,
firmly contextualised the Liber Iudiciorum in an Iberian, not a ‘Germanic’ context,
and this context continued to frame the overarching interpretative framework ap-
plied to the text even as late as 1884, for the subsequent copies which were derived
from this edition. It was only with Friedrich Lindenbrog’s 1613 edition that the text
became ‘Germanicised’. Kelly shows the close relation of this ‘Germanicisation’ to
the edition’s political-ideological function as an explicitly secular text, which was
aimed at lending glory to the contemporary Holy Roman imperial court. It was from
this context that a historiographical divergence occurred between the text’s
German and ‘Germanicized’, and French, Flemish and Spanish ‘Ibericized’ editions,
with the ‘Germanic’ form becoming firmly entrenched as authoritative in the nine-
teenth century.
The volume is not one of unanimous agreement. Some contributors feel that the
implications of a poststructuralist analytical approach are that we must contest entirely
the utility of using the term ‘Germanic’ at all. If we acknowledge that such philoso-
phers as Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida were profoundly empirical in their ex-
amination of texts, the implication of their insights is sometimes not merely that
certain concepts are unstable, but lack any ontological foundation at all. James
Harland’s article relies upon the observation that all who attempt to demonstrate the
presence of a coherent ‘Germanic’ ideology as part of the structuring framework of
early Anglo-Saxon funerary ritual are making interpretative leaps, rather than suc-
cessfully empirically demonstrating their assertions. This being the case, why not, his
article proposes, jettison tiresome frameworks that do little to advance discussion?
These frameworks have, after all, caused very real harm.34 Likewise, Sebastian
Brather’s contribution examines how nationalist rhetoric has continually shaped,
even into the modern day, interpretations of the transformation of archaeological
material from Eastern Central Europe. Brather reveals how dichotomies between
‘Germanic’ and ‘Slavic’ are unhelpful in actively researching the transformative
processes which took place in funerary and settlement practices, not least because
notions of ‘Slavic’ migration have very little basis in the contemporary source ma-
terial from the period in which these transformations occurred. Brather and
Harland therefore both argue that the ‘Germanic’ should be jettisoned in favour of
the alternative interpretative routes which such notions have occluded. For
Harland, possible alternatives include the transformation of normative civic
Roman ideology, and its impact on social phenomena such as the construction of
gender. Brather also suggests examining alternative levels of space (the local, the
regional, and supra-regional) alongside questions of migration and mobility as di-
vorced from ethnic change. The types of identities that these authors explore are
rather more fragmentary, and more difficult to pin down, than the illusory secure
identifications which the ‘Germanic’ framework attempts, unsuccessfully, to provide.
This book, too, represents a set of disparate fragments, and this is perhaps ap-
propriate, given the multivalent and fragmentary nature of the concept that it con-
cerns. Despite the best efforts of a variety of nationalist agendas, the concept defies
being hammered into a coherent, singularly applicable form. This disparate nature
of the concept is demonstrated well by the example of the emblematic Sutton Hoo
helmet: this exceptional find combines archaeological and historical notions of the
‘Germanic’ whilst also being permeated by visual ideas regarding the putative
‘Germanic’ imagery which adorn the helmet. It is an artefact which encapsulates all
disciplines that evolved to study the ‘Germanic’: history, archaeology, art history,
and literature studies. Of these, it is the art historical legacy of the ‘Germanic’, espe-
cially, that is still under-represented in the scholarly discourse of late Antiquity and
the early Middle Ages.35 In an article published in 2014, Neil Price and Paul
Mortimer argue that “the wearer of the [Sutton Hoo] helmet was seen as both war
leader and war god, a literal personification of Odin”.36 Here, they combine different
components of Germanenbegriffe into a single narrative of ‘divine role-playing’, basing
34 James M. Harland, “Memories of Migration? The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Burial Costume of the 5th
Century AD,” Antiquity 93, no. 370 (2019): 954–69. See also James M. Harland, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and
the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain: A Modern Framework and its Problems (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam Univ. Press, in press).
35 A recent attempt at filling this gap can be found in Matthias Friedrich, “Image, Ornament, and
Aesthetics: The Archaeology of Art in the Merovingian World (c. AD 450–750)” (Dr. phil. diss.,
Albert-Ludwigs-Univ. Freiburg, 2019), esp. Chapter 1, “The Great Divide”.
36 Neil Price and Paul Mortimer, “An Eye for Odin? Divine Role-Playing in the Age of Sutton Hoo,”
European Journal of Archaeology 17, no. 3 (2014): 517–38, here 517.
their arguments entirely upon the only vaguely defined ‘wider Germanic world’, the
controversial theory that practices of so-called ‘sacral kingship’ represented “genuine
institutions […] of early medieval northern Europe”,37 and Old Norse textual evidence
about Odin: “In seeking a parallel for the one-eyed ruler figure in the traditional stories
of this region, there is a single individual that springs instantly to mind: the Æsir god
Odin”.38 The problem with this approach is not that the authors combine textual,
visual, and archaeological evidence—the difficulty is that in their particular approach
we find the ‘mixing and matching’ of pieces of evidence that are only loosely con-
nected in time and space, and which appear to form a coherent set of facts only when
interpreted through a ‘pan-Germanic’ lens. Such an approach is surely no longer tena-
ble. This volume seeks, therefore, to take a few steps back from the ‘Germanic’—that is,
to review our terminology and its use more carefully—to move toward a more nuanced,
less ‘black-and-white’ view of the late antique and early medieval worlds. We do not
intend, nor do we believe that it is possible, to offer a definitive statement on applying
the Germanenbegriff to the phenomena which function as source material from our pe-
riods of study. What we do hope to offer below is a collection of articles that are ‘good
to think with’. Perhaps they may encourage scholars to reconsider some of the analyti-
cal categories which have so often been treated as axiomatic in their respective fields.
It is, after all, only through such reconsideration that we may hope to improve the
quality of our analytical methodologies for the study of the past.
Acknowledgements: The conference was supported by several funding bodies in

the United Kingdom, including the Humanities Research Centre at the University of
York, the Royal Historical Society, and the Society for the Study of Medieval
Languages and Literatures, alongside a few smaller grants from the University of
York’s Departments of Art History and History. Heidi Stoner and Nik Gunn offered
immeasurable assistance in the organisation and running of the conference, and
Catherine-Rose Hailstone and Wesley Upson assisted greatly as stewards to help en-
sure its smooth running. Guy Halsall was supportive of the conference’s inception
and acted as an advisor on its content. James Harland was able to make his contri-
butions to the finalisation of the manuscript during his tenure as a postdoctoral fel-
low at the DFG Center for Advanced Studies 2496, “Migration and Mobility in Late
Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages,” and subsequently the Collaborative Research
Center 923 “Bedrohte Ordnungen”, both at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen.
We are immensely grateful to all of these, as well as the Northern/Early Medieval
Interdisciplinary Conference Series, for making possible the interdisciplinary dia-
logue which produced the articles that you will read in this book.
37 Ibid., 518.
38 Ibid., 532. For a more detailed discussion on the archaeological and historical problems con-
nected with such an approach, see Friedrich, “Image, Ornament, and Aesthetics,” Chapter 1.
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Michael Kulikowski
The Marriage of Philology and Race:
Constructing the ‘Germanic’
The Germania of Tacitus has been called a most dangerous book, though it is actu-
ally also a most boring book. It has none of the searing wit of the great historian’s
Annals, nor the absorbing mass psychology of the Histories. Its portrayal of Rome’s
barbarian “other” lacks the grandstanding magnificence of the Caledonian chief-
tain in the Agricola, with his ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appelant (“where they
make a desert, they call it peace”). On the contrary, the Germania is a static, some-
times laborious ethnography in which very little happens, where chaste and upright
Germani are mainly called upon to contrast with licentious Romans and to provide
a bit of exoticism for the reader’s delectation. But what the Germania lacks in ex-
citement, it makes up for with names; hundreds of them, of tribes and peoples, gen-
tes and nationes. These precious clues to an otherwise barely known past have set
scholars on their trail for centuries, ever since the ancient treatise was rediscovered
in the middle of the fifteenth century.
It is those centuries of scholarship, not the book itself, that made the Germania
dangerous: a Rorschach-blot for the political projects and prejudices of contemporar-
ies. From the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries, the Germani,
ancient Germans, Germanen—the name is the same in most languages—were of cen-
tral interest to many of the then-emerging academic disciplines. In the crucible of na-
tionalism and Romanticism, the Germania and its peoples were among the most
prominent victims of a marriage between philology and racial theory, in the increas-
ingly scientific scholarship of the nineteenth century. The Germani of old could be
equated to all the speakers of Germanic languages, and in turn to the inhabitants of
modern Germany, before that state had even come into existence.
This complicated theme is explored in a fine collection edited by Heinrich Beck,
Dieter Geuenich, and Heiko Steuer Zur Geschichte der Gleichung “germanisch-deutsch”,
which shows how combustible that ethnic and racial equation could be. It duly caught
fire, time and again, in the decades between the Franco-Prussian and the Second
World Wars. Whether we like it or not, we live in the shadow of that combustible
history. Though scholars in many national traditions have tried to escape it in
many different ways, we have inherited a seemingly inescapable vocabulary and
a set of argumentative and interpretative frameworks that refuse to be pulled
down. The present volume, and the conference from which it emerged, embraced
a collective determination to make progress in understanding “the Germanic”
while recognizing and respecting the diverse disciplinary and interpretative tradi-
tions represented by the contributors. The essay, more or less as it was delivered,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-002
20 Michael Kulikowski
aims to briefly sketch the history of the “Gleichung germanisch-deutsch” and the
ways it continues to influence our discussion of Rome’s barbarian neighbors.
I bring up Rome at the beginning, because it was Romans who created the collec-
tivity that became the Germani—the name they gave to the commonalities they imag-
ined beyond the Rhine and Upper Danube. Equally, the nature of the Germani would
never have become so very fraught a concept for modernity had the western Roman
empire not collapsed in the fifth century AD: the idea of a Völkerwanderung, and its
implication in Rome’s fall, is still an inescapable element of our scholarly inheritance.
The word Völkerwanderung, usually left untranslated in English scholarship, is
German, and the Migration of Peoples has long been regarded as the migration
of specifically “Germanic” peoples: the French for Völkerwanderung, tellingly, is
vagues germaniques. Conceptually, this implies an opposition between Germanic
north and Roman south in which the former eventually overcomes the latter.
That model goes back to the Renaissance, and particularly to the determination
of Italian humanists to create an imagined Antiquity that would decline into the
Middle Ages that they claimed to reject. The Reformation sharpened the concep-
tual binary, as Protestant humanists embraced the vision of a virtuous Germanic
north in opposition to the Roman south, papist and corrupt. Since 1455, they
had to hand Tacitus’s Germania, with its barbarous but admirably authentic
northerners to bear witness.
The publication, in 1555, of the Viennese humanist Wolfgang Lazius’s De aliquot
gentium migrationibus (“On the migrations of certain peoples”) created an enduring
narrative structure whereby barbarous northern peoples migrate south into the
Roman world and thus into history, though Lazius did not automatically equate
these gentes with Germani. At roughly the same time, European conquest of the
Americas generated discussions of the living “savages” that the colonizers found
there, and that inevitably triggered reflection on Europe’s own past savagery. It was
in that moment that Tacitus and his Germania became not just one among many, but
the essential piece of evidence for Europe’s northern past. From it was constructed
an enduring myth of Germanic purity and primitive freedom, nourished by early
modern debates over rulership, the nature of the prince, and the powers of the state.
In Britain, those of a Whiggish persuasion could trace the rights of Englishmen to the
primaeval forests whence Angles and Saxons had emerged. Gibbon’s Enlightened
anti-clericalism found room for both internal and external causes for Rome’s fall: reli-
gion as well as barbarism, not merely the latter. Into this tinderbox of ideas and ide-
ologies, all of which took for granted the conquest of a sophisticated Roman empire
by some version of the northern barbarian, there arrived Romantic nationalism and
the contemporaneous creation of the modern university, introducing the first self-
conscious historical methodology and the first works of scholarship in whose tradi-
tion we still labour.
Modern historical method developed against a backdrop of nationalism that
sought to define the cultural, linguistic, and spiritual identity of a nation, whether
or not that nation had as yet achieved statehood—as the German nation had not.
The discovery of familial relations among languages, and the taxonomizing of these
into groups on a tree, was an invitation to make value judgments, and the ranking
of civilizations was part and parcel of nineteenth-century scholarship as well as pol-
itics. Just as important to these developments is the historical accident that the
main impetus for the professional study of the late empire and early Middle Ages
came from German-speaking lands which nationalists longed to see unified; the col-
lection and publication of national primary sources in a unified corpus was central
to such a project, and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica was founded in 1819,
half a century before the creation of a German state. Similar corpora of ancient and
medieval sources were produced in most European countries, with the modern “na-
tion” always the normative framework for the inclusion or exclusion of a primary
source. But the Monumenta Germaniae was particularly important in shaping
scholarship on the period: among the hundreds of ancient and medieval works
published in its many volumes, its editors arrogated to German history not just
authors from the barbarian kingdoms and the German territories of the Middle Ages,
but also Roman writers like Ausonius and Symmachus. The early editors thereby cre-
ated a historical epistemology in which late Roman authors belong to the history of
Germany because the Germans took over the Roman world. The Völkerwanderung thus
became a constitutive part of modern Germany’s past.
The Monumenta’s scholarly standards were high from the beginning, and the reli-
able critical editions produced by its editors were the necessary precondition for writ-
ing an accurate, modern narrative of events. The fundamental empirical work on the
period was done by the scholarly titans of Wilhelmine Germany and the synthetic nar-
ratives that remain standard to this day emerged late in the nineteenth and early in the
twentieth century. Some, like Otto Seeck’s Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken
Welt, were implicitly written from a Roman perspective. Other comparable works
implicitly took a Germanic perspective, though they had perforce to use the same
Roman primary sources: Felix Dahn’s massive Könige der Germanen and Urgeschichte
der germanischen und romanischen Völker, each in multiple volumes, and Ludwig
Schmidt’s Geschichte der deutschen Stämme bis zum Ausgang der Völkerwanderung. It
is important to note the way the germanisch of Dahn becomes the deutsch of
Schmidt, though their analytical perspectives were not far apart at all.
These nineteenth-century approaches have had a lasting legacy. Where Classical
philology and ancient history have long been kept separate by methodology and the
sorts of questions each asks, the field of germanisches Altertumskunde tended to rely
on a mutually reinforcing overlap of Germanic philology and barbarian history, and on
a sort of timeless view of Germanic antiquity. This timelessness allowed a full millen-
nium’s worth of “Germanic” evidence—that is evidence that was either written in a
philologically Germanic language, or written in Latin by men who came from regions
in which the vernacular was a Germanic language—to be deployed synchronically in
discussing any given moment in that history. The old Altertumskunde has nowadays
evolved into Vor- und Frühgeschichte and has become much more rigorous in the way
it handles different categories of evidence, but is still far more likely to draw upon ety-
mologies, folklore, and speculative linguistics than is either ancient or high medieval
history.
Another early twentieth-century development further entrenched the concept of a
real and reified Germanentum as part of our historiographical legacy: the emergence of
archaeology out of antiquarianism to become an auxiliary science of history. One cen-
tral tenet of scientific archaeology’s early years was that material remains could be
correlated to tribes or peoples attested in historical sources, and also to the language
families identified by philologists, so that any given collection of extant material evi-
dence could be assigned to a named historical people. The approach was codified by
the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who called it Siedlungsarchäologie. A basic corollary
of Kossinna’s Siedlungsarchäologie, which was naturalized in the Anglophone world by
V. Gordon Childe, was migration: because (supposedly homogeneous) archaeological
cultures could theoretically be matched to ethnic groups named in the sources, the
changing distribution of material culture could be read as the migration of peoples.
The forthright certainties of Kossinna’s approach are now generally repudiated—so
much so that German-speaking archaeologists speak of a “Kossinna-hammer” with
which one can batter one’s scholarly opponents. But it is also true that the overlapping
triad of material culture/language/ethnicity remains the default epistemology of most
archaeological work on the period, and that many practising archaeologists continue
to accept an unproblematic link between certain objects and certain ethnic groups.
Developments in scholarship have a rhythm of their own, but in the high nation-
alist century from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, any topic that potentially touched
on the authenticity of modern claims to authority could not be divorced from contem-
porary politics. Few things had as much potential for sparking political controversy
as did the nature and territorial extent of ancient Germania. Within France, for in-
stance, nineteenth-century debate over whether Celtic Gauls or Germanic Franks
were the authentic progenitors of the modern nation became more poisonous after
France lost the Franco-Prussian War, and echoes of these debates persist in every-
thing from the Asterix comic-books to Gauloises cigarettes. Analogous debates af-
fected both pre-fascist Italy and Restauración Spain, tinged by the politics of right
and left and creating scholarly faultlines that are visible to this day. Britain long re-
sisted professionalization of historical scholarship along German lines, but forays
into our historical period shared many assumptions of Continental scholars. Hector
Munro Chadwick, in his influential The Heroic Age (1912), embraced the Romantic
and völkisch vision of germanisches Altertumskunde, discerning a common Germanic
and Nordic past that united northern Europeans against effeminate Latins. Chadwick’s
genteel racism, common enough in his day, is equally characteristic of those
Anglophone historians who most eagerly embraced German scientific history,
whether the liberal anti-Semite E.A. Freeman, or the progressive Victorian Irishman
J.B. Bury.
By the time Bury wrote his last works in the 1920s, historical idealism had taken a
battering in the trenches of the western front, as had almost every gentler sentiment.
And an unpleasant nationalism, shading into out-and-out jingoism and racism, is visi-
ble in many analyses from the first half of the twentieth century. Thus the great Felix
Dahn was not just a historian, but a Romantic novelist: Ein Kampf um Rom has never
gone out of print, telling the tale of heroic Ostrogoths and wicked Byzantines, ending
in the journey “home” to Nordic Thule of the last Goths: “Wir sind die letzten Goten!/
Wir tragen keine Krone mit–/Wir tragen einen Toten.” Dahn was also an anti-Semite
and an anti-Slav who banned Polish student associations when he was university rec-
tor at Breslau (now, of course, Wrocław in Poland) and belonged to the rabidly nation-
alist Alldeutscher Verband. Ludwig Schmidt’s 1905 Geschichte der deutschen Stämme,
which implied the perfect identification of ancient Germani with modern Deutschen,
was so congenial to a National Socialist audience that it was reissued unchanged in
1940–1941. For the Nazis, the Völkerwanderung and the fall of the Roman empire were
historical evidence for German Lebensraum, so much so that the SS created an archae-
ological and historical unit, the Ahnenerbe, to follow Hitler’s conquering armies and
uncover the ancient foundations of Germanic settlement. Indeed many prominent
post-war archaeologists got their start digging in France or Poland, looking for evi-
dence of an earlier German conquest.
It is therefore no wonder that post-War research on our period bore so many
scars: French writers on les vagues germaniques evoked the Wehrmacht on the
march. The famously epigrammatic concluding sentence of André Piganiol’s L’empire
chrétien—“Roman civilization did not die peacefully. It was murdered”—left no one
in any doubt that Rome’s murderers were Germans. In the past half century, the
French scholarly tradition has produced most of the genuinely ground-breaking
approaches to high medieval history, but has remained strikingly traditional on
the subject of the barbarians. There have been some very original works for sure
(for instance Magali Coumert’s Origines des peuples), but there also remains a power-
ful strain of Francophone research devoted to distinguishing Romans and Germans
by measuring their skulls and matching the results to their grave-goods.
Phenotyping skeletons is less in vogue in other scholarly traditions, for reasons
that should be obvious, and it is no surprise that the first real attempts to break
with pre-War research traditions came in German-speaking countries. While some
scholars did little more than substitute a new, less volkisch vocabulary within an
unchanged interpretative framework, a new generation struggled to write about an-
cient Germani in conceptual terms untainted by the legacy of National Socialism.
They did so by challenging previously unproblematized assumptions about ethnicity
and identity, and the ethnic correlation of culture, language and polity. The analyti-
cal impact of this change was to minimize the role of mass migration in discussions
of the Völkerwanderungszeit; instead, late antique evidence could be read as a pro-
cess in which political communities were reconstituted discursively and creatively
around new leaders, rather than as a simple Germanic conquest of Roman soil.
Like any scholarly conversation, this one has gone through phases, developing
over time. When it began in the 1960s, and particularly during a period of creative
efflorescence in the 1970s and early 1980s, scholars attempted to salvage the sub-
stance of the old Altertumskunde with a new analytical language borrowed from so-
ciology and divorced from pre-war nationalist traditions. The ur-text for this is the
1961 Habilitationsschrift of the medievalist Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und
Verfassung. Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen gentes. Long and difficult, cited in
inverse proportion to its actual readership, it had little reception until taken up in
the pathbreaking 1970s publications of the Viennese historian Herwig Wolfram.
Wolfram’s History of the Goths, and his work on other barbarian gentes, popularized
the idea of barbarian ethnogenesis: ethnicity was the central component of barbar-
ian identity, but that barbarian ethnicity was situational and not or not mainly—a
matter of genuine descent-communities. Ethnic identity was instead carried from
place to place, and passed from generation to generation by Traditionskerne,
small groups of aristocratic warriors, around whom larger ethnic groups coalesced
and dissolved in a process of continuous ethnic reinvention. While effectively
eliminating the need for both mass migrations and ethnic or racial essentialism,
Wolfram’s approach could also rehabilitate altertumskundliche habits like using
speculative philology and “Germanic” texts from vastly differing, and sometimes
very late, contexts as solid historical authorities for antiquity.
This take on barbarian history enjoyed a tremendous vogue in both deutschspra-
chige and Anglophone worlds, and was given both nuance and far wider currency
through the work of Wolfram’s student Walter Pohl, one of the most influential medie-
valists of recent decades. In the 1990s, in particular, Vienna-affiliated scholarship dom-
inated medievalists’ writing on the centuries between 400 and 900, through major
European Research Council projects and an international working group on Texts and
Identities. Since the 1990s, discussion has moved far beyond the pathbreaking studies
of Wenskus and Wolfram, integrating Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological insights into the
way identities are constantly being constituted, reconstituted and enforced. There is
likewise a new sensitivity to the sometimes very great distance (chronological, social,
political) between the world in which our literary sources were written and the ancient
history they purport to describe. Equally, there is a new openness to the reality of an-
cient cultural, political and linguistic distinctions, and to the role of violence in the en-
forcement of those distinctions. That is, we need no longer insist on a rhetoric of
transformation to describe all our period’s changes: the western Roman empire did in
fact fall. Furthermore, ethnicity—Germanic identity or otherwise—has ceased to be the
central or exclusive focus of research. (The distance travelled can be measured in the
pathbreaking collective volume on Strategies of Distinction which Pohl edited in 1998
and the recent Strategies of Identification, published a decade and a half later.) In
effect, the formative dogma of the 80s has gone; indeed the most recent edition of
Wolfram’s Geschichte der Goten has shed its talk of Traditionskerne, which serves
to highlight the lasting quality of its empirical analysis.
The upshot of all this is that the time has come to take another shot at a more
ambitious project: integrating this fruitful theoretical nuance about the constitution
and construction of various social identities into narrative history, and doing so in a
way that does not slip accidentally into time-hallowed tropes of Germanic migration.
Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376–568 was a fine first at-
tempt, as were the second edition of Pohl’s Die Völkerwanderung and Hubert Fehr
and Philipp von Rummel’s volume of the same name.1 We must nevertheless do more
and try harder, because an alternative interpretative path exists and it is not a happy
one: the perpetuation, even the revalorization, of very simplistic models of migration,
and violent migration at that. The popular vision of “the Germanic” has always been
one of migrating barbarian hordes, attacking the frontiers of the Roman empire and
conquering it. This vision is peddled in magazines and pop histories for buffs, on tele-
vision, in wargames, and in the vocabulary of the popular press (“barbarians at the
gates”). In fairness, most people prefer a simple story to a complex one every time,
and the nuance and ambiguity of the approaches I’ve been describing are simply not
congenial to those who want their bad guys bad, their good guys good, and every-
thing to make immediate and transparent sense. We should not begrudge demagogic
politicians their prejudices or the History Channel its target audience.
More troubling, however, is the accession of serious scholars. A thoroughly re-
vanchist approach to barbarian history has been startlingly successful in recent years.
One can mock a lot of it as Neo-Victorian imperial nostalgia, all Michael Caine and
Stanley Baker at Rorke’s Drift, and the Boy’s Own style affected by some of it actively
invites that criticism. One of the more recent emissions in this vein is something more
than that, however, and troublingly so: Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians: The
Fall of Rome and Birth of Europe (2010) must be reckoned with as a type of anti-
Wenskus and anti-Pohl. The latter deploy sophisticated social science to unpack nuan-
ces for which historians do not, or did not yet, have a vocabulary, greatly expanding
our knowledge of the past as a result. The former deploys the vocabulary of social sci-
ence to decorate and thus justify a radically simplistic narrative of mass migration and
transparent tribal ethnicities; it is a masterclass in intellectual sleight of hand, retailing
a narrative that could have been written a hundred years before with language that
simulates the cutting edge, thereby giving new currency to old stereotypes. We should
be under no illusion as to which approach will always remain more popular: in a
world where the American president came to power promising to build a wall to keep
out Mexicans, where Britain has chosen to turn its back on Europe, and European gov-
ernments are building fences to fend off thousands of displaced Syrians, it can never
1 Editorial note: the time between the author’s delivery of this plenary address and this volume’s publi-
cation has also seen the publication of Mischa Meier’s Geschichte der Völkerwanderung: Europa, Asien
und Afrika vom 3. bis zum 8. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2019), or indeed the author’s own
Imperial Tragedy: From Constantine’s Empire to the Destruction of Roman Italy, AD 363–568 (Harvard:
Harvard Univ. Press, 2019) which are also good examples of books which try to achieve these aims.
be a neutral or disinterested scholarly act to discuss our period in terms of “unassimi-

lated barbarians” and “immigrant violence.” We have learned we can do better than
this, and really, we must.
Anyone who studies European history between 500 BC and the Carolingian era
must at some point come up against the words German and Germanic and think about
what they mean. With luck, their response will be to interrogate the Germanic, not to
assume its self-evidence: doing so requires disciplinary humility and interdisciplinary
respect. Our disciplines and subdisciplines vary in their antiquity, but they are all well-
established and all grew out of a more generalized early modern tradition of humane
studies. Regardless of quite when our fields developed the lineaments of their codified
modern, and self-aware disciplinary praxis, they have all been here long enough to
possess specialist vocabularies. These vocabularies, these Fachsprache, mean some-
thing to one’s subspecialist cohort that they cannot mean to anyone else. Some are
synecdoche, where one word evokes a set of interlinked concepts, connotations, and
allusive triggers that are completely invisible from what it denotes formally. Others are
just shorthand for something specific that would otherwise require an elaborate periph-
rasis. It is also an unfortunate fact that different specialities use the same words in dif-
ferent roles, so that what they mean is not necessarily the same across disciplines or
even subdisciplines. It is therefore incumbent upon us to understand how our interloc-
utors from other disciplines understand the words we and they are using.
Philosophers and mathematicians share the concept of “adequate language”, by
which they mean a medium of communication that is clear and encompassing enough
to convey intended meaning, and simultaneously specific and parsimonious enough
to exclude unwanted meaning. It seems clear to me that we who interrogate the
Germanic do not have an adequate language in which to do so. I am not certain we
could arrive at any such thing as an adequate language for our mutual interests, but
it is the fact that we do not yet have one that engenders a need for disciplinary humil-
ity. When a historian reads an archaeologist or a philologist reads a numismatist on a
topic of mutual interest, each will inevitably see familiar words deployed in ways that
appear questionable, even wrong-headed. When that happens, the temptation is to
question the epistemological soundness of our interlocutor. It is an impulse we
should resist. The baseline assumption should be that we have not understood
our interlocutor’s specialist vocabulary, not that another’s specialist vocabulary is
wrong, though sometimes it may be. When certain German archaeologists pro-
claim their hostility to Mischargumentation, insisting that it is pure archaeological
enquiry, uncontaminated by the literary evidence, that demonstrates the Gepidic or
Langobardic character of a given cemetery, historians may feel sure their arguments
are in fact gemischte. But by the same token, historians should realize that they do
not instinctively understand the connotative implications of archaeology’s technical
vocabulary, the penumbra of subordinate ideas carried in each of its technical terms,
whatever the scholarly language. One’s own judgments therefore require as much
scepticism as whatever it is one is trying to judge.
To put it another way, when interrogating as varied and old a concept as “the
Germanic”, we need to cultivate the habit of applying to our own half-examined as-
sumptions the sort of scepticism we lavish upon others. Everything, that is, with a
grain of salt, ourselves included. Cum grano salis—that Latin tag is the title of a
Festschrift for an eminent combatant in the debate over ethnic identifications in
material culture. As title, it is a bit double-edged, but it can encourage us to turn
one edge on ourselves. As scholars we are trained to take all our evidence with that
proverbial grain of salt, and almost all of us do so, most of the time. And yet, as
human beings, we cannot help but take others with a much bigger grain of salt than
we take ourselves, and that is a problem. What do I mean? I mean I am used to scoff-
ing, almost unthinkingly, when a Vor- und Frühgeschichtlicher Archäologe tells me
that the grave goods deposited with a fifth-century skeleton in Burgundy reveal a
north Italian woman who married a Danubian man on the march (a Gepid?
Langobard? Rugian? Maybe one of Valamer’s eastern Goths on the way to Gaul,
no Mischargumentation there?), and was then buried German-style in a graveyard
mainly reserved for Gallo-Romans. Surely one is free to scoff? Not so fast. Why is
it that rather than scoffing I accept it, often unthinkingly, when a provincial Roman
archaeologist writes about someone with an obviously Aquitanian style buried in a
Narbonensian or Tarraconensian context? Why does that feel true? Because we all do
know intuitively that regional dress styles are real, that a Nascar T-shirt is as foreign
to Northampton, Massachusetts, as Birkenstocks are to Jackson, Mississippi.
Cum grano salis. The provincial Roman archaeologist has a point, and one that
ought to hold good for barbarians too, when one stops to think about it. Of course,
the concept of Tracht might have wincingly Romantic-nationalist origins, but re-
gional habits of dress do exist and have existed, and the problem needs to be faced
squarely, in specific material terms, and not just disembodied into the abstract realm
of habitus. We will perhaps not find an adequate language with which to do this, but
we should at least try to find a common language in which to make the attempt. If we
don’t make the attempt, the disciplines and subdisciplines represented in this vol-
ume, studying the same material and the same history, may continue to imagine that
they are in dialogue with one another while in fact performing a pantomime—hewing
to specialist technical vocabularies each with its synecdochic certainties, while in the
world outside, others are ranting simplistically and dangerously about immigrant vi-
olence in the fifth century.
Cum grano salis. Along with the quest for an adequate language that requires,
I mean openness to the novel and disconfirmatory. Let me take two examples.
America’s imperial death rattle in the Middle East has brought an awful lot of new
material to the surface. The Central and South Asian aspects of Sasanian history,
to take the clearest of all examples, will never be the same, with decades of dis-
puted chronologies now clarified definitively by new coin finds. Perhaps more un-
expected is the explosion of new evidence for the Central Asian Huns—Alkhan,
Hepthalite, Nezak—which has allowed for rigorous comparative analysis and
conclusions that will surprise the western medievalist or ancient historian. We

have not yet taken up the challenge of reinterpreting our European material in
light of what the Hepthalites and Nezaks can tell us, but we must. If ‘Huns’, who-
ever they were, could create sophisticated and monetized state systems in what
had been the Kushan empire and eastern Iran, why do we think they didn’t do the
same in the Carpathians or the Puszta?
That example is deliberately peripheral to normal discussions of the Germanic.
The second one is closer to home: there can be no doubt that (setting aside the Divjak
letters and Moreau sermons of Augustine), the Vienna palimpsest of Dexippus is the
most important newly discovered text of late antiquity. It expands our corpus of that
third-century author’s fragments by an eighth or so, and preserves material on the
“Scythian” invasions of the Balkans under the emperors Decius and Gallienus. Along
with clarifying some chronologies, and providing confirmatory evidence for a couple
of events (two sieges of Thessalonica in the 250s, not a doublet), one name stands
out: Ostrogotha. There, in an authentic text from an unimpeachable source, is a
name that is not only philologically Germanic, but that recalls a passage from the
Getica of Jordanes, the sixth-century Constantinopolitan historian of the Goths.
Jordanes is at the heart of many controversies, not least the extent to which he re-
lied upon a lost history dedicated to the Gothic king Theodoric by his praetorian
prefect Cassiodorus. No wonder, then, that the new Dexippus has caused much ex-
citement—and the temptation to declare that one’s own long-held interpretations
of third-century history have been proved right. In fact, though, the new Dexippus
should inspire humility. A substantial part of what I have written on the third-
century Goths, for instance, needs to be rethought: Jordanes appears to contain more
good information than I had ever been willing to allow. Like many others, I had as-
sumed that the Ostrogotha episode in Jordanes bore as little relation to fact as his
account of the king Tanausis fighting the Egyptian pharoah Sesostris. Dexippus
shows that I was wrong—we need to look at what Jordanes preserves for the period
treated by Dexippus in a new light, adjusting our criteria for the possible, the probable
and the dubious the light of new evidence. But the new Dexippus should be humbling
in other ways too: we’ve long known that Jordanes used the fifth-century Greek au-
thor Priscus of Panium, and some, myself included, have argued that that places the
Getica firmly in the learned Greek world of classicizing history, rather than the Latin,
or still less the “Germanic,” context of Theodoric’s Ravenna. Surely the new Dexippus
helps clinch that point: Jordanes is writing in Latin from mainly Greek sources, and we
remain further than ever from Italy, Cassiodorus, or some putative Origo Gothica
known to the royal Amal house. Questions need to be reopened, strongly held convic-
tions tested, not just reasserted.
Let me wrap up. One of the projects I’m working on deals with the sociology of
knowledge, which can often bump up against philosophy of history. The more I’ve
read in that literature, the more I’ve come to think that at some fundamental level,
Wilhelm Dilthey was right about the task of the human sciences. Interpreting the
past is more than the application of method, the third-person project of explanation
(das Erklären). Interpretation of the past is also a project of empathic understanding—
an encompassing first-person Verstehen, that will have to be approximate, but is none-
theless essential to any truth-claims our interpretation might make. R.G. Collingwood
put the same point more pragmatically in his Idea of History: along with analytical
method, understanding the past requires the re-enactment of past events in the mind
of the historian, which is an imaginative process not a mechanical one. All of us are
working on one of the oldest and most controverted questions in history—the relation-
ship of Europe’s north to its Mediterranean south, the identity of its peoples, and the
fate of Rome, the most universalizing polity the world has ever seen. The question is
baked into our psyches, a constitutive part of western modernity. And thus the lines of
engagement have been developing for so very long that they too often function to re-
strict our analysis and fetter our capacity to imagine. If interrogating “the Germanic”
and the historical circumstances in which it is imbricated is our collective goal, then
we need to recognize those fetters, kick against their restriction. We will not ask en-
tirely new questions. A paradigm shift is unlikely. What we can do, though, is avoid
restating old questions so that they do no more than conjure and give comfort to
ready-made answers. The idea of the Germanic has been put to some truly horrific
uses. Left uninterrogated, the concept can still do so, surreptitiously or openly, it
doesn’t matter. As an object of interrogation, we can at least restrict the concept’s func-
tion as a Rorschach-blot for shifting prejudices, and perhaps essay a language ade-
quate to convey the hesitancy and nuance which so complex a symbol requires.
Further Reading
This discursive lecture was not designed for the kind of scholarly annotation that
a more analytic piece of research would require. Additionally, the literature has
grown and developed since this was originally drafted. That said, a few words on
further reading (excluding books mentioned in the body of the text above) might
be helpful. Perhaps the main thing to note is the extent to which the importance
of the Eurasian context foreshadowed here has now entered the scholarly mainstream:
I would single out Mischa Meier’s monumental Geschichte der Völkerwanderung:
Europa, Asien und Afrika vom 3. bis zum 8. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
2019), my own Imperial Triumph (London: Profile Books, 2016) and Imperial Tragedy
(London: Profile Books, 2019), and the excellent collective volume edited by Nicola di
Cosmo and Michael Maas, Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome,
China, Iran and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018).
Important historiographic work includes Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold,
August 410 – Ein Kampf um Rom (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2010), Ian Wood, The Modern
Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013) and Bonnie Effros,
Uncovering the Germanic Past. Merovingian Archaeology in France 1830–1914 (Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press, 2012).
Narratives covering the “fall of the Roman empire” are legion. The most plausible
and effective are Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), Henning Börm, Westrom von Honorius
bis Justinian (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013), Christine Delaplace, La fin de l’Empire
romain de Occident (Rennes: Presse Univ. de Rennes, 2015), and Hugh Elton, The
Roman Empire in Late Antiquity: A Political and Military History (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2018).
Apart from the works by Pohl and others mentioned in the text, one should
seek out Magali Coumert, Origines des peuples (Paris: Institut d’études augusti-
nienes, 2007) and Roland Steinacher, Die Vandalen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2016).
Herwig Wolfram’s classic Die Goten: Von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des sechsten
Jahrhunderts should now be consulted in its 5th edition (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009).
Finally, consistently relevant work is published in the Ergänzungsbände zum
Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde and the Forschungen zur Geschichte
des Mittelalters from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Roland Steinacher
Rome and Its Created Northerners
Germani as a Historical Term
In this article I discuss the many problems attached to the use of Germani as a his-
torical term through a consideration of Latin and Greek sources from the first cen-
tury BCE to the tenth century CE, that is, roughly speaking, from Posidonius of
Apameia to ninth- and tenth-century Byzantine and Carolingian writers. Latin texts
used the term Germani to describe a barbarian population beyond the Roman bor-
ders east of the Rhine and north of the Danube only for a rather short period. In the
first two centuries CE, Gaius Julius Caesar and other authors after him, especially
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, established the term. Having been introduced by these
Roman authors, Germani and Germania survived in a variety of different meanings.
After the Principate, Germani in most cases simply described Franks or Alamanni
on both banks of the Rhine. In the first century CE, during the reign of emperor
Domitian (81–96) the geographical term Germania came in use to name the two
Roman provinces along the Rhine, Germania superior and inferior. East of these
provinces an area of Roman interest known as Germania appears in the sources
throughout the Augustan period. Consistently, Germania described a greater area
than Gallia or Italia did. A Roman category had been taken over by early medieval
intellectuals but never related to a clear political or territorial concept.
Many Greek scholars simply classified the inhabitants of the northwestern and
northeastern Mediterranean as ‘Celts’ and ‘Scythians’, respectively. This remained
usual practice in Greek literature until Late Antiquity. A few Greek texts instead use
Germanoi (Γερμανοί). These texts either depended on Caesar, or defined the
Germanoi as a Celtic people. In most modern archaeological or historical studies,
many gentes (barbarian groups) are simply classified as Germani without further
discussion. A term like Germani still evokes, no matter how much one tries to avoid
it, notions of contingent identities in vast areas east of the Rhine and north of the
Danube, including parts of Scandinavia, and with undefined borders to the east.1
This is very near to what Roman writers from the first century BCE to the second
1 Bruno Krüger et al., Die Germanen: Geschichte und Kultur der germanischen Stämme in
Mitteleuropa: 1. Von den Anfängen bis zum 2. Jahrhundert unserer Zeitrechnung; 2. Die Stämme und
Stammesverbände in der Zeit vom 3. Jahrhundert bis zur Herausbildung der politischen Vorherrschaft
der Franken, Veröffentlichungen des Zentralinstituts für Alte Geschichte und Archäologie der
Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR 4, 1/2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1979/1983), vols. 1 and 2, a
handbook on Die Germanen printed in East Berlin, did not at all alter the traditional German way of
dealing with a contingent Germanic identity. A stronger focus on social and economic history of all
of the Germanen was the only change.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-003
32 Roland Steinacher
century CE, especially Caesar and Tacitus, wanted their fellow Romans to believe.
At the same time, centuries after the first use of the term Germani (and in the same
way as with the term Celts), such categories offered some security for generations
of scholars and their readers in a field of complicated and very often perplexing
sources, both in material and in written culture. Such pseudo-ethnic terms became
widespread, by offering some order to puzzling material, and they have a long his-
tory in scholarship, that continues even today.
Half a millennium ago, when medieval Europe entered an age of fast economic,
political, and social change, scholars adapted the terms Germani and Celts. A society
claiming classical texts for its own intellectual foundation frequently founded its his-
torical explanations on the written remains of antiquity. Learned men of that age laid
the groundwork for a ‘modern’ view of ethnic identity by looking for clear borders
between the sixteenth-century Germans and French, Italians and Spaniards—a task
that was not especially easy in a Europe unified by a common ecclesiastical and intel-
lectual culture. Roman as well as Greek writers, however, had very different aims from
those of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century scholars. Thus, the division of peoples into
West Germanic, East Germanic, and North Germanic was an eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century linguistic construct.
During the nineteenth century the putative existence of a ‘Germanic’ identity,
though in the end nothing more than a fantasy of ancient literature, was given new
strength by linguistic theories. The entry “Germanen” in the Deutsches Wörterbuch of
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm offered, for example,a simple explanation: Germani was
simply the term for the Deutschen, and the peoples related to them (“germanen ist
eine bezeichnung der deutschen und der ihnen stammverwandten völker bei Kelten und
Römern, die sich bei letzteren mit sicherheit nicht über den sklavenkrieg [73–71 v. Chr.]
hinauf verfolgen läszt”).2 Most scholars had no reservations about the existence of a
coherent Germanic world before the Middle Ages. Archaeological, historical, and
linguistic research in the German- speaking world defined the Germani, until recently,
as the immediate predecessors of the modern Germans.3 It is impossible, however, to
generalise about the economic, social, religious, ethnic, or political structures of so-
called ‘Germanic’ peoples. The category Germani is a Roman and literary one; there
has never been a ‘Germanic’ identity, nor has there ever been a ‘Germanic world’: “The
non-existence of ancient Germans is perhaps the most important thing one can say
about the barbarians of late antiquity”.4 “A people dubbing itself Germani may have
2 Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 vols. (Leipzig: 1854–1961), 5:3716; also
available online at: http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/DWB, accessed March 2017.
3 Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire, The Middle Ages
Series (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 20–22.
4 Ibid., 20.
never existed. As a term applied by others, however, Germani had a long and rich his-
tory, from Caesar’s Germani up to the present-day English term ‘Germans’.”5
Despite the ambiguity of the antique term Germani, an enduring identity span-
ning from the constructed Germani in prehistory to the modern German nation
has become part of Germany’s public interest today.6 Roman sources classified
the societies which Roman soldiers, politicians, and diplomats dealt with.
As these sources have a very different background than our research interests,
problems inevitably arise. Modern scholarship has to discuss every individual and
every social entity (gens) on its own terms, considering their specific historical cir-
cumstances. Prehistoric sociological structures interacted with urban, Mediterranean
culture and it was out of these processes of integration and confrontation lasting for
centuries, the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’, that medieval Europe emerged.
The idea of a ‘Germanic’ identity, apart from a Roman definition of a Germania, did
not appear earlier than the sixteenth century. It is much more part of the history of
scholarship than of the Roman, barbarian, or post-imperial history of Europe.7
5 Walter Pohl, Die Germanen, Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 57 (Munich: Oldenbourg,

2000), 1.
6 Pohl, Die Germanen, 1. The “maybe” of the first sentence provoked the critique of Walter Goffart.
Goffart identifies here a “Germanic contention” (Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 7, 233) and attacks Pohl
on the basis of the introduction of his book cited above: “Pohl is, of course, committed to the exis-
tence of his subject, a coherent ‘Germanic’ people foreshadowing the ‘Deutsche’ of today (ibid.,
274).” Walter Pohl, “Review on Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides,” The American Historical Review
112, no. 3 (2007), 913 answered, this was “the exact opposite of my real position.”
7 Michael Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 43–70; Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 40–55; Walter Pohl, “Der
Germanenbegriff vom 3. bis 8. Jahrhundert: Identifikationen und Abgrenzungen,” in Zur Geschichte
der Gleichung “germanisch – deutsch”, edited by Heinrich Beck et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004),
163–83; Walter Pohl, “Vom Nutzen des Germanenbegriffes zwischen Antike und Mittelalter: Eine
forschungsgeschichtliche Perspektive,” in Akkulturation. Probleme einer germanisch-romanischen
Kultursynthese in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter, edited by Dieter Hägermann, et al.,
Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 41 (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2004), 18–34; Jörg Jarnut, “Germanisch: Plädoyer für die Abschaffung eines obsoleten
Zentralbegriffes der Frühmittelalterforschung,” in Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen: Von der
Bedeutung des frühen Mittelalters, edited by Walter Pohl, Forschungen zur Geschichte des
Mittelalters 8 (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW, 2004), 111–13; Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The
Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 25–28; Pohl, Die Germanen, 61;
Heinrich Beck et al., s.v. “Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde,” RGA (1998), 11:
181–483, 420–38; Matthias Springer, “Zu den begrifflichen Grundlagen der Germanenforschung,”
Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden 44 (1990): 169–77;
Heinz Gollwitzer, “Zum politischen Germanismus des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Max-Planck-
Institut für Geschichte (1971): 282–356.
Caesar’s Invention: Germani as a Third Group

in between Celts and Scythians
Greek and Roman Ethnography
Greek writers defined identities of human societies in the known world and be-
queathed ethnonyms. Since the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, these categories were
most often little more than learned constructions. Greek ethnographers like
Hekataios, Herodotus and Eratosthenes of Cyrene categorized the world north of the
Alps as a western Keltike (Κελτική) and an eastern Scythike (Σκυθική) with the river
Tanais (Don) as its frontier.8 Celts and Scythians were known as the two ethne (ἔθνη)
living in the northern part of the inhabited world. Ethne was understood to describe
greater groups of peoples. Other parts of the world were inhabited by Thracians or
Persians, Aethiopians, Libyans, and Maurousioi. Each of these terms is complicated
and needs scholarly interpretation.9 Greek ethnographers tried to classify new groups
interacting with the Mediterranean world and to understand them as part of one of
the known ethne. Observations, deductions, and speculations, combined with empiri-
cal knowledge, formed the basis of this written knowledge. The ethne were divided
into phylai (φῦλαι).10 Such a φυλή was in the back of Posidonius’s mind when he
mentioned Germanoi for the first time. Before we enter into a discussion of the ideas
of Posidonius and Caesar, the latter of whom depended on the former, and their after-
life, we must again return to the classics. Aristotle (384 BCE–322 BCE) defined ethnic-
ity as one of the differences between Greeks and barbarians. Greeks lived in their
polis, barbarians lived in ethne.11 The Greeks and Romans writing these sources were
primarily citizens of their polis, their civitas, or the res publica. The rest of the
8 Klaus Geus, Eratosthenes von Kyrene: Studien zur hellenistischen Kultur- und Wissenschaftsge-
schichte, Münchner Beiträge zur Papyrusforschung und antiken Rechtsgeschichte 92 (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 2002), 283–95, 333–35; Iris von Bredow, s.v. “Tanais,” DNP (2007), 12:7; Dieter Timpe, s.v.
“Entdeckungsgeschichte des Nordens in der Antike I.,” in RGA (1989), 7:307–89; Wilhelm Kubitschek,
s.v. “Karten,” RE (1919), 10:2022–149, 2053–56; Gustav Knaack, s.v. “Eratosthenes,” RE (1907), 6:
358–88, 375–76.
9 Cf. Geary, Myth of Nations, 46–49; Thomas Grünewald, s.v. “Kimbern,” RGA (2000), 17:493–500;
Allen A. Lund, Zum Germanenbild der Römer: Eine Einführung in die antike Ethnographie (Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 1990).
10 Aristot. pol. 1261a und 1276a = Aristotle, Politics, edited and translated by H. Rackham (London:
Loeb, 1932); cf. LSJ: “φυλή, ἡ, like φῦλον, a race, tribe”; […] a union formed in an organized commu-
nity (whether πόλις or ἔθνος): hence, tribe”; Ilona Opelt and Wolfgang Speyer, s.v. “Barbar I.,” RAC
Suppl. (2001), 1: 813–95, 819–30.
11 Aristot. pol. 1324b; Walter Pohl, “Regnum und gens,” in Der frühmittelalterliche Staat:
Europäische Perspektiven, edited by Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser, (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW,
2009); Beck et al. “Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde,” 190.
population in the Mediterranean most likely had identities similar to those of the so-
called barbarians.12 The categories of ancient writers remained in use up to Late
Antiquity and in many cases to the high Middle Ages.13 For most ancient writers, cat-
egorizing peoples north, east, and south of the Mediterranean basin simply meant
distinguishing their ways of life from the urbanised civilisation they knew, not men-
tioning, at the same time, the fact that farming communities did not really differ from
barbarian communities in the Mediterranean outside their cities.
Gaius Julius Caesar: An Author with Specific Interests Introduces

the Term Germani (with a little help from Posidonius)
Posidonius of Apameia at the Orontes in Syria, who died around 51 BCE (that is, in
Caesar’s lifetime), described a fierce Celtic tribe named the Germanoi (Γερμανοί).
Posidonius wrote a continuation of the Roman history of Polybios (c. 203–120 BCE)
and referred to northern barbarians who participated in the Cimbrian wars. Among
the northerners, he mentioned the Γερμανοί as a fierce and very primitive Celtic
tribe, similar to the Cimbrians. These human beings were purported to eat vast
amounts of meat, and drink milk and unmixed wine at breakfast.14 Such details
indicated an early stage of human evolution, according to the rules of Greek eth-
nography. Diodorus Siculus and Strabo adopted these stereotypes and explained
the special ferocity of the Celtic tribe of the Γερμανοί, who were geographically
situated in the far north. The theory was simple: the most northern barbarians
were the most dangerous and fierce ones. This helped to explain the shameful
Roman defeats of the late second century BCE.15
12 Kulikowsi, Rome’s Gothic Wars, 35: “Indeed the fact of imperial government and its regular de-
mands for taxation may have been the only real factor distinguishing a Pannonian peasant on one
side of the Danube from a Quadic peasant on the other.”
13 See Patrick Geary, “Barbarians and Ethnicity,” in Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical
World, edited by Glenn W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1999), 107–9; Walter Pohl, Die Völkerwanderung: Eroberung und Integration, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 2005), 15.
14 Poseid. fr. 22 (Athen. 4, 39, p. 153e) = Posidonius 1: The Fragments, 2: The Commentary, 3: The
Translation of the Fragments, edited and translated by L. Edelstein and I. G. Kidd, Cambridge Classical
Texts and Commentaries 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972–1999); Caes. BGall. 4, 1, 8; 6, 22,
1 = Caesar, The Gallic War, edited and translated by H. J. Edwards (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1917) has similar stereotypes. The Germani eat only milk, cheese and meat.
15 Poseid. fr. 22 (Athen. 4, 39, p. 153e); Diod. 5, 32, 3 = Diodorus Siculus, Library of History Volume
III: Books 4.59–8, edited and translated by C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
1939); Strab. 4, 195; 7, 290 = The Geography of Strabo, edited and translated H. L. Jones, 8 vols.
(London: Heinemann, 1917–1932); cf. Beck et al., “Germanen, Germania, Germanische
Altertumskunde,” 183–90; Timpe, “Entdeckungsgeschichte des Nordens,” 343–46; Reinhard
Wolters, Die Römer in Germanien (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2004), 16–17.
The Posidonian Germanoi were a Celtic, or more precisely, a Galatian, phyle, the
most eastern one in the Keltike. Posidonius described their neighbours, the Cimbri, as
a western phyle of the border region to the Skythike and was not completely sure how
exactly to categorise them. He also divided the Celtic inhabitants of the region, that
shortly after was named Gallia, into two groups. Most likely Posidonius’s point of
view was that Keltoi inhabitated the inner parts of Gaul, Galatai (Γαλάται), the north-
ern regions and the shores of the ocean as far as the so-called Hercynian Forest.16
The Hercynian Forest (Hercynia silva, ὀρος Αρκύνια/Ορκύνια) formed the north-
ern boundary of that part of Europe known to writers of Antiquity. The term Galatai
was synonymous with Keltoi (Κελτοί) in Greek texts, and since Polybius the Celtic
inhabitants of Galatia, an ancient region of Asia Minor, were also given this name.
The retranslation of Latin Galli to Greek Galatai caused some confusion. Posidonius
strongly influenced the Roman writers of his age. Caesar explained in the introduc-
tion of his Gallic Wars that “all Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the
Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called
Celts, in ours Gauls, the third, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appel-
lantur.”17 This is only one example of Caesar’s use of contemporary literature. For
specific purposes to be explained below, the Roman commander was possibly
taken too seriously in one detail—a detail that was to become a major problem after
the sixteenth century. Posidonius described the Keltike. His aim was to contribute a
Celtic logos just as Herodotus had written a Scythian one. He defined all peoples as
part of the Keltike, nothing more. Many scholars tried to prove that his reference to
the Galatai was based on previous knowledge of Germanic identities north of Gaul.
Posidonius never intended to develop such a category. Again, we enter the field of
later, modern interpretation.18
Gaius Julius Caesar used Posidonius’s idea of fierce Γερμανοί as threatening Celtic
barbarians in the North. Posidonius had written the most important ethnographical
text concerning the Celts in Caesar’s time. We know this, apart from Caesar’s com-
mentary, from Diodorus, Strabo, and Athenaios.19 The Roman commander Caesar,
16 Diod. 5, 32, 1. Diodorus seems to rely on Posidonius here, but this is not completely secure:
Timpe, “Entdeckungsgeschichte des Nordens,” 344–45; Gerhard Dobesch, Das europäische
‘Barbaricum’ und die Zone der Mediterrankultur: Ihre historischen Wechselwirkungen und das
Geschichtsbild des Poseidonios, Tyche Supplementband 2 (Vienna: Holzhausen, 1995), 59–63; Beck
et al., “Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde,” 188; Eduard Norden, Die germanische
Urgeschichte in Tacitus’ Germania (Leipzig: Teubner, 1920), 59–63.
17 Caes. BGall. 1, 1; Dieter Timpe, “Ethnologische Begriffsbildung in der Antike,” in
Germanenprobleme in heutiger Sicht, edited by Heinrich Beck, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der
Germanischen Altertumskunde 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986), 22–40.
18 For an overview of the research done on Posidonius: Beck et al., “Germanen, Germania,
Germanische Altertumskunde,” 183–85, 242–45 (bibliography).
19 Christopher B. Krebs, Negotiatio Germaniae: Tacitus’ Germania und Enea Silvio Piccolomini,
Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel, Hypomnemata: Untersuchungen zur
however, tried to explain why he had stopped his troops at the left bank of the Rhine
and described the barbarians east of the river as much more dangerous and experi-
enced in fighting than those in the Gallia. The vast areas now named Germania were
of Roman interest. Caesar’s ethnographic excursus (Caes. BGall. 6, 21–28) established
the term Germani for the peoples beyond the Rhine who posed, or so Caesar wanted
to convince the Roman public, a constant threat to the Empire. Germani lived sepa-
rated from the Gallic Celts by the Rhine. Only some tribes, the so-called Germani cisr-
henani, were settled near the Belgi. East of the Rhine the Germanic tribes, including
the Suebi, lived as far as the unknown East. Caesar introduced the Germani as a third
group of barbarians between the Celts and the Scythians. At the same time, he cate-
gorized the Cimbri who were so present in Roman memory as Germani; a strong argu-
ment for his Roman readers.20
The Cimbri or in Greek Kimbroi (Κίμβροι) held a special place in Roman histori-
cal memory. Historiographers made them a special threat from the North, and it is
important to mention this because Caesar’s invention of the Germani would have
been impossible without also making the well-known and feared ancient Cimbri
part of this new greater group, between the Celts and the Scythians. At the same
time Caesar brought into play Posidonius’s uncertainty regarding how to classify
them.21 Two examples may help to illustrate the noteworthiness of the Cimbri for a
Roman reader. In the Augustan period it seemed appropriate to narrate the story of
a Cimbrian delegation arriving at Augustus’s court to ask forgiveness for their feroc-
ities centuries prior.22 Strabo mentions Roman naval activity as far as the homeland
Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben 158 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 58–59 and
n. 77–79; Allen A. Lund, Die ersten Germanen: Ethnizität und Ethnogenese (Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag Winter, 1998), 49; Dobesch, Das europäische ‘Barbaricum’, 61–70; Dobesch,
“Die Kimbern in den Ostalpen und die Schlacht bei Noreia,” in Ausgewählte Schriften Gerhard
Dobesch 2: Kelten und Germanen edited by Herbert Heftner and Kurt Tomaschitz (Vienna:
Böhlau, 1982/2001); Daphne Nash, “Reconstructing Poseidonios’ Celtic Ethnography: Some
Considerations,” Britannia 7 (1976), 111–26, argues against Caesar depending too much on
Posidonius; Rolf Hachmann, “Der Begriff des Germanischen,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik
7 (1975): 36.
20 Caes. BGall. 1, 40; 1, 33, 4; Grünewald, “Kimbern,” 494–98; Dieter Timpe, “Kimberntradition und
Kimbernmythos,” in Germani in Italia, edited by Piergiuseppe Scardigli and Barbara Scardigli,
Monografie scientifiche. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Serie scienze umane e sociali (Rome:
Teubner, 1994), 23–27.
21 Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 50 and n. 46; Lund, Die ersten Germanen, 70–71; Dobesch, Das
europäische ‘Barbaricum’, 59–71; Timpe, “Kimberntradition und Kimbernmythos”; Krüger et al., Die
Germanen, 1:40–42, 232–54.
22 Res Gestae Divi Augusti 26 = Augustus. Meine Taten nach dem monumentum Ancyranum,
Apolloniense und Antiochenum, edited and translaed by E. Weber, 6th ed. (Darmstadt: WBG,
1999); cf. Herwig Wolfram, Die Germanen (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995), 28–29.
of the Kimbroi. Most likely this information is nothing more than a topos of arrival
in the far north, where these most dangerous enemies of Rome were located.23
Furthermore, Caesar made the Rhine a Roman frontier for centuries. It seems
likely that Caesar needed such strong categories at the time because Crassus had
recently victoriously crossed the Euphrates, whereas Caesar had only made small
incursions beyond the Rhine. Caesar invented the Germani through use of
Posidonius, and his own shallow accomplishments in the North. For centuries a
new political terminology was in use. The main problem in modern scholarship is
that too many tend to forget that it is a Roman conception, nothing more, and noth-
ing less.24 Scholarship and political propaganda used Caesar’s denotation up to the
twentieth century. Interestingly enough, these classifications never became totally
accepted in Latin and Greek literature until the sixteenth century.25 Some scholars
tried to prove that Posidonius’s vague classifications were, in the end, similar to
Caesar’s category of Germani. Most of these theories rely on modern categories. For
those who are convinced that the Cimbri were Germans, the sources are assumed to
simply be mistaken. In fact, however, no author except Caesar in the first century
23 Strab. 7, 2, 1–2.
24 Krebs, Negotiatio Germaniae, 58–69; Gerold Walser, Caesar und die Germanen. Studien zur polit-
ischen Tendenz römischer Feldzugsberichte, Historia Einzelschriften 1 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1956), 76: Walser describes Caesar’s aim as being to convince the Roman public that the
Rhine had been an old and important frontier line, now reached by Roman troops: “daß diese
Grenzlinie zwischen dem neuen Untertanenvolk und dem Gegner, dessen Abwehr eigentlich der
ganze gallische Krieg galt, schon immer bestanden hat.”
25 Lund, Zum Germanenbild der Römer, 75–100; Wolfgang M. Zeitler, “Zum Germanenbegriff Caesars:
Der Germanenexkurs im sechsten Buch von Caesars Bellum Gallicum,” in Germanenprobleme in
heutiger Sicht, edited by Heinrich Beck, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen
Altertumskunde 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1986), 52: “Caesar […] prägte und schuf auf diese Weise nicht nur
mit dem Schwert, sondern auch mit dem Wort Wirklichkeit.” Jarnut, “Germanisch”, 108; Stefan
Zimmer, “‘Germani’ und die Benennungsmotive für Völkernamen in der Antike,” in Zur Geschichte
der Gleichung “germanisch – deutsch”, edited by Heinrich Beck et al., Ergänzungsbände zum
Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 34 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 19. Sigmund Feist,
Germanen und Kelten in der antiken Überlieferung (Halle: Verlag für Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1927)
tried to show as early as 1927 that no Germans could be found outside of Caesar’s writings and that
nearly all sources known classified the population named Germani by Caesar as Celts. His work was
only ever acknowledged as a marginal footnote. The idea that Caesar’s introduction of the term was a
justification of his military and political ambitions appears in: Walser, Caesar und die Germanen, 94:
“Was Caesar in seiner ethnographischen Konstruktion des Germanenbildes als politisches
Tendenzbild entworfen hat, ist später durch seine eigene Grenzziehung wirklich entstanden. Der cae-
sarische Germanenbegriff erweist sich also als eine äußerst eigenartige Vorwegnahme des geschichtli-
chen Germanentums.” Walser was criticised by his contemporaries, as well as Feist: Franz Hampl,
“Walser, Caesar und die Germanen,” Gnomon 29 (1957): 284: “Dieses Anliegen führt ihn [Walser, RS]
u.a. dazu, die alte seinerzeit von der Forschung einhellig abgelehnte These S. Feists, daß die re-
chtsrheinischen Germanen in Wirklichkeit Kelten gewesen seien, unter bestimmten neuen
Gesichtspunkten neu zur Diskussion zu stellen.”
BCE knew of such a great group of peoples. Where the Cimbri and the Teutons were
concerned, Paulus Orosius (c. 385–c. 420 CE) even adopted, centuries later, the ste-
reotype of initially strong barbarians becoming weak and decadent in the southern
cities. This demonstrates how strong the topos of the ferocious northerners attack-
ing the Romans had remained. Paulus Orosius did not, incidentally, believe the
Cimbri and Teutons to be Germani.26
In addition to the term Germani, Caesar, Tacitus, and Strabo also used Suebi as
an umbrella term for many of the peoples east of the Rhine and north of the
Danube. It remains confusing that these authors understood Suebi as the name of
one people and at the same time as a collective term. The problems of comprehend-
ing what could have been meant or what was intended are quite similar to the prob-
lems we encounter with the term Germani. Both terms are Roman categories. The
main difference is that it seems likely that, at least at the Rhine, some groups really
named themselves Suebi. Ptolemaios described Sueboi Langobardoi near the Rhine,
Sueboi Semnones at the Elbe and Sueboi Angiloi in between. That means Suebi was
given up as an umbrella term in the second century CE and authors like Ptolemaios
looked for more specific terms. Interestingly enough, Germani also lost its general,
Caesarean, meaning in the third century, as I will show below.27 Explaining the
term Suebi as simply an alternative means of saying Germani is neither satisfying
nor convincing. Rather, it may be that very general Roman categories were in use
but had to be abandoned because the reality was simply more complex. Again,
modern scholarship has invented a non-existing problem.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus: An Author with Specific Interests Uses

the Terms Germani and Germania with a Little Help from Caesar
During the reign of emperor Domitian, in the years 83–90 CE, two new provinces
were organized out of former Gallic provinces: Germania Inferior (a term which has
survived in the name of the Netherlands) and the mountainous Germania Superior.
26 Oros. 5, 16, 14 = Paulus Orosius, Historiae adversum paganos, edited by Carl Zangemeister, Pauli
Orosii Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII, CSEL 5 (Vienna: Gerold 1882, reprint Hildesheim
1967): “Teutones autem et Cimbri integris copiis Alpium nives emensi Italiae plana pervaserant, ibique
cum rigidum genus diu blandioribus auris, poculis, cibis ac lavacris emolliretur, Marius V consul et
Catulus adversum eos missi, die ad pugnam et campo dato Hannibalis secuti ingenium in nebula dispo-
suere pugnam, in sole pugnarunt.” Similar stereotypes, e. g., for the Vandals: Proc. BV 2, 6, 5–14.
27 Ptol. 2, 11, 6–9 = Claudius Ptolemy, The Geography, edited and translated by E. L. Stevenson
(New York: New York Public Library, 1932, reprint New York: Dover, 1991); Helmut Castritius, Ludwig
Rübekeil and Ralf Scharf, s.v. “Sweben.” RGA (2005), 30:184–212; Pohl, Die Germanen, 90–92; Jan-
Wilhelm Beck, ‘Germania’ – ‘Agricola’: Zwei Kapitel zu Tacitus’ zwei kleinen Schriften. Untersuchungen
zu ihrer Intention und Datierung sowie zur Entwicklung ihres Verfassers, Spudasmata 68 (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms Verlag, 1998), 197–200; Krüger et al., Die Germanen, 1:45–49, 216–19.
Diocletian’s imperial reorganisation changed the name of these provinces to

Germania Prima and Secunda. In the Augustan period, there was—as a result of
Roman activity as far as the Elbe River (under Drusus in 9 CE)—an understanding
that Germania Magna was an area to be placed under Roman control. Its limits
were defined as the Rhine and the Danube in the West and South, the Vistula and
the Baltic Sea in the East and the North. Claudius Ptolemaeus (c. 83–c. 168 CE) was
the first to use the term Germania megale. Orosius, meanwhile differentiated be-
tween the two Roman provinces, and Germania Interior. Germania Libera is fre-
quently used in modern scholarship, but never appears in the sources, and is
nothing more than a Romantic phrase introduced by Jacob Grimm in 1835/36, while
giving a lecture on Tacitus.28 The initial purpose of the Roman campaigns was to
protect Gaul by controlling the area between the Rhine and the Elbe. In the year
9 CE, the Roman frontier was withdrawn to the Rhine again. The concept of a
province to be named Germania existed, and it seems likely that basic structures
of such a province existed. In fact, the geographical term was present and used
in a similar manner to Gallia, Hispania or Italia for the following centuries. As
late as the Merovingian period, Germania was entirely controlled from Gallia. In
a manner of speaking, Frankish kings thus managed what Roman emperors had
failed to achieve.29
De Origine et situ Germanorum, by Publius Cornelius Tacitus (d. c. 120 CE) was
not very well known or used throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages.30 Not until
as late as the fifteenth century did this monograph on the ‘dangerous Germans’ be-
come widely known. Tacitus’s Germania was first published in a modern edition in
Venice in 1470. When Konrad Peutinger first edited and published Jordanes’s
Getica in 1515, this volume also contained Paul the Deacon’s History of the
Lombards. Together with Tacitus’s ethnographic books, these texts represent the
starting point for the study of a ‘Germanic’ past as a source of inspiration for mod-
ern national identity and as a justification for territorial claims and conflict.
Tacitus’s favourable portrayals of noble barbarians, superior in many of their quali-
ties to the Roman elites (these qualities were styled as a threat to the empire), made
the work popular in Germany—especially among German nationalists and German
28 Beck et al., “Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde,” 257; Maria R. Alföldi, “Germania
magna – nicht libera. Notizen zum römischen Wortgebrauch,” Germania 75 (1997), 45–52.
29 Ptol. 2, 9, 2; Oros. 7, 32, 12; Reinhard Wolters, Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald: Arminius,
Varus und das römische Germanien (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2008), 71–75; Pohl, Die Germanen, 59; Beck
et al., “Germanen, Germania, Germanische Altertumskunde,” 245–59; Hans-Werner Goetz and Karl-
Wilhelm Welwei, Altes Germanien: Auszüge aus den antiken Quellen über die Germanen und ihre
Beziehungen zum Römischen Reich. Quellen der alten Geschichte bis zum Jahre 238 n. Chr, Ausgewählte
Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 1a (Darmstadt: WBG, 2013), 1, 172.
30 Generally for Tacitus see: Ronald Syme, Tacitus 1/2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958) and Ten
Studies in Tacitus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970); Krebs, Negotiatio Germaniae, 22–26, 69–81 and
passim for the humanistic acquisitions.
Romantics—from the fifteenth century on.31 Tacitus pictures a vast territory with a
dense population not controlled by Rome. The Rhine and the Danube rivers limited
these vast territories. To the North and to the East no clear frontiers were named.
All the peoples living in areas of Roman interest were summarized by common hab-
its and ethnographical constructions. The farther from the Roman borders, the
fiercer the Germanic tribes were described. Tacitus made the Germani the most dan-
gerous enemies of Rome. He claimed the Roman conquest of Germania from the
Rhine to the Elbe as a basic need for Rome and a question of honour abandoned
under Augustus’s rule. His text was a strong critique of imperial policy in general
and specifically of Domitian. This emperor had announced on his coins that the
Germania was captured and in peace (Germania capta), and Tacitus wanted to ex-
pose this, in his opinion, dangerous and false view.32
Tacitus wrote quite similar tracts on Britain and Judaea. He based his political
intentions on ethnographic arguments. His tactic of describing the dangers in
Palestine and Britain is comparable to what he did with the Germani. Here again the
focus on the Central European barbaricum in scholarship tends to narrow our views of
the problems as very few comparative studies have been done. One could get the
impression that the work done asked the wrong questions. Modern, national polit-
ical identities attempted to seek answers for the structures of their past and did
not, at least not at a fundamental level, seek understanding of the Roman sources
and their background as texts brought into being by Roman authors with specific
31 Goffart, Barbarian Tides, 14, 16, 43–46, 48–50; Krebs, Negotiatio Germaniae; Dieter Mertens,
“Die Instrumentalisierung der “Germania” des Tacitus durch die deutschen Humanisten,” in Zur
Geschichte der Gleichung “germanisch – deutsch”, edited by Heinrich Beck et al., Ergänzungsbände
zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 34 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 38–101; Ulrich
Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus und in der Aufklärung. Die Vorgeschichte des
Historismus (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991), 386–92; Heinz Heubner, “Die Überlieferung der Germania
des Tacitus,” in Beiträge zum Verständnis der Germania des Tacitus, edited by Dieter Timpe and
Herbert Jankuhn (Göttingen: Teubner, 1989), 16–27; Pohl, Die Germanen, 59–61; Kenneth
C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976).
32 Allen A. Lund, “Versuch einer Gesamtinterpretation der ‘Germania’ des Tacitus, mit einem
Anhang: Zu Entstehung und Geschichte des Namens und Begriffs ‘Germani’,” in ANRW II. Principat.
33. 3. (Sprache und Literatur: Allgemeines zur Literatur des 2. Jahrhunderts und einzelne Autoren der
trajanischen und frühhadrianischen Zeit [Forts.]), edited by Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991);
Pohl, Die Germanen, 52–59; Dieter Timpe, Romano-Germanica: Gesammelte Studien zur Germania des
Tacitus (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1995); Herbert Jankuhn et al., Beiträge zum Verständnis der Germania des
Tacitus: Bericht über die Kolloquien der Kommission für die Altertumskunde Nord- und Mitteleuropas
im Jahre 1986 und 1987, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen phil.-hist.
Klasse 175/195. 2 vols. (Göttingen: Teubner, 1989/1992), 2; Lund, Zum Germanenbild der Römer,
80–86; Lund, “Zum Germanenbegriff bei Tacitus,” in Germanenprobleme in heutiger Sicht, edited by
Heinrich Beck, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 1 (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1986), 53–87. A bibliographical overview: Beck et al., “Germanen, Germania, Germanische
Altertumskunde,” 242–45.
agendas. Modern scholars had additional concerns in mind, quite distinct from
those that Roman authors used. The small part of the world on the Rhine was not
so important for Roman politics as German or French scholars would later have
liked to believe.33
A Different View: Diodorus, Strabo and Cassius Dio
Greek writers of the same period held a different view from that of Caesar and
Tacitus. Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century BCE,34 differentiated
between southern Celts and northern Galatians. This idea may have depended on
Posidonius. Diodorus mentioned Greek myths, revealing that the Keltike had been
named Galatia since the times of Herakles due to the eponymous heros Galatos.
Gaul extended as far as the borders of Scythia, with the river Tanais (Don) as the
frontier, due to Herodotus’s and Eratosthenes’s assumptions. In Diodorus’s view,
the Galatians lived north of the old Narbonensis inhabitated by the Keltoi and as far
as the Scythika. Diodorus thus did not use Caesar’s new term but explicitly men-
tioned the Galatian tribes subdued by Caesar.35 The distinction was chosen due to a
traditional ethnographic notion that the ferociousness of human beings increased
the further north they lived. In this respect, Diodorus refers explicitly to the wild
inhabitants of the northern zones bordering on Scythia. These peoples were even
depicted as cannibals.36 Most likely, Diodorus differentiated between rather peace-
ful Celts in the South, near the civilised world, and warlike Galatai to explain the
33 Karl Reinhard Krierer, Antike Germanenbilder, ÖAW Dph 318, Archäologische Forschungen 11
(Vienna: Verlag ÖAW, 2004), 162; Lund, Zum Germanenbild der Römer, 75–86; Arno Borst, Der
Turmbau zu Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker,
4 vols. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1957–1963), 1:166–68.
34 Kenneth S. Sacks, Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press,
1990); Lionel I. C. Pearson, The Greek Historians of the West: Timaeus and his Predecessors (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1987); Peter Moeller, s.v. “Diodoros,” RGA (1984), 5:477–81.
35 Diod. 2, 43, 2; 5, 24–25; 5, 25, 4.
36 Diod. 5, 32, 1 (translation by C. H. Oldfather): “And now it will be worth to declare that which
multitudes are altogether ignorant of. Those who inhabit the inland parts beyond Massilia, and
about the Alps, and on this side the Pyrenean mountains, are called Celts, Κελτοί; but those that
inhabit below this part called Celtica, Κελτική, southward to the ocean and the mountain Hyrcinus,
and all as far as Scythia, are called Galatians, καὶ πάντας τοὺς ἑζῆς μέχρι τῆς Σκυθίας Γαλάτας
προσαγορεύουσιν. But the Romans call all these people generally by one and the same name,
Galatians, Γαλάτας ἅπαντας. […] Those towards the north, and bordering upon Scythia, are so ex-
ceedingly fierce and cruel, that (as report goes) they eat men, like the Britons. They are noted to be
a fierce and warlike people, that some have thought them to be those that anciently overran all
Asia, and were then called Cimerians, and who are now (through length of time) with a little alter-
ation called Cimbrians.” Cf. Goetz and Welwei, Altes Germanien, 80 and n. 35; Moeller, “Diodoros,”
480–81.
extreme aggression of the Northeners. They were all Celts together but the assail-
ants of Greece in ancient times were located in the Northeast. Similarily the Galatai
living at the borders of the Scythia were especially ferocious. Diodorus identified
the so-called Cimmerians as originating in the same region as the Cimbrians who
overran the entire known world in “ancient times”. The same is said about the Celts
and Galatians who conquered Rome in 387/386 BCE, plundered Delphi in 279 BCE,
and destroyed many Roman armies.37
The Greek historian, geographer, and philosopher Strabo (d. c. 24 CE), writing
in the Augustan period, refers to Galatian and Germanic tribes west of the Rhine
and north of the Danube. Interestingly enough, he mentions the parts of Europe
north of the Ister (Danube) as easier to describe and much simpler to understand
than those on the other, that is, the Roman, side—namely, the Illyrian and the
Thracian tribes living on Roman soil. The longer societies had been part of the
Roman Empire, the more there was known about them. Simple ethnographical cate-
gories had been in use for the outer world. Once this outer world became Roman, it
proved to be inhabited by human beings with a rich variety of identities. At the
same time, Roman military, administrative, and intellectual authorities defined
these identities. Such circumstances have to be taken seriously when dealing with
the term Germani. Strabo himself admits to not knowing too much about barbari-
cum. Contrary to Diodorus, who most likely finished his work in the time of Caesar,
Strabo knew and used the term Germani. He categorised the Germani as part of the
Celtic stock mentioning some specific habits of these Germans reminiscent of
Posidonius and Diodorus.38 The Germanoi (Γερμανοί) varied slightly from the Celts:
they lived on the right bank of the Rhine and were larger in size, fiercer and blonder
than their Celtic relatives. Strabo offered a simple explanation: The Germanoi were gen-
uine Galatae (γνησίους Γαλάτας φράζειν) since the Latin word germanus meant “hav-
ing the same parents, brotherly, sisterly” but also “genuine, real, true” as “faithfully”
and “honestly”. The only category taken from Caesar’s work is the localisation of the
37 Diod. 5, 32, 3–4: Cimmerians/Cimbrians in “ancient times”; cf. Timpe, “Kimberntradition und
Kimbernmythos,” 25. Diod. 14, 113–17; Diod. 9, 10, 6; 22, 3–4; Diod. 21, 6, 1–2; 22, 9, 2–3; 25, 13, 1.
38 Strab. 7, 1, 1 (translation H. L. Jones): “It (the river Danube/Ister) rises in the western limits of
the Germania, ἄρχεται μὲν οῦν ἀπὸ τῶν Γερμανικῶν ἄκρων τῶν ἑσπερίων, as also near the recess of
the Adriatic, at a distance from it of about one thousand stadia, and comes to an end at the Pontus
not very far from the outlets of the Tyras and the Borysthenes, bending from its easterly course ap-
proximately towards the north. Now the parts that are beyond the Rhenus and the Keltike, καὶ τῆς
Κελτικῆς, are to the north of the Ister; these are the territories of the Galatic and the Germanic
tribes, τά τε Γαλατικὰ ἔθνη καὶ τὰ Γερμανικὰ, extending as far as the Bastarnians and the Tyregetans
and the River Borysthenes. And the territories of all the tribes between this river and the Tanaïs and
the mouth of Lake Maeotis extend up into the interior as far as the ocean and are washed by the
Pontic Sea. But both the Illyrian and the Thracian tribes, and all tribes of the Celtic or other peoples
that are mingled with these, as far as Greece, are to the south of the Ister. But let me first describe
the parts outside the Ister, for they are much simpler than those on the other side.”
Germani. The stereotypes of rude peoples in the cold north are part of a Greek ethno-
graphic tradition that we know from Posidonius and Diodorus. Strabo is a good exam-
ple of the fact that most Greek writers did not take Caesar’s categories too seriously,
and that they conceived of Celts in the West, and Scythians in the East, right up to Late
Antiquity.39
Lucius Claudius Cassius Dio Cocceianus (d. after 229 CE) published a Roman
history in eighty volumes, from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy through the subse-
quent founding of Rome and up to the first quarter of the third century.40
Describing the Rhine area, he characterised the inhabitants left and right of the
Roman border. The inhabitants of Gaul were situated on the left bank of the Rhine,
and on the right bank, the Celts. Most modern translations replaced the name Keltoi
(Κελτοι) with “Germans”. Dio further elaborated that the Rhine had always been
considered a boundary and that the tribes living there gained their different names;
from ancient times both peoples dwelling on either side of the river were called
Celts.41 Referring to the territories Caesar had under his control, Dio talked about
39 Strab. 7, 1, 2: “Now the parts beyond the Rhenus, immediately after the country of the Celti,
slope towards the east and are occupied by the Germani, Γερμανοὶ, who, though they vary slightly
from the Celtic stock, τοῦ Κελτικοῦ φύλου, in that they are wilder, taller, and have yellower hair,
are in all other respects similar, for in build, habits, and modes of life they are such as I have said
the Celti are. And I also think that it was for this reason that the Romans assigned to them the
name ‘Germani’, as though they wished to indicate thereby that they were ‘genuine’ Galatae,
γνησίους Γαλάτας φράζειν, for in the language of the Romans ‘germani’ means ‘genuine’.” See Pohl,
Die Germanen, 51; Hachmann, “Der Begriff,” 120; Norden, Die germanische Urgeschichte, 102. For
germanus-a-um see: Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary; Ludwig Rübekeil,
Suebica: Völkernamen und Ethnos (Innsbruck: Inst. für Sprachwissenschaft, 1992), 182–87 proposes
a Gallic translation of the Suebic name, which he translates as “the true ones”, into the Latin
Germani. John F. Drinkwater, “The Origins of the Germans. Review: Suebica. Völkernamen und
Ethnos by Ludwig Rübekeil,” The Classical Review 43/2 (1993): 333–35 gives in his review an
English summary of this thesis.
40 Fergus Millar, A Study of Cassius Dio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); Peter Moeller, s.v. “Dio
Cassius,” RGA (1984), 5:468–77.
41 Dio Cass. 39, 49, 1–2 = Dio Cassius, Roman History, edited and translated by F. Cary, 9 vols.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1917–1932): “The Rhine issues from the Celtic Alps, a little
outside of Rhaetia, and proceeding westward, bounds Gaul and its inhabitants on the left, and the
Germans on the right, and finally empties into the ocean” (Ὁ δὲ δὴ Ῥῆνος ἀναδίδωσι μὲν ἐκ τῶν
Ἄλπεων τῶν Κελτικῶν, ὀλίγον ἔξω τῆς Ῥαιτίας· προχωρῶν δὲ ἐπὶ δυσμῶν, ἐν ἀριστερᾷ μὲν τήν τε
Γαλατίαν καὶ τοὺς ἐποικοῦντας αὐτήν, ἐν δεξιᾷ δὲ τοὺς Κελτοὺς ἀποτέμνεται· καὶ τελευτῶν ἐς τὸν
ὠκεανὸν ἐμβάλλει.) “This river has always down to the present time been considered the boundary,
ever since these tribes gained their different names; for very anciently both peoples dwelling on
either side of the river were called Celts”. (Ἐπεὶ τό γε πάνυ ἀρχαῖον Κελτοὶ ἑκάτεροι οἱ ἐπ’ ἀμφότερα
τοῦ ποταμοῦ οἰκοῦντες ὠνομάζοντο.) (English translation by Foster Cary). I have marked the trans-
lation of Dio’s Κελτοί as ‘Germans’ in bold in the English as well as the Greek text. Goetz and
Welwei opted for “Kelten (Germanen)” for their translation. Their commentary on Dio Cass. 53, 12,
6, explaining his use of Celts as synonymous to Germani, is misleading as Dio tells us there that the
Germanoi are Celts not only that they were called such. Goetz and Welwei, Altes Germanien, 199, n.
Spain and the Gallic provinces. He listed these Gallic provinces and mentioned that
Celts called Γερμανοί by the Romans had occupied the Belgic territory, providing the
name of the Roman province. The imperial province Belgica was established
under Augustus in 16 or 13 BCE. The military districts on the Rhine became the prov-
inces Germania Inferior and Superior under Domitian between 82 and 90 CE.42 There
is no doubt that Dio consequently used Keltoi for all the different tribes in the
Germania. To ‘correct’ him and translate Keltoi as Germani would be to misunder-
stand the source and artificially impose modern categories upon a third-century au-
thor who knew precisely what he meant. From Dio’s point of view, Celts had been
attacking the Roman frontiers since the days of the Cimbri.43
East and West After the Third Century: Gothic

Peoples in the East, Franks, Alamanni
and Juthungi on the Rhine
A period of relative peace was ended by the Marcomannic wars under the reign of
Marcus Aurelius (161–180 CE), shifting Roman activity to the middle Danube region.
77: “Das heisst als ‘Kelten’ (‘Gallier’) und ‘Germanen’; Dio verwendet aber weiterhin den älteren
Begriff ‘Keltoi’ zur Bezeichnung der Germanen, nennt die ‘eigentlichen’ Gallier ‘Galatai’ und
erläutert erst 53, 12, 6, dass sein Keltenbegriff auf Germanen zu beziehen ist.”
42 Dio Cass. 53, 12, 5–6: “[…] While to Caesar belonged the remainder of Spain—that is, the district of
Tarraco and Lusitania,—and all the Gauls,—that is, Gallia Narbonensis, Gallia Lugdunensis, Aquitania,
and Belgica, both the natives themselves and the aliens among them. For some of the Celts, whom we
call Germans, had occupied all the Belgic territory along the Rhine and caused it to be called Germania,
the upper portion extending to the sources of that river, and the lower portion reaching to the British
Ocean.” (Κελτῶν γάρ τινες, οὓς δὴ Γερμανοὺς καλοῦμεν, πᾶσαν τὴν πρὸς τῷ Ῥήνῳ Βελγικὴν κατασχόντες
Γερμανίαν ὀνομάζεσθαι ἐποίησαν, τὴν μὲν ἄνω τὴν μετὰ τὰς τοῦ ποταμοῦ πηγάς, τὴν δὲ κάτω τὴν μέχρι
τοῦ ὠκεανοῦ τοῦ Βρεττανικοῦ οὖσαν). For the Roman provinces see: Marie-Thérèse Raepsaet-Charlier
and Georges Raepsaet-Charlier, “Gallia Belgica et Germania Inferior. Vingt-cinq années de recherches
historiques et archéologiques,” in ANRW II. Principat 4. Politische Geschichte. Provinzen und
Randvölker: Gallien [Forts.], Germanien, edited by Hildegard Temporini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975),
184–97; Franz Schön, s.v. “Belgica,” DNP (1997), 2:551.
43 Dio Cass. 53, 26, 4–5: “About this same time Marcus Vinicius took vengeance upon some of the
Germans because they had arrested and slain Romans who entered their country to trade with
them; and thus he, too, caused the title of imperator to be bestowed upon Augustus.” (ὑπὸ δὲ τὸν
αὐτὸν τοῦτον χρόνον Μᾶρκος Οὐινίκιος Κελτῶν τινας μετελθών, ὅτι Ῥωμαίους ἄνδρας ἐς τὴν χώραν
σφῶν κατὰ τὴν ἐπιμιξίαν ἐσελθόντας συλλαβόντες ἔφθειραν, τὸ ὄνομα καὶ αὐτὸς τὸ τοῦ
αὐτοκράτορος τῷ Αὐγούστῳ ἔδωκε.) “For this and his other exploits of this period a triumph, as
well as the title, was voted to Augustus; but as he did not care to celebrate it, a triumphal arch was
erected in the Alps in his honour and he was granted the right always to wear both the crown and
the triumphal garb on the first day of the year.”
During the third century, the structures of late antique and post-imperial Rome
began to develop. At the same time, the term Germani gradually lost its significance.
Goths and Heruli attacked the eastern provinces, and several treaties had to be
signed to control these groups. In the middle of the third century, some Roman terri-
tories beyond the Danube had to be abandoned (Dacia and the agri decumates).
The majority of ethnic names in use along the Rhine, Danube, and Elbe Rivers
had been replaced by new ones: the Alamanni and Franks came into being to the
east of the Rhine, and behind them on the Elbe and the Weser, the Saxons had
emerged. Thuringians as Bavarians (as late as the early fourth to sixth centuries)
represent even more recent tribal formations. Our best source for the fourth century
is Ammianus Marcellinus, writing around 380 CE. After the Marcomannic wars, the
Gothic name steadily gained in importance for barbarian groups north of the Black
Sea and the lower Danube. Some of the ethnic names cited by the ethnographers of
the first two centuries CE. for the banks of the Oder and the Vistula (Gutones,
Vandili) reappeared in a similar form from the third century on in the area of the
lower Danube and along the Carpathian Mountains.44
All Quiet on the Eastern Front: No Germani, but Gothic Peoples

with a Scythian Origin
The existence of the new Dacian provinces acted on the people of its periphery in the same
way that Roman Gaul affected barbarian Germania—it was a spur for the rise of more struc-
tured social organization beyond its borders.45
The only difference was that dense Roman structures later developed in the Balkan
and Danubian provinces compared to the Rhine and upper Danube region. Dacia
was established by Trajan after 107 CE, revealing a gap of more than a century.
There is yet another difference: the Gothic name included many different entities, as
did Caesar’s or Tacitus’s Germani. It was intended to describe and fix barbarian peo-
ples in the East as Rome’s enemies and partners. But the term was, with some excep-
tions, not used as a basis for early modern political identities laden with more or less
vague notions of ethnic identity.46
44 Pohl, Die Germanen, 34–39; Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), 35–50; Krüger et al., Die Germanen, 2:11–48.
45 Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars, 40.
46 Wolfgang Lazius, a scholar at the court of emperor Ferdinand I, tried to create a common
Gothic background for European countries as diverse as Spain, Burgundy and Austria in the six-
teenth century to legitimise Habsburgian rule in these areas. Lazius did not create a Gothic myth
with a deep impact in the history of scholarship like his colleagues using Tacitus’s or Caesar’s
ideas. Only his book’s title led to the term Völkerwanderung (migration of peoples, migration pe-
riod): De aliquot gentium migrationibus sedibus fixis, reliquiis, linguarumque, initiis immutationibus
At the end of the fifth century, the Gothic name could be applied—true to the
sources—to describe peoples as different as Goths in Gaul, Spain and Italy, Vandals
in Africa, Gepids and Heruls along the Tisza and the Danube, Rugians, Sciri, and
Burgundians, even Sarmatians, and Iranian Alans. Greek and Latin authors used
Gothi/Gothoi, or Gentes Gothicae as a general term for peoples north of the Black Sea.
These peoples were most often classified as Scythians using ethnographical basics
dating back to the Greek ethnographers Hekataios, Herodotus and Ersathosthenes
and others. Here some parallelism with the term Germani emerges. There is, however,
one major difference: almost no Gothic identity in the sense meant by the modern
scholarly category appears to have developed. Interestingly enough, academic study
subsumed the so-called Gothic peoples under the idea of widespread Germanic unity.
Gothic peoples became “East-Germanic” peoples (Ostgermanen).47 This approach
suggests a putative uniformity of different barbarian groups which never existed. No
one in Late Antiquity would have understood this.48
Procopius’s introduction to his Vandal War is a good example of the Roman (or
Rhomaian) ethnographic point of view. The Byzantine officer described the largest
tribes of the Gothic peoples: Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, Alans and Gepids.
Long ago (πάλαι), all these peoples were, according to Procopius, called Sauromatai
and Melanchlainai. Procopius adds that the ethnonym Gets (Γετικά ἔθνη), well
known since the times of Herodotus, was in use for all these peoples. The Gothic
peoples had different names but were similar in their habits and beliefs. All
Procopian Goths had white skin and blond hair, were tall and very good looking,
had the same laws, and were Arians. They spoke one Gothic tongue. Initially, this
united people settled at the Ister river, the lower Danube. The people separated, taking
ac dialectis libri XII printed in Basel 1572. See Donecker, this volume, and, cf. Roland Steinacher,
Rom und die Barbaren: Völker im Alpen- und Donauraum (300–600) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2017),
39–41; Herwig Wolfram, Die Goten: Von den Anfängen bis zur Mitte des sechsten Jahrhunderts.
Entwurf einer historischen Ethnographie, 5th ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009), 13, 16; Hans Messmer,
Hispania-Idee und Gotenmythos: Zu den Voraussetzungen des traditionellen vaterländischen
Geschichstbilds im spanischen Mittelalter (Zürich: Wasmuth, 1960), 51, n. 248.
47 Ludwig Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Stämme bis zum Ausgang der Völkerwanderung: Die
Ostgermanen, 2nd ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1941); Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Stämme bis zum
Ausgange der Völkerwanderung: Die Geschichte der Westgermanen, 2nd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1940).
In the second revised edition of his Die Geschichte der Ostgermanen, Ludwig Schmidt changed parts of
his classification data for the “East-Germanic” peoples, whereas he did not for the “West-Germanic”.
Furthermore, he considered it a handicap to categorise “Germanic” history alongside Roman history.
48 Walter Pohl, s.v. “Goten III. Historisches,” RGA (1998), 12:427–43; Peter J. Heather, Goths and
Romans 332–489 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 135–40; Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und
Verfassung: Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen Gentes (Cologne: Böhlau, 1961), 462–84; Roland
Steinacher, “Who is the Barbarian? Considerations on the Vandal Royal Title,” in Post-Roman
Transitions: Christian and Barbarian Identities in the Early Medieval West, edited by Walter Pohl
and Gerda Heydemann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013).
the new names from the names of their leaders.49 Sauromatai are known from
Herodotus. Procopius tells a story that made them descendants of Scythian men and
Amazon women. According to Herodotus, the female fighters had been eagerly looking
for strong fathers for their children. Melanchlainai could be translated as ‘those with
black coats’. This ethnic name appears in Herodotus’s Histories and centuries later in
the Orationes of Dion Chrysostomos. Based on Herodotean origin tales, ancient eth-
nographers defined Getae, Massagetes, Sakoi, Issedonoi, and Sauromatoi, as well as
the Gothic peoples mentioned above, as the offspring of Sauromatai and
Melanchlainai. The ethnographers located these peoples near the Maotic Sea and the
Tanais (Don). In the sixth century CE, this ethnographic knowledge came to be a basis
for the Gothic/Getic history of Jordanes and Cassiodorus so much discussed in modern
scholarship.50 Or as Wood put it: “The notion that the Goths were Getae gave the
Romans a framework within which to respond to them.”51 Procopius furthermore ex-
plained the migration of the Gothic Vandals. Due to starvation, the Vandals and Alans
moved to the Rhine and fought the Germanoi who at that location were called Franks
in Procopius’s day.52 Use of the term Germanoi is usually limited to the Rhine area as
well as to Frankish ancestors. Procopius would never have regarded the ‘Gothic peo-
ples’ as Germanoi. Nor did he define the Franks of his days as such. Likewise neither
Cassiodorus nor Jordanes knew of Germani.53
All Quiet on the Western Front: Franci and Alamanni Replace

Caesar’s and Tacitus’s Germani
Franci or Alamanni replaced Germani in Latin sources after the third century, as
Germani no longer seemed specific enough. After the third century, the term
Germani was, if used at all, most often restricted to single gentes.54 In a few cases
Germani still appears, but the term was known from Caesar’s relatively widespread
49 Proc. BV 1, 2, 3 = Procopius, History of the Wars: III–IV The Vandalic War, 2 vols. (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1914–1940, reprint 2000/2001). Cf. Jochen Engels, s.v. “Geten,” RGA
(1998), 11:563–68.
50 Hdt. 4, 20, 100–102, 110–16 = Herodotus, Historiae, edited by and trans. Alfred Denis Godley,
Herodotus. The Persian Wars, Volume 2, Books 3–4 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1921);
Dion Chrysostomos, Orationes 36, 3; ibid., 563–68; Martin Eggers and Ion Ioniță, s.v. “Sarmaten § 1.
Historisches § 2. Archäologisches,” RGA (2004), 26:503–12.
51 Ian N. Wood, “Conclusion: Strategies of Distinction,” in Strategies of Distinction: The
Construction of Ethnic Communities 300–800, edited by Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, TRW 2
(Leiden: Brill, 1998), 302.
52 Proc. BV 1, 3, 2.
53 See Jarnut, “Germanisch,” 108.
54 Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 172; Norden, Die germanische Urgeschichte, 426: Norden observed that
by the sixth century, Germani was a mere literary term (“war nur ein Literaturwort”).
writings. To label barbarians at the Rhine border Germani was done either with the
intention of providing geographical information or using an educated term to dem-
onstrate one’s breadth of knowledge, but nothing more.
Far away from the Rhine and even beyond the eastern borders of the Empire a
trilingual inscription mentions “Germanic” and “Gothic” troops in Roman service.
Gordian III (r. 238–244 CE) invaded the Sassanian Empire in 243 CE. Roman troops
advanced as far as a place called Misiche, believed to be west of Baghdad, near the
modern city of Fallujah. After a crushing defeat at Misiche, the victorious Shah
Shapur I (242–273) had a trilingual inscription engraved at Naqsh-e Rustam, on the
walls of an older building from the Achaemenid period, the so-called Ka’ba-ye
Zartosht. The Res Gestae Divi Saporis refers in Middle Persian, Greek and the Parthian
language to the Sasanian triumph: “The Caesar Gordian raised in all of the Roman
Empire a force from the peoples of the Goths and Germans (Γούθθων τε καὶ Γερμανῶν
ἐθνῶν δύναμιν) and marched on Assyria against the people of the Aryans/Iranians and
against us.” What was on the mind of the Shahanshah’s craftsmen? Not surprisingly
Gothic federates were among the troops of the Roman emperor. The “Germanic force”,
however, most likely designated Alamannic troops from the western borders. Naming
many different nations made the Persian victory more impressive.55
Two examples from the Augustan history (Scriptores Historiae Augustae), a text
written in the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, can help to illustrate the point.
An entry for the thirty tyrants mentions Alamanni, who in past times were called
Germani: Alamannos, qui tunc adhuc Germani dicebantur.56 Aurelian’s entry in the
same collection describes the triumph of the emperor in 274 CE:
[…] Furthermore, there were led along in order four tigers and also giraffes and elks and other
such animals, also eight hundred pairs of gladiators besides the captives from the barbarian
tribes. There were Blemmyes, Axomitae, Arabs from Arabia Felix, Indians, Bactrians,
Hiberians, Saracens and Persians, all bearing their gifts; there were Goths, Alans, Roxolani,
Sarmatians, Franks, Suebians, Vandals, and Germans—all captive, with their hands bound
fast. […] There were led along also ten women, who, fighting in male attire, had been captured
55 Philip Huyse, Die dreisprachige Inschrift Šabuhrs I. an der Ka’ba-i Zardušt (ŠKZ), Corpus
Inscriptionum Iranicarum III/I, Text I, 1–2 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1999),
pa. 3/griech. 7: Γορδιανὸς Καῖσαρ ἀπὸ πάσης τῆς Ῥωμαίων ἀρχῆς Γούθθων τε καὶ Γερμανῶν ἐθνῶν
[δύναμιν συνέλεξ]εν [καὶ εἰ]ς [τὴ]ν Ἀ[σσ]υρίαν ἐ[πὶ τὸ] τῶν Ἀριανῶν ἔθνος καὶ ἡμᾶς ἐπῆλθεν. καὶ εἰς
τοὺς ὅρους τῆς Ἀσσυρίας ἐν τῇ Μησιχίῃ ἐξ ἐναντίας πόλεμος μέγας γέγονεν […]. Cf. Wolfram, Die
Goten, 54–55; Andreas Goltz, “III.2. Die Völker an der mittleren und nordöstlichen Reichsgrenze
(Mittlere und untere Donau sowie Schwarzmeergebiet),” in Die Zeit der Soldatenkaiser: Krise und
Transformation des Römischen Reiches im 3. Jahrhundert n. Chr. Band I, edited by Klaus-Peter Johne
(Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2008), 456–57, n. 57; Georgina Herrmann and Rosalind Howell, The
Sasanian Rock Reliefs at Bishapur 1: Bishapur III Triumph attributed to Shapur I, Iranische
Denkmäler 9 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980), 67; Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars, 36 and n. 3.
56 S.H.A. Tyr. Trig. 13, 3; Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 173.
among the Goths after many others had fallen; these a placard declared to be of the race of the
Amazons—for placards were borne before all, displaying the names of their nations.57
Thus, beside captured Goths, Vandals, Alans, Franks, and Amazons, Germani
formed part of Aurelian’s triumph at Rome. Certainly, Germani was not used as an
umbrella term here. These Germani were Alamanni and Juthungi, a good example of
the rare use of the term in the third century. Alamanni and Juthungi invaded Italy in
the winter of 270/71 CE. The emperor battled the Vandals in Pannonia, had to return
to Italy, and fought battles at Placentia and Milan with them.58
Ammianus Marcellinus (325/330–after 391 CE) sometimes styled Alamanni and
other gentes at the banks of the Rhine Germani. In other parts of his text he used
barbari for the very same groups; in yet other parts, specific names. Germani was a
geographical designation first, alluding to Caesar and having the Rhine area in
mind. A certain Jovinus, commander of the cavalry in Gaul, attacked two companies
of Alamanni, and cut them to pieces during the battle of Châlons-sur-Marne.
Ammianus dubbed this Alamannic group Germani only once: “On the other hand,
the Germans could do nothing but pour forth useless threats and shouts”.59 After
the Lentienses Alamanni had been defeated in battle by Gratian’s (r. 375–383 CE)
generals, their king Priarius was slain. Subsequent to their surrender they gave
the Empire recruits and were in consequence allowed to return to their homes:
“These Germans, though thus compelled to retreat, being aware that the greater
part of our army had been despatched into lllyricum.”60
Orosius (c. 375–c. 418 CE) used Germani to describe Roman enemies at the
Rhine or the Danube. He, however, delineated earlier events, intrusions of Germani
in the Principate up to the end of the second century to be precise. For fifth-century
events Orosius availed himself of more specific ethnonyms like Vandals, Alans or
57 S.H.A. Aurel. 33–34: “[…] praeter captivos gentium barbararum. Blemmyes, Axomitae, Arabes
Eudaemones, Indi, Bactriani, Hiberi, Saraceni, Persae cum suis quique muneribus; Gothi, Alani, Roxolani,
Sarmatae, Franci, Suebi, Vandali, Germani, religatis manibus captivi. […]”; Geary, Myth of Nations, 70.
58 S.H.A. Aurel. 18 and 21; Amm. 17, 6, 1 = Ammianus Marcellinus, Res Gestae, edited and trans-
lated by J. C. Rolfe, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1935–40): The Juthungi appear as a part of the
Alamanni (Alamannorum pars); for the Juthungi see: Helmut Castritius, “Semnonen – Juthungen –
Alemannen: Neues (und Altes) zur Herkunft und Ethnogenese der Alemannen,” in Die Franken und
die Alemannen bis zur “Schlacht bei Zülpich” (496/97), edited by Dieter Geuenich, Ergänzungsbände
zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 19 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 349–66; Timo
Stickler, “Iuthungi sive Semnones,” Bayerische Vorgeschichtsblätter 60 (1995): 231–49.
59 Amm. 27, 2, 3: “[…] latrocinalia castra perrupit contraque Germani nihil praeter inefficaces minas
iactanter sonantes et fremitum.” Translation by J. C. Rolfe.
60 Amm. 31, 10, 5: “[…] verum retrocedere coacti Germani, noscentesque exercitus pleramque par-
tem in Illyricum […].” Translation by J. C. Rolfe. For the battle of Châlons-sur-Marne and the struggle
with the Lentienses see John F. Drinkwater, The Alamanni and Rome 213–496: Caracalla to Clovis
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 276–79, 310–12.
Goths.61 Jerome (c. 347–420 CE) gave a very similar designation as the Historia
Augusta cited above. The Church Father mentioned that the Franks had lived in for-
mer times in the Germania, an area named Francia in his lifetime (apud historicos
Germania, nunc Francia).62 Gregory of Tours (c. 538–594 CE) applied Germani only
once: citing the lost work of Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus, he told the story of a son
of the usurper Constantinus. This commander was sent around 410 ad Germanias
gentes to recruit Frankish and Alemanic auxiliary units.63
Zosimus (c. 490–c. 510 CE) reports that Constantine I had recruited an army of
Germanoi and other Celtic peoples (Γερμανῶν καὶ τῶν ἀλλῶν Κελτικῶν ἐθνῶν). Of
course, the Byzantine writer has been ‘corrected’ by modern scholars. Most often
linguists and historians translate this passage as “Germanic and Celtic peoples”,
which is an error. Zosimus knew what he was writing. His background was ethno-
graphic literature describing a Keltike in the western parts of Europe, and the
Germanoi he mentioned were barbarians located on the Rhine, subsumed together
beneath the old Caesarean term. Constantine recruited Alamannic, Frankish and
other barbarian soldiers.64
Procopius also knew Caesar’s term and described the situation as follows. In
olden times, on both sides of the Rhine, different peoples had cohabited under the
name Germanoi (Γερμανοί). Procopius spoke of the Franks and mentions that these
barbarians had been called Γερμανοί in times past. The first information describing
ancient Germans at both sides of the Rhine could be due to an attempt to explain
the Frankish territory of the sixth century by historical considerations. Another pos-
sibility for understanding the passage is to interpret it as referring to the territorial
name Germania, which was used for the Roman provinces west and east of the
Rhine. Be this as it may, this source shows that Procopius reduced the term
Germanoi to the Franks and associated it with the Rhine area.65 Agathias also
61 Oros. 5, 24, 6; 7, 29, 15; 7, 35, 4; 7, 41, 2; cf. Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 173.
62 Jer. V. Hilar. 22 (PL 23, 39).
63 Greg. Tur. Franc. 2, 9 = Gregor von Tours, Zehn Bücher Geschichten, edited and translated by
Rudolf Buchner, Ausgewählte Quellen zur Deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 2–3, 9th ed.
(Darmstadt: WBG, 2000); see Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 173; Helmut Castritius, s.v. “Renatus
Profuturus Frigeridus,” RGA (2003), 24:507–8; Phillipp Wynn, “Frigeridus, the British Tyrants and
the Early Fifth Century Barbarian Invasion of Gaul and Spain,” Athenaeum 85 (1997): 70.
64 Zos. 2, 15, 1 = Zosimos, Neue Geschichte/Historia Nea, edited and translated by Otto Veh,
Bibliothek der Griechischen Literatur 31 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1990), 56: “[…] Germanen und
Kelten […]”. An English translation of 1814 offers the same interpretation: Zosimus, New History:
Book 2, trans. H. Green, C. Chaplin (London: 1814): “Having therefore raised an army amongst the
barbarians, Germans, and Celts, whom he had conquered, and likewise drawn a force out of
Britain, amounting in the whole to ninety thousand foot and eight thousand horse, he marched
from the Alps into Italy.” Cf. Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 170 and n. 31; Walter Goffart, “Zosimus. The
First Historian of Rome’s Fall,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 412–41.
65 Proc. BG 5, 11, 29: “After this he began to gather all the Goths from every side and to organize
and equip them, duly distributing arms and horses to each one; and only the Goths who were
referred to Frankish barbarians being formerly known as Γερμανοί. These Franks in-
habited Gaul in his lifetime:
The Franks, τὸ γένος τῶν Φράγγων, have a common frontier with Italy. They may reasonably
be identified with the people who in ancient times were called Germanoi, Γερμανοί, since they
inhabit the banks of the Rhine and the surrounding territory, and though they occupy most of
Gaul, it is a later acquisition since they did not previously live there; and the same is true of
the city of Massilia, which was originally settled by Ionians.66
From the third century onwards, Germani became a term that alluded increasingly
to the past of the first century BCE. and the first century CE. The term referred to the
works of Caesar and, possibly, Tacitus. This is the proper way to understand the
use of Germani in most late antique sources. The fact that the term was nearly for-
gotten between the fourth and the sixth centuries attests to late antique difficulty in
understanding Caesar’s invention, very similar to our own confusion today.
As a term applied by others, a Fremdbezeichnung, Germani was either limited to
Franks and Alamanni or used for peoples of a distant past. The term was never used
by anybody who wanted to be called a German themselves in Late Antiquity.
Compared to the ethnonym Slav, this is striking.67 Slavic groups seem to have used an
ethnonym *Slavene/Slovenes/Sloviane to refer to a small individual community. After a
Slavic liturgy had been established by the twelfth century a certain awareness of the
similarity of vernaculars of many different groups arose. The German neighbours
were *Nemcy, the dumb or mute, whereas the Slavs labeled themselves as ‘those who
know the words’. Paul Barford has conceived of Slavic self-definition as being that of
a ‘communication community’.68
engaged in garrison duty in Gaul he was unable to summon, through fear of the Franks. These
Franks were called Germanoi in ancient times. And the manner in which they first got a foothold in
Gaul, and where they had lived before that, and how they became hostile to the Goths, I shall now
proceed to relate.” Cf. Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 171.
66 Agathias 1, 2, 1 = Agathias, Historiarium [The Histories], edited and translated by Joseph
D. Frendo, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae Series Berolinensis 2a (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975):
Πρόσοικοί τε γάρ εἰσι τῆι Ἰταλία καὶ ἀγχιτέρμονες τὸ γένος τῶν Φράγγων. εἶεν δ’ ἂν οὗτοι οἱ πάλαι
ὀνομαζόμενοι Γερμανοί, δῆλον δέ· ἀμφὶ Ῥῆνον γὰρ ποταμὸν οἰκοῦσι καὶ τὴν ταύτηι ἤπειρον, ἔχουσι δὲ
καὶ Γαλλιῶν τὰ πλεῖστα, οὐ πρότερον πρὸς αὐτῶν κατεχόμενα, ἀλλ’ ὕστερον ἐπικτηθέντα, καὶ τὴν
Μασσαλίαν πόλιν, τοὺς Ἰώνων ἀποίκους. Cf. Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 171.
67 Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 172–73 and 176; cf. Ernst Eichler, “Zur Genese des Slawen-Begriffs und
zur slawischen Ethnonymie,” in Akkulturation: Probleme einer germanisch-romanischen Kultursynthese
in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter, edited by Dieter Hägermann, Wolfgang Haubrichs and Jörg Jarnut,
Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 41 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004),
61–67; Johannes Niehoff, s.v. “Slaven, Slavisierung,” DNP (2001), 11:657–59.
68 Paul M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (London:
British Museum Press, 2001), 29 and 31.
Germanoi in Byzantine Sources
Germanoi derived from the Latin Germani and, as mentioned above, Procopius defined
Germanoi as the former name of the Frankoi, associating the latter with the Rhineland
Germans of the early Roman empire. Through the fifteenth century it remained an axi-
omatic ethnic formula in Byzantine historiography that Germanoi and Frankoi were
one and the same, with the only exception being the occasional and even more anach-
ronistic association of the Germanoi with the Keltoi (Celts).69
The equation of Franks and Germanoi was used in Byzantine literature by, for
example, Michael Attaleiates, Dukas and Ioannes Zonaras.70 During the High
Middle Ages, Rhomaian texts used Frankoi to describe the Normans in the south of
Italy and Sicily, Frankoi oi kai Germanoi for the French, and Alamanoi for the
Germans. In official documents, moreover, these Slavic Nemitzoi, Νεμίτζοι, appear.71
The Suda, a tenth century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia, has an
entry on Germanikos, Γερμανικός: “A Frank. The Germanoi are called Celts—the
ones who live (are) around the Rhine River.” (Γερμανικός: ὁ Φράγγος. ὅτι οἱ
Γερμανοὶ Κελτοί λέγονται, οἳ ἀμφὶ τὸν Ῥῆνον ποταμόν εἰσι.) The entry on Keltoi
does this in reverse, equating Celts and Germanoi: “Keltoi: Name of a people, the
ones called Germans. They are on both sides of the Rhine river; they overran the
land of the Albanians. They are also called Senones.” (Κελτοί: ὄνομα ἔθνους, οἱ
λεγόμενοι Γερμανοί: οἳ ἀμφὶ τὸν Ῥῆνον ποταμόν εἰσιν, οἳ κατέθεον τὴν γῆν τῶν
Ἀλβανῶν: οὓς καὶ Σήνωνας καλοῦσιν.)72 The “land of the Albanians” in this entry is
most likely an error, mixing up Albanians and Alamanni.73 Beside some obvious er-
rors and permutations, the Byzantine parlance mirrors the late antique use of the
terms described above. Germanoi is understood to be the old name of the Franks on
the Rhine, and they are ultimately Celts, in the end. Constantine Porphyrogenetos’s
remark on the history of Venice uses the term Franks too: “Of old, Venice was a
deserted place, uninhabited and swampy. Those who are now called Venetians
were Franks from Aquileia and from the other places in Francia, and they used to
dwell on the mainland opposite Venice.”74
69 R. Bruce Hitchner, s.v. “Germanoi,” ODB (1991), 2:845–46.

70 Hans Ditten, “Germanen und Alamannen in antiken und byzantinischen Quellen,” Berliner
Byzantinische Arbeiten 52 (1985): 26–27.
71 R. Bruce Hitchner and Alexander Kazhdan, s.v. “Germany,” ODB (1991), 2:847; Ditten,
“Germanen und Alamannen,” 26–30; R. Bruce Hitchner and Alexander Kazhdan, s.v. “Frankoi,”
ODB (1991), 2:803; Werner Ohnsorge, Abendland und Byzanz: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geschichte
der byzantinisch-abendländischen Beziehungen und des Kaisertums (Darmstadt: WBG, 1958), 227–54.
72 Suid. gamma 198, Adler: The Suda Online. Available at: http://www.stoa.org/sol/, accessed
May 2017; Suid. kappa 1307, Adler: The Suda Online.
73 Ditten, “Germanen und Alamannen,” 26.
74 Const. Porph. Adm. Imp. 28 = Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, edited
and translated by Gy. Moravcsik, R. J. H. Jenkins, Dumbarton Oaks Texts 1, Corpus Fontium
Germanoi and Franks were equated with one another. The origin of such equa-
tions is the same as the reason authors identified Huns, Avars, or Hungarians
with the Scythians known from Herodotus.75 The old term “Scythian” was applied to
Huns, Avars, Hungarians, Goths and later even Slavs. Pliny and Ptolemaeus used
“Scythian” in general for all the barbarians north of the Black Sea. At the same
time, more recent ethnonyms were applied to peoples known from history. It is again
Constantine Porphyrogenetos who provides an example: talking about Venetian his-
tory, Constantine makes Attila the king of the Avars, βασιλευς τῶν ᾿Αβάρων. The roots
of the word Scythian in the ancient east signified “Horseman”. So to see it used to
describe barbarians attacking on horses, such as Goths, Alans, Huns, and Avars, is
only too understandable.76
Scandinavia as a Scythian Land of Origin
Paul the Deacon used Germania in the preliminary chapters of the Historia
Langobardorum:
Paul, for his part, takes pains to locate the Lombard’s original home in a vast Germania, the
land of human germination, so prolific in men, owing to the northern latitude, that it could
not feed its teeming masses. This is the main part of his scientific prelude, rooted in
Hippocratic climatic and medical theory.77
Paul differentiated the two Roman provinces along the Rhine, the Germania supe-
rior and inferior, from the vast areas of Germania with the Tanais as its frontier.
From these areas, uncountable ferocious barbarian peoples had been coming to the
Roman empire (feroces et barbarae nationes e Germania prodierunt). Paul did not
Historiae Byzantinae 1 (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1985):
Ἰστέον, ὅτι ἡ Βεβετία τὸ μὲν παλαὶον ἦν τόπος ἔρημός τις ἀοίκητος καὶ βαλτώδης. Οἱ δὲ νῦν
καλούμενοι Βενέτικοι ὑπῆρχον Φράγγοι ἀπὸ Ἀκουιλεγίας καἲ ἀπὸ τῶν ἑτέρων τόπων τῆς Φραγγίας, καὶ
κατῴκουν εἰς τὴν ζηρὰν ἅντικρυ τῆς Βεβετίας. For Constantine Porphyrogenetos cf. Ighor Šečenko,
“Re-reading Constantine Porphyrogenitus,” in Byzantine diplomacy: Papers of the Twenty-fourth
Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies March 1990, edited by Jonathan Shepard and Simon
Franklin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1992).
75 Walter Pohl, “Das awarische Khaganat und die anderen Gentes im Karpatenbecken (6.–8. Jh.),”
in Die Völker Südosteuropas im 6.–8. Jh. Symposion Tutzing 1985, edited by Bernd Hänsel,
Südosteuropajahrbuch 17 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1987), 47–49; Eugen Ewig, “Volkstum und Volksbewußtsein
im Frankenreich des 7. Jahrhunderts,” in Spätantikes und fränkisches Gallien 1: Beihefte der Francia 3,1,
edited by Eugen Ewig (Zurich: Thorbecke, 1976), 259–61.
76 See Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 171 and n. 36–37; Hilmar Klinkott, s.v. “Skythen § 1: Geographie
und Geschichte § 2: Skythen-Bild,” RGA (2005), 29:36–40. Const. Porph. Adm. Imp. 28: Bασιλευς
τῶν ᾿Αβάρων.
77 Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550–800): Jordanes, Gregory of Tours,
Bede, and Paul the Deacon (Princeton: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 384.
categorize the Goths, Vandals, or Heruli as Germani; he only asserted that they orig-
inated in this region. Shortly afterwards, a second use of the terminology appears
in the Historia: the Lombards are said to derive from the peoples of the Germania
(Langobardorum, gens […] a Germanorum populis originem ducens).78
Of course many scholars understood this as an early source that proved the
Germanic identity of the Lombards. At the same time, these scholars doubted the
dimensions of Paul’s Germania and thought this to be an error adopted from the
Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.79 Regarding the first point: the wording populi
Germanorum is nothing more than a geographical designation. It is striking that the
discussed terms only appear in the introduction of Paul’s history and never again in
the rest of his work. Isidore transformed a traditional, vast Keltike into a Germania
reaching as far as the Tanais.80
Some similarities with Paul’s treatment of vast areas north of the Roman bor-
ders as lands of origin for many barbarian peoples can be traced in the widely dis-
cussed ‘Scandinavian problem’. From the sixth century on, origin stories began to
78 Paul. Diac. Hist. Lang. 1, 1 = Paulus Diaconus, Historia Langobardorum, edited by Georg Waitz,
MGH SS rer. Lang. (Hannover 1878, reprint 1988) 12–187 at 47–48: “This is the reason why such
great multitudes of peoples (tantae populorum multitudines) originate in the north, and that the en-
tire region from the Tanais (Don) to the west […] is adequately denominated with the generally ac-
cepted name Germania (generali tamen vocabulo Germania vocitetur). The Romans, however, after
having occupied those parts, have named the two provinces beyond the Rhine, Upper and Lower
Germany (superiorem inferioremque Germaniam dixerint). From this teeming Germania (populosa
Germania) innumerable groups of captives are led away to be sold to the inhabitants of the South.
So many human beings are born there that the land can scarcely nourish them; many gentes fre-
quently emigrated from there and those have indeed become the scourge of portions of Asia, but
especially of the parts of Europe which lie next to it. Everywhere destroyed cities throughout Illyria
and Gaul demonstrate this, but most of all unhappy Italy which has felt the cruel rage of nearly all
these gentes. The Goths indeed, and the Wandals, the Rugii, Heruli and Turcilingi and also other
fierce and barbarous nationes have come from Germania. Similiarily the gens of the Winnili, this
means of the Lombards, which afterwards ruled prosperously in Italy, deduces its origin from the
peoples of the Germania, Germanorum populis originem ducens. They came from the island named
Scadinavia, although other causes of their emigration are also alleged.” Paul. Diac. Hist. Lang. 1, 15:
[…] usque hodie in intimis Germaniae finibus gentem harum existere feminarum […]. Cf. Pohl,
“Germanenbegriff,” 173–74. Paul owed to Isidore the idea of Germany as the land of human germina-
tion Goffart, Narrators, 384–88.
79 Theodor Mommsen, “Die Quellen der Langobardengeschichte des Paulus Diaconus,” Neues
Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde zur Beförderung einer Gesamtausgabe
der Quellenschriften deutscher Geschichte des Mittelalters 5 (1880): 60; the older research is summa-
rized in Walter Pohl, “Tradition, Ethnogenese und literarische Gestaltung: Eine Zwischenbilanz,” in
Ethnogenese und Überlieferung: Angewandte Methoden der Frühmittelalterforschung, edited by Karl
Brunner and Brigitte Merta, VIÖG 31 (Vienna: Oldenburg, 1994).
80 Isid. Hisp. Orig. 14, 4, 4 = Isidorus Hispalensis, Origines (Etymologiae), edited by Wallace
Martin Lindsay, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX, 2 vols. (Oxford
1911); trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and O. Berghof, The Etymologies of Isidore of
Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).
appear, using the motif of a Scandinavian or northern descent for the military elites
ruling at Ravenna, Carthage, or Toledo. Roman ethnographers had a clear image in
mind: out of the cold north descended innumerable numbers of peoples. The num-
bers of the arriving gentes given by Roman authors were most often fictional and
greatly exaggerated. Romans tended to use strong imagery when speaking of bar-
barians: “They overwhelmed everything like waves, floods, and volcanic lava.”81
Ammianus Marcellinus reports that innumerae gentium multitudines, countless
swarms of nations, poured through the provinces when the Goths arrived in Thrace
in 376 in unexpected great numbers. Herodotus had previously given such report of
the Medic hordes attacking Greece in the fifth century BCE. In Ammianus’s view,
this new evidence confirmed the trustworthiness of the old stories of great masses
of barbarians living outside the known world.82 Synesius of Cyrene once reported to
emperor Arcadius that no new barbarians could be found north of the Black Sea.
The barbarians had instead merely astutely invented new names to fool the Romans
and scare them. Agathias and Orosius, on the contrary, thought of new peoples arriv-
ing again and again at the borders, disappearing as quickly as they arrived.83 Such mo-
tifs, images, and stereotypes had become part of literary traditions that intellectuals of
the sixth century had introduced as explanations. Jordanes wrote in Constantinople
after 550, but he made some, much disputed, use of a now lost Gothic history by
Cassiodorus, who had written some three decades earlier at the court of the
Ostrogothic king Theodoric. Jordanes labelled Scandinavia an officina gentium aut
certe velut vagina nationum, a workshop or womb of nations.84
Paul the Deacon referred to the Lombard origin in this “workshop of nations”, try-
ing to compare his Lombards to the famous and ancient Goths. Paul knew that many
other peoples lived there: Est insula qui dicitur Scadanan […] in partibus aquilonis, ubi
81 Charles R. Whittaker, “Barbarian, Barbarian Settlements,” in Late Antiquity. A Guide to the

Postclassical World, edited by Glenn W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 334.
82 Amm. 21, 4, 7 and 8; David Rohrbacher, The Historians of Late Antiquity (London: Routledge,
2002), 14–35; Whittaker, “Barbarian, Barbarian Settlements,” 336.
83 Syn. Oratio de regno ad Arcadium imperatorem, 16; Agathias 5, 2, 4; Oros. 7, 32, 1; see Herwig
Wolfram, “Ethnogenesen im frühmittelalterlichen Donau- und Ostalpenraum (6. bis 10. Jahrhundert),”
in Frühmittelalterliche Ethnogenese im Alpenraum, edited by Helmut Beumann and Werner Schröder,
Nationes: Historische und philologische Untersuchungen zur Entstehung der europäischen Nationen
im Mittelalter 5 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1985), 98–100; Walter Pohl, Die Awaren: Ein Steppenvolk in
Mitteleuropa 567–822 n. Chr., 2nd. ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2002), 4 and n2; Wolfram, Die Goten, 23 and
n. 77; Hansgerd Göckenjan, s.v. “Skythen,” LMA (1995), 7:1999.
84 Iord. Get. 25 = Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum/Getica, edited by Theodor Mommsen,
MGH Auct. ant. 5 (Berlin 1882, reprint 1982) 53–138; translation see Wolfram, Die Goten, 14; Goffart,
Narrators; Geary, “Barbarians and Ethnicity,” 108; Herwig Wolfram, “Origo et religio. Ethnische
Traditionen und Literatur in frühmittelalterlichen Quellen,” in Mittelalter: Annäherungen an eine
fremde Zeit, edited by Wolf Hartmann, Schriftenreihe der Universität Regensburg NF 19
(Regensburg: Universitätsverlag Regensburg, 1993), 31–36.
multae gentes habitant.85 For Goths and Lombards, a Scandinavian origin had been in-
vented at the Ostrogothic court in Ravenna in the middle of the sixth century and during
the Carolingian era. These writings had an afterlife. Around 700 CE, the Geographus
Ravennatus defined Scandinavia as an Antiqua Scithia to explain the origin of the
Scythic Goths, Gepids, and Danes. Three centuries later, Adam of Bremen entitled the
Baltic Sea mare Scythicum. Adam classified all the peoples on the Baltic coasts as
Scythians, including the Slavic peoples. Helmold of Bosau as well as Otto of Freising
drew upon and adapted Adam’s categories.86
The Early Medieval Afterlife of Germani and Germania
In eighth-century sources, Germanicae gentes and Germania appear yet again. It is

striking that ecclesiastical writers closely connected to the papal centre used these
terms. Germanicae gentes was applied to pagan individuals living in what was called
Germania in the Principate. In letters of Saint Boniface as well as in the Liber
Pontificalis the terms are to be found several times.87 Letter 17 of Saint Boniface iden-
tifies the gentes and the territory the papal writers had in mind: “some gentes in the
areas of Germania or the territory east of the Rhine.” ([…] aliquas gentes in
Germaniae partibus vel plaga orientali Rheni fluminis […]).88
That means that old Roman terminology was applied to differentiate the areas
east of the Rhine from Gallia. During the Merovingian and Carolingian era, Germania
denoted an area controlled from Gallia and was used as a political term. The
Frankish kings managed what the Roman emperors did not, controlling the
Germania from the west. In 833, the three adult sons of Louis the Pious rebelled
against their father, and Louis II (‘the German’, 804–876) took on the regnum in
85 Origo Gentis Langobardorum 1; similarily in Paul. Diac. Hist. Lang. 1,1.

86 Ravennatis anonymi cosmographia et Guidonis geographica (Itineraria Romana 2) 1, 8 =
Ravennas Anonymus Cosmographia, edited by Joseph Schnetz, Ravennatis Anonymi cosmographia
et Guidonis Geographica, Itineraria Romana 2 (Leipzig: Teubner 1940, reprint Stuttgart 1990);
Adam v. Bremen, Gesta 2, 18–19 = Adam von Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum,
edited and translated by Volker Scior, Werner Trillmich and Rudolf Buchner, Quellen des 9. und
11. Jahrhunderts zur Geschichte der Hamburgischen Kirche und des Reiches, Ausgewählte Quellen
zur deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters 11 (Darmstadt: 2000) 137–499; see Göckenjan, “Skythen,”
1999; Franz Staab, s.v. “Geograph von Ravenna,” RGA (1998), 11:102–9; Staab, “Ostrogothic
Geographers at the Court of Theoderic the Great: A Study of Some Sources of the Anonymous
Cosmographer of Ravenna,” Viator 7 (1976): 27–58.
87 Bonifatius, ep. 38; 45; 75 = Bonifatius, Epistulae, MGH Epistolae selectae 1. Die Briefe des
Heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, edited by Michael Tangl (Berlin 1916); Liber Pontificalis 91, 3 =
Liber pontificalis, edited by Louis Duchesne, Le Liber pontificalis. Texte, introduction et commen-
taire, 2 vols., Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome. Série 2, 3 (Paris 1886–1892);
see Pohl, “Germanenbegriff,” 175.
88 Bonifatius, ep. 17 and 43.
orientali Francia.89 The Annales Fuldenses for 838 entitled Louis II’s territory regnum
orientalium Francorum.90
As mentioned above, more than a hundred years before, in 722, writers at the
court of Pope Gregory II identified about the same territory as Germaniae partes vel
plaga orientalis Reni fluminis.91 This ‘kingdom in eastern Francia’ lay largely east of
the Rhine and corresponded roughly to the Germania used in classical literature.
Louis II’s monarchy was founded upon the four Regna, Bavaria, eastern Francia,
Saxony, and Alamannia. The sobriquet of the king, “the German” (Ludwig der
Deutsche), appeared no earlier than the eighteenth century and became widespread
in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century in German scholarship.
This is a misunderstanding and a misinterpretation, trying to fix the roots of a mod-
ern German identity at the earliest point possible.
The papal chancellery also used Germania in the ninth century, due to the geo-
graphical terms used during the Principate. The political idea that was described by
such wording remained the greater Frankish kingdom, Francia.92 The Annales
Xantenses for the year 854 termed Louis the German rex orientalis. The same
source applied oriens to the southeastern frontier region as well.93 Hludowicus
Germanicus cannot be translated as ‘Louis the German’, showing how far from the
89 DD LD 13 = MGH Diplomata. Die Urkunden Ludwigs des Deutschen, Karlmanns und Ludwigs des
Jüngeren, edited by Paul F. Kehr (Berlin 1934) 15–16; see Herwig Wolfram, “Lateinische Herrscher- und
Fürstentitel im neunten und zehnten Jahrhundert,” in Intitulatio II. Lateinische Herrscher- und
Fürstentitel im neunten und zehnten Jahrhundert, edited by Herwig Wolfram, Mitteilungen des Instituts
für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Erg. Bd. 24 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1973), 110–12; Wolfram, “Bavaria
in the Tenth and Early Eleventh Centuries,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History 3, c. 900–c. 1024,
edited by Timothy Reuter (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 294; Patrick Geary, Before
France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1988); Walter Goffart, “The Supposedly ‘Frankish’ Table of Nations: An Edition and
Study,” Frühmittelalterstudien 17 (1983): 98–130.
90 Annales Fuldenses a. 838 = MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim
editi 7, edited by Friedrich Kurze (Hannover 1891), 29.
91 Bonifatius, epist. 17 and 43, ed. Tangl, 30, 68. Epistola 43 is a letter of Gregory III. to the people of
Hessen and Thuringia: Gregorius papa universis optimatibus et populo provinciarum Germaniae,
Thuringis et Hessis […] vel omnibus in orientali plaga constitutis. See Herwig Wolfram, Grenzen und
Räume: Geschichte Österreichs vor seiner Entstehung 378–907, Österreichische Geschichte (Vienna:
Ueberreuter, 1995), 84 and n. 76.
92 Joachim Ehlers, Die Entstehung des deutschen Reiches (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 15–17;
Wilfried Hartmann, Ludwig der Deutsche (Darmstadt: WBG, 2002), 1–6 and n. 9; Dieter Geuenich,
“Ludwig ‘der Deutsche’ und die Entstehung des ostfränkischen Reiches,” in Theodisca: Beiträge zur
althochdeutschen Sprache und Literatur in der Kultur des frühen Mittelalters, edited by Wolfgang
Haubrichs (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 313–29, especially 316–19 and n. 19; Wolfram, “Bavaria,” 294.
93 Annales Xantenses ad. annum 854, 869 = MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum schol-
arum separatim editi 12, edited by Bernhard von Simson (Hannover 1909), 28: Ludewicus rex orien-
talis; cf. Paul Kretschmer, “Austria und Neustria: Eine Studie über spätlateinische Ländernamen,”
Glotta 26 (1937): 222.
sources many terms in modern scholarship happen to be. Dieter Geuenich has
stressed that the title means “Louis, reigning over the territories of Francia East of
the Rhine”. Besides Germania, the Frankish territory west of the Rhine, geographi-
cal terms like Gallia, Lotharingia, Francia, Italia or Burgundia were in use.94
Conclusion
Roman efforts to establish a province east of the Rhine and maybe as far as the Elbe
during the first century CE ultimately failed. What remained was the political termi-
nology used throughout the first century BCE. and the first century CE. This par-
lance had its specific literary use up to the ninth century. As shown, Germani was a
name that was limited to Franks and Alamanni in Latin literature, and had a certain
Byzantine afterlife. Germania became one of the Roman terms in use to classify
European regions. All this has very little in common with what scholars from the
fifteenth century CE on wanted it to mean.
The terms Germani and Germania constitute nothing more, or less, than a Roman
political body of thought. Barbarian societies within a sphere of Roman interest had
been subsumed under a new terminology. Classical ethnography defined these bar-
barian groups as Celts, and Greek literature did the same centuries after Caesar. The
Roman Empire managed to influence barbarian groups within its sphere of influence
so strongly that these groups, in conflict with or against the Romans or with each
other, more and more organized themselves according to Roman needs.
Arminius, for example, was a Roman officer fighting in Pannonia under Roman
command. On the Rhine he was on duty in the environment of the legatus Augusti pro
praetore Publius Quinctilius Varus commanding Cheruscian units. His opponent
Segestes, holding a similar position, kept his allegiance to the Romans. Arminius’s in-
surgency was most probably a mutiny of Roman auxiliary troops, a thesis introduced
by Dieter Timpe. Fighting the Bructeri and Marsi, groups involved in the mutiny, the
Roman generals Tiberius and Germanicus were accompanied by Flavus, Arminius’s
brother. Marbod, a political character in many aspects similar to Arminius, was also
educated in Rome.95
Marbod and Arminius, Segestes and Flavus are good examples for a new
Roman elite acting in an area planned to become part of the empire. They appear in
94 See Jarnut, “Germanisch,” 109; Hans Hubert Anton, “Troja-Herkunft, origo gentis und frühe
Verfasstheit der Franken in der gallisch-fränkischen Tradition des 5.–8. Jahrhunderts,” MIÖG 108
(2000): 46–48; Geuenich, “Ludwig ‘der Deutsche’,” 314–18.
95 Dieter Timpe, Arminius-Studien (Heidelberg: Winter, 1970). Herwig Wolfram, Salzburg, Bayern,
Österreich: Die Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum und die Quellen ihrer Zeit, MIÖG Erg. Bd. 31
(Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1995), 40–45.
the end to have been more Roman than barbarian. The fact that Tacitus made
Arminius “without doubt Germania’s liberator, who challenged the Roman people
not in its beginnings like other kings and leaders, but in the peak of its empire; in
battles with changing success, undefeated in the war”,96 is strongly tied to Tacitus’s
intention of playing up the Germanic threat to criticise the imperial policy of his time
and to force a Roman striving for the acquisition of new provinces once again. Thus,
in the end, the idea of ‘Germanic’ unity, freedom and victory appears really to have
been a Roman one. The Roman umbrella terms Germani and Suevi as applied by
Casear and Tacitus were only partly useful and, excepting the territorial name of the
intended Augustan province, were used only in a very limited sense. Germania and
Germani form part of Roman thinking but were adapted and changed again and
again for centuries up to our own present.
Acknowledgements: It was possible to write this text during a fellowship,

Forschungsstipendium, of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung at the Friedrich-
Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin as well as during my time as a Senior Fellow
at the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaft Kolleg, Greifswald. Francesco Borri (Vienna), Julia
Ess (Berlin) and Dana Polanichka (Wheaton College, Massachusetts) were of great help
when finalising the text.
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Stefan Donecker
Re-inventing the ‘Germanic’ in the Early
Modern Era: Omnes Germani sunt, contra
fabulas quorundam
Franci, Burgundiones, Gothi, Vandali, Gepidae, Rugi, Heruli, Turcilingi, Longobardi, Normanni,
Picti, Quadi, Scoti, Angli, Suevi, Saxones, omnes Germani sunt, contra fabulas quorundam. […]
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In 1509, the eminent German humanist and poet laureate Heinrich Bebel presented his
readers with an impressive line-up of tribes. The Franks, the Burgundians, the
Goths, the Vandals and many other prominent barbarians of late antiquity be-
longed, in fact, to a far larger collective: omnes Germani sunt, they all were
Germanic, even though some unnamed scholars might erroneously claim other-
wise. And Bebel proved unconstrained by the preconceptions developed by later gen-
erations of historiographers: even the Huns, commonly regarded as the major
antagonists and the embodiments of otherness in the grand narrative of the
Barbarian Invasions could, according to Bebel and his source, Berosus, claim a right-
ful place in the genealogical tree of praiseworthy Germanic ancestors.
To a modern observer, Bebel’s Germanic Huns might seem like a peculiar allu-
sion to the wartime jargon of the early twentieth century, when “the Hun” became
an acerbic moniker for the Germans, owing to Wilhelm II’s misguided jingoist rhet-
oric. But Bebel’s 1509 treatise and the Emperor’s infamous Hun Speech of 1900 are
separated by four centuries, and ethnic designations like “the Germanic” and “the
Hunnic” had undergone substantial conceptual shifts in the interim. In 1900, in a dis-
cursive context shaped by a dominant, fully developed nationalist narrative, the two
terms stood in diametrical opposition, one representing immutable Germanness, the
other being representative of supposedly Asian barbarism. Anyone merging the
“Germanic” and the “Hunnic”, be it the British press or the German Emperor himself,
was purposefully toying with their contrasting connotations.2
For Heinrich Bebel and his contemporaries, four hundred years earlier, this op-
position simply did not exist. The perplexing image of a joint Hunnic-Germanic her-
itage serves as a reminder that, while the ethnonym Germani has been in
1 Henricus Bebelius, “De laude, antiquitate, imperio, victoriis, rebusque gestis veterum Germa-
norum,” in Opera Bebeliana sequentia (Pforzheim: Anshelm, 1509), fol. l1v. Cf. Caspar Hirschi,
Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter
zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 332.
2 Cf. Klaus von See, Barbar, Germane, Arier: Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1994), 58–59.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-004
68 Stefan Donecker
continuous use among scholars since the early modern period, its meaning has
been far from constant. Between 1500 and 1900, the “Germanic” developed from a
loose and flexible ethnic umbrella term into an effective and omnipresent keyword
of nationalist discourse.
The rediscovery of Tacitus’s ethnographical treatise De origine et situ Germa-
norum, commonly referred to as Germania, in the 1450s and the subsequent editio
princeps in 14723 allowed German humanists to appropriate the Germanic gentes of
antiquity and to incorporate them into their patriotic writings.4 Such a usage of a
distant past was anything but uncommon among early modern scholars. Early mod-
ern historiography was dominated by a genealogical methodology that sought to
perceive and explain the present through an examination of blood ties, ancestry
and biological lineage:
Fabricating genealogies was a major intellectual activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. The assumptions which governed genealogical inquiries informed researchers into his-
tory, politics, language, religion, and mythography. To understand a word, a people, a belief,
or a custom meant locating it on a genealogical stemma which revealed its ancestors and kin.5
Given this genealogical paradigm, Tacitus’s Germania proved to be a godsend for

German humanism.
In a rather competitive atmosphere where “[e]very nation and city from
Novgorod to Naples felt the need for an early history that rivalled or surpassed the
ancient histories of Greece and Rome,”6 German scholars were among the first to
assert their ancestry. The claim to an Etruscan heritage voiced by Leonardo Bruni
and his fellow Florentines in the fifteenth century was the earliest attempt to es-
tablish a collective genealogy compatible with humanist erudition,7 but the
Germans followed suit. By 1500, the supposed continuity between ancient
3 Dieter Mertens, “Die Instrumentalisierung der ‚Germania’ des Tacitus durch die deutschen
Humanisten,” in Zur Geschichte der Gleichung “germanisch-deutsch”: Sprache und Namen,
Geschichte und Institutionen, edited by Heinrich Beck et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 58–61.
4 Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the
Third Reich (New York: Norton, 2011), 105–28; Mertens, “Instrumentalisierung”; Ludwig Krapf,
Germanenmythus und Reichsideologie: Frühhumanistische Rezeptionsweisen der taciteischen “Germania”
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979); Hans Tiedemann, “Tacitus und das Nationalbewußtsein der deutschen
Humanisten Ende des 15. und Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts” (PhD thesis, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Univ.
Berlin, 1913).
5 Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 532.
6 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science,
1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 82.
7 Johannes Helmrath, “Die Umprägung von Geschichtsbildern in der Historiographie des europäischen
Humanismus,” in Von Fakten und Fiktionen: Mittelalterliche Geschichtsdarstellungen und ihre
Aufarbeitung, edited by Johannes Laudage (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), 337–42. The importance of older me-
dieval traditions, such as the Trojan genealogies that had been almost ubiquitous in dynastic
Re-inventing the ‘Germanic’ in the Early Modern Era 69
Germani and contemporary Teutsche was already taken for granted among the
scholarly community. In other countries, it took far longer to establish an un-
equivocally acknowledged genealogy. Different contradictory hypotheses on
English origins coexisted in early modern England;8 in France, scholars remained
undecided whether French heritage hinged primarily on the Gauls, the Franks or
the Romans.9
But although the claim to a Germanic heritage was a resounding success for
German humanists—quickly established, rarely questioned and undoubtedly presti-
gious—the concept of the “Germanic” needed to be refined nevertheless. Bebel’s curt
comment, omnes Germani sunt, illustrates both the appeal but also the limitations in-
herent to the initial humanist readings of the term. If virtually any barbarian tribe of
antiquity could be labelled as “Germanic”, the claim of a Germanic ancestry became
essentially devoid of significance.10 Universalism posed a major challenge to the ge-
nealogical pretensions of early modern historiographers, especially since it was
backed by the authority of the Bible.11 Yet to be effective, a genealogical hypothesis
historiography during the Middle Ages, began to wane at the same time. By 1500, the idea of a Trojan
heritage had become so common that it could no longer serve to single out a particular dynasty among
its peers—being a descendant of Troy meant little if all of one’s rivals claimed a similar heritage.
Furthermore, humanist source criticism began to cast doubt on the plausibility of Trojan hypotheses.
They resurfaced occasionally in the course of the early modern era—for example, at the court of
Emperor Maximilian I or the French kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV—but were by and large sup-
planted by new genealogical models. On the motif of Trojan ancestry in the Middle Ages see, in
particular, Gert Melville, “Troja: Die integrative Wiege europäischer Mächte im ausgehenden
Mittelalter,” in Europa 1500: Integrationsprozesse im Widerstreit; Staaten, Regionen,
Personenverbände, Christenheit, edited by Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 1987); Jörn Garber, “Trojaner – Römer – Franken – Deutsche: ‘Nationale’
Abstammungsmythen im Vorfeld der Nationalstaatsbildung,” in Nation und Literatur im Europa
der Frühen Neuzeit: Akten des I. Internationalen Kongresses zur Kulturgeschichte der Frühen
Neuzeit, edited by Klaus Garber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989).
8 Glyn Daniel and Colin Renfrew, The Idea of Prehistory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1988),
14–15: “One could not confess failure about the early past of man; it had to be peopled by someone,
and it did not really matter a great deal whether they were Danes, Romans, Greeks, Trojans, Noah
and Japhet, Israelite tribes, Phoenicians, or Druids.”
9 In the early eighteenth century, Henri de Boulainvilliers and his adversary Jean-Baptiste Du Bos
utilised the ambiguous French genealogy and deduced arguments for their respective political
agendas—the aristocratic resp. the royalist cause—from the unresolved relationship between
Franks, Romans and Gauls. See Ian N. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 19–36.
10 Cf. Tiedemann, “Tacitus,” 48.
11 Since all mankind descended from Adam respectively the Sons of Noah and was collectively re-
deemed by Christ, any attempt at a patriotic historiography had to contend with the tenets of
Christian universalism. The moral hierarchy among the Sons of Noah—blessed Shem and Japhet
vis-à-vis cursed Cham—did allow for some leeway; nevertheless, genealogical models had to be for-
mulated carefully to avoid conflicts with Scripture.
70 Stefan Donecker
had to demarcate one’s own ancestors and elevate them to a privileged position
within universal history.
In the case of the Germans, this tension between universalism and particularism
required scholars and historiographers to refine the promising, but somewhat vague
notion of a Germanic ancestry. In the decades and centuries after the rediscovery of
Tacitus’s Germania, the concept of the “Germanic” had to be honed and clarified. In
the following, I intend to draw attention to three crucial components in this ongoing
re-evaluation of the Germanic past: first, the refinement of the genealogy itself—par-
ticularly concerning the individual progenitors and the spatial origin of the Germanic
tribes; second, the classification and explanation of ethnonyms and lastly the de-
marcation towards other groups of barbarians, namely Celts and Slavs.
Tracing the Germanic: Berosus, Jordanes

and the Examination of Germanic Origins
In a famous, regularly quoted and extremely influential passage in the second chapter of
the Germania, Tacitus suggests that the Germans were indigenae, indigenous inhabitants
of their lands who had never been conquered nor intermingled with neighbouring peo-
ple.12 This somewhat cautiously phrased statement was enthusiastically received by
German humanists and triggered the “Tacitean paradigm shift”13 in the years around
1500, a fundamental re-evaluation of the Germanic past that emphasised autoch-
thony and uncompromising territoriality as indicators of Germanic pre-eminence.14
In his 1538 Germaniae chronicon, the humanist and historiographer Sebastian Franck
summed up the common opinion of his predecessors and contemporaries in a
12 Tac. Germ. 2: Ipsos Germanos indigenas crediderim minimeque aliarum gentium adventibus et
hospitiis mixtos.
13 Dieter Mertens, “Spätmittelalterliches Landesbewußtsein im Gebiet des alten Schwaben,” in
Spätmittelalterliches Landesbewußtsein in Deutschland, edited by Matthias Werner (Ostfildern:
Thorbecke, 2005), 143.
14 Mertens, “Instrumentalisierung,” 80–84; Johannes Helmrath, “Probleme und Formen na-
tionaler und regionaler Historiographie des deutschen und europäischen Humanismus um 1500,”
in Spätmittelalterliches Landesbewußtsein in Deutschland, edited by Matthias Werner (Ostfildern:
Thorbecke, 2005), 381–84; Stefan Donecker, “The Ambivalence of Migration in Early Modern
Thought: Comments on an Intellectual History of Human Mobility,” in Migrations: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives, edited by Michi Messer, Renée Schroeder and Ruth Wodak (Vienna: Springer, 2012),
229–30; Herfried Münkler, Hans Grünberger and Kathrin Mayer, Nationenbildung: Die
Nationalisierung Europas im Diskurs humanistischer Intellektueller; Italien und Deutschland (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 1998), 236–42; Hedwig Riess, “Motive des patriotischen Stolzes bei den deutschen
Humanisten” (Doctoral thesis, Albert-Ludwigs-Univ. Freiburg, 1934), 14–15; Tiedemann, “Tacitus,”
40–47.
particularly emphatic way: “The Germans are superior to many other nations, be-
cause we are not a nation that has come from distant lands, and poured like filth
from foreign countries.”15
But appreciation of a putative autochthony based on Tacitus’s statement faced a
serious problem: the mere concept of indigenae was incompatible with the biblical
account. If all human beings descended from Noah and his sons and originated from
the stranded Ark at Mount Ararat, no one could claim to be indigenous to his or her
native land. Tacitus, as a mere pagan, could be forgiven for being unaware of this
fact, but Christian historiographers of the early modern period would have been ill-
advised to take his statement literally. The case of Isaac La Peyrère, a heterodox
French scholar of the mid-seventeenth century, illustrates the dangers of disregard-
ing the universal origin of mankind.16
Insisting on Germanic autochthony in the strict sense of the word was therefore no
option for German humanists. However, the Tacitean dictum of indigenous Germani
did hold a considerable weight and was far too attractive to be disregarded altogether.
The most simple solution to the dilemma was to gloss over it: scholars like Conrad
Celtis, Heinrich Bebel, Johannes Nauclerus and Andreas Althamer emphasised ancient
Germanic autochthony in accordance with Germania chapter 2 and avoided the implicit
incompatibility with the Bible as best as they could.17 Ultimately, however, such stop-
gap measures remained unsatisfactory. Any Germanic genealogy would, in the long
run, lose its credence if it shied away from a serious inquiry into spatial origins.
Although his importance and influence were unmatched, Tacitus was not the only
source available to German humanists in their search for Germanic origins. In his 1518
Germaniae exegesis, Franciscus Irenicus confronted his readers with two contradictory
genealogical trees that represented two different schools of thought18—one that located
the origins of the Germans in the Near East and tried to combine the Tacitean and the
biblical accounts, and one that instead turned towards the far North and developed a
15 Sebastian Franck, Germaniae chronicon: Von des gantzen Teutschlands, aller Teutschen völcker
herkommen/ Namen/ Händeln/ Guten und bösen Thaten […] (Augsburg: Alexander Weyssenhorn,
1538), preface, fol. aa6v: Weitter haben diß die teutschen vor vil andern völckern beuor/ das wir nit
ein frembd herkommen volck/ als ein vnflat auß andern lendern außgetriben herkommen […].
16 In an effort to explain the origins of the “Indians” in the Americas, La Peyrère argued that God
had created human beings in different parts of the world, thereby challenging the universal truth
of the Genesis account. This so-called Pre-Adamite hypothesis was vigorously condemned by all
Christian denominations, and La Peyrère was forced to recant after his writings had been burned in
public. On La Peyrère, see Grafton, Defenders, 204–13.
17 Peter Hutter, Germanische Stammväter und römisch-deutsches Kaisertum (Hildesheim: Olms,
2000), 47–49; Theobald Bieder, Geschichte der Germanenforschung, Erster Teil: 1500 bis 1806
(Leipzig: Hase & Koehler, 1939), 47; Riess, “Motive,” 12–6; Friedrich Gotthelf, Das deutsche Altertum
in den Anschauungen des sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Duncker, 1900), 21.
18 Franciscus Irenicus, Germaniae exegeseos volumina duodecim (Hagenau: Thomas Anshelmus;
Nuremberg: Ioannes Kobergius, 1518), fol. 21r, 57r.
72 Stefan Donecker
genealogical narrative largely independent of Tacitus.19 For simplicity’s sake, I will

label the two models in the following as the Berosus pattern (Fig. 1) and the Jordanes
pattern (Fig. 2), based on their respective main sources.
Fig. 1: Geneaological tree of “Germanic” ancestors, according to the “Berosus pattern”. Irenicus,
Germaniae exegesis, fol. 57r.
19 Hutter, Stammväter, 47–49; Bieder, Geschichte, 36–38.

Fig. 2: Genealogical tree of Germanic gentes, according to the “Jordanes pattern”. Irenicus,
Germaniae exegesis, fol. 21r.
The one responsible for the Berosus pattern was the Italian Dominican Annius of
Viterbo, who, in 1498, published a text purportedly written by the Hellenistic
Babylonian historiographer Berosus in the third century BC.20 In the following decades,
20 Thomas Lehr, Was nach der Sintflut wirklich geschah: Die Antiquitates des Annius von
Viterbo und ihre Rezeption in Deutschland im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Lang, 2012); Harald
Bollbuck, “Geschichtsfälschung, Überlieferung historischen Wissens und Antikenrezeption: Die
Antiquitates des Annius von Viterbo,” in Geschichte schreiben: Ein Quellen- und Studienhandbuch zur
Historiografie (ca. 1350–1750), edited by Susanne Rau and Birgit Studt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010);
Walter Stephens, “When Pope Noah Ruled the Etruscans: Annius of Viterbo and his Forged
Antiquities,” MLN 119 Supplement (2004); Anthony Grafton, “Invention of Traditions and Traditions
74 Stefan Donecker
several scholars questioned the veracity of Annius’s “discovery”, but the text was con-
sidered authentic by the majority of the scholarly community until it was finally ex-
posed as an elaborate forgery in the early seventeenth century by Joseph Justus
Scaliger. The reason behind the extraordinary success of Annius’s Pseudo-Berosus was
actually rather simple: the text provided the missing link that humanists had sought
for a long time—a connection between biblical Scripture and the canon of Greco-
Roman literature.21
According to the consensus of medieval Genesis exegetes, the ancestor of the
Germans had been Ashkenaz, a son of Gomer, grandson of Japhet and grand-
grandson of Noah.22 Annius, however, had his Pseudo-Berosus provide a far more ap-
pealing option: he claimed that Noah had sired additional children after the deluge—
since the Bible only listed the three sons that had been with him in the Ark, addi-
tional offspring remained a valid option. One of these post-diluvial sons was
Tuyscon, Germanorum & Sarmatum pater23—easily identifiable with Tuiscon, men-
tioned by Tacitus as a god born from the earth whom the Germanic tribes revered as
their ancestor.24 Annius’s solution was as simple as it was effective: Tacitus and his
informants had merely misunderstood a few details and mistakenly deified Noah’s
son, the human primogenitor of the Germans.
Incorporating Tacitus’s Tuiscon into Noah’s family might appear, to modern
readers, as a rather brazen forgery on Annius’s part, but it provided exactly the ar-
gument that German humanists needed—since it enabled them to salvage much of
the cherished notion of Germanic autochthony. Tuiscon and his offspring were no
indigenae in the strict sense of the word, but had simply adhered to the initial divi-
sion of the world among the Noachids. After arriving in Germany, they remained in
the land that had been allotted to them and thus proved morally superior to the
migrating vagabonds that wandered more or less aimlessly through the world.
Tacitus’s Germania did not contradict the Bible after all, since the Germans were
about as indigenous as any group could possibly have been.25 It is thus easy to see
why Annius’s Pseudo-Berosus appealed to German humanists.
of Invention in Renaissance Europe: The Strange Case of Annius of Viterbo,” in The Transmission of
Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Münkler, Grünberger and Mayer, Nationenbildung, 242–61.
21 Hirschi, Wettkampf, 328–30; Gotthelf, Altertum, 8–9.
22 Cf. Arno Borst, Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der
Sprachen und Völker (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1957–63), 1063–65.
23 Joannes Annius Viterbensis, Antiquitatum variarum volumina XVII […] (Paris: I. Badio, 1515), fol.
110r–110v. See Lehr, Sintflut, 169–71; Gotthelf, Altertum, 6–7.
24 Tac. Germ. 2: Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et annalium genus
est, Tuistonem deum terra editum.
25 Huldericus Mutius, a Swiss reformer and historiographer, even had the audacity to alter Tacitus’s
text and purge it from any possible contradictions to the bible: In his thirty-one books on Germanic
antiquity published in 1539, Mutius claimed: “Cornelius Tacitus concurs with the opinion of Berosus
But his position did not remain unchallenged. Jordanes’s Getica, rediscovered by
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini in the mid-fifteenth century and printed for the first time
in a 1515 edition compiled by Konrad Peutinger,26 contained a pithy statement that
proved almost as influential as Tacitus’s dictum on Germanic authochtony: “Now
from this island of Scandza, as from a hive of races or a womb of nations, the Goths
are said to have come forth long ago under their king, Berig by name.”27 The evoca-
tive image of the Northern vagina nationum, continuously spawning barbarian tribes
that roam about in campaigns of invasion and conquest, had a lasting impact on
European historiography. A very similar statement in Paul the Deacon’s late eighth-
century Longobard history lent additional credence to Jordanes’s testimony.28
Franciscus Irenicus’s second genealogical stemma in the Germaniae exegesis is
evidently inspired by Jordanes. It depicts a large number of barbarian tribes that
had emerged e Scandia insula septentrionali, with the Goths in a particularly promi-
nent position and most other gentes—such as the Vandals, the Huns, the Gauls, the
Avars and the Bavarians—listed as their offspring. The idea of Scandia, i. e.
Scandinavia, as a Gothic/Germanic Urheimat provided scholars with an alternative
to the Berosus model and its ties to the Near East.
Both the Jordanes and the Berosus genealogies remained valid hypotheses
throughout the sixteenth century. They were not sharply delineated from each
other and could overlap: proponents of the Scandinavian vagina nationum model
also required some connection to the Noachids, though they usually chose not to
elaborate on this. Likewise, Berosus enthusiasts could be willing to accept Scandia
as an intermediary waypoint, where some of Tuiscon’s descendants settled after
their migration from the Near East before continuing to spread to other lands.
Compared to Jordanes, Berosus possessed the advantage of being easier to com-
bine with Tacitus and the indigenae motif. However, the veracity of the text itself was
increasingly questioned and by the end of the sixteenth century, the vast majority of
scholars had realised that Annius’s Berosus was nothing but a forgery. Wolfgang
and writes that the Germani, in search of a new land and abode, reached this country after going
astray on the shores of the ocean in a long and varied journey.” Later, he elaborates: “Concerning
Germany, Cornelius Tacitus left a testimony that the Germani had been indigenous, had not inter-
mingled with other people through immigration or intercourse, and had arrived by sea rather than
land” (Huldericus Mutius, De Germanorum prima origine, moribus, institutis, legibus & memorabilibus
pace & bello gestis omnibus […] [Basle: Henricus Petrus, 1539], 1, 5). Mutius tries to be as subtle as
possible in his alteration, using vocabulary found in chapter 2 of the Germania, but inverts the mean-
ing entirely. See Gotthelf, Altertum, 18–19. Such straightforward attempts to rewrite Tacitus were,
however, rare in the early modern period, since scholars could be expected to know the true wording
of the Germania very well.
26 Bieder, Geschichte, 33.
27 Iord. Get. IV, 25: Ex hac igitur Scandza insula quasi officina gentium aut certe velut vagina natio-
num cum rege suo nomine Berig Gothi quondam memorantur egressi.
28 Paul. Diac., Hist. Lang. I, 1.
76 Stefan Donecker
Lazius’s 1557 De gentium aliquot migrationibus was one of the last major treatises on
Germanic antiquity that relied heavily on Pseudo-Berosus.29 But Jordanes was unable
to fill the gap which the removal of Pseudo-Berosus left entirely, at least among schol-
ars in the Holy Roman Empire. The vagina nationum motif became extremely influen-
tial in Scandinavia, where it formed the core of Swedish Gothicism, the quasi-official
historical doctrine that underpinned Sweden’s great power ambitions in the seven-
teenth century.30 German scholars, on the other hand, remained somewhat suspicious,
since they were unwilling to discard the Tacitean ideal of autochthony for a model
that located Germanic origins in a foreign land. Philipp Clüver, the leading authority
on Germanic antiquity in the early seventeenth century, disapproved of “writers of this
era” who “have the urge to deduce unknown tribes from the uttermost North, and
to devise the most wondrous tales about their migrations, such as the ones con-
tained in the books by Diaconus on the Langobards, or Jordanes on the Goths.”31
In summary, both Berosus and Jordanes offered German scholars useful options to
locate the spatial origins of their purported ancestors, though neither of the two hy-
potheses remained unchallenged. Scholars who came to distrust Berosus’s authenticity
and felt uncomfortable with Jordanes’s vagina nationum hypothesis due to its “foreign”
Swedish connotations could always fall back on Tacitus. The simple Germani sunt indi-
genae dictum remained valid when more complex genealogies became difficult to
maintain. But the lasting importance of the Berosus- and Jordanes-pattern genealogies
of the early modern era must not be underestimated: they refined the perception of
Germanic ancestry and added a spatial dimension by locating the origins of the
Germani either in the Near East or the far North. As such, they set the stage for the
great nineteenth- and twentieth-century controversies on the origins of European civi-
lization, epitomized by the catchphrases ex oriente lux versus ex septentrione lux.32
29 Wolfgang Lazius, De gentium aliquot migrationibus […] (Basle: Oporinus, 1557), in particular
16–17.
30 On Swedish Gothicism, see Ralph Tuchtenhagen, “Unter Goten und Atlantikern: Der schwedi-
sche Anspruch auf einen Platz in der europäischen Staatenwelt der Frühen Neuzeit,” in
Abstammungsmythen und Völkergenealogien im frühneuzeitlichen Ostseeraum, edited by Stefan
Donecker (Greifswald: Univ. Greifswald, 2020): 131–51, and Kristoffer Neville, “Gothicism and Early
Modern Historical Ethnography,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 213–34; Inken Schmidt-
Voges, De antiqua claritate et clara antiquitate Gothorum: Gotizismus als Identitätsmodell im
frühneuzeitlichen Schweden (Frankfurt: Lang, 2004); Josef Svennung, Zur Geschichte des Goticismus
(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967).
31 Philippus Clüverus, Germaniae antiquae libri tres (Leiden: Elzevir, 1616), III, 102: Verum com-
mune hoc esse video omnibus istius sæculi scriptoribus, genteis sibi ignotas, ab ultimo usque septem-
trione deducere, mirificasque circamigrationes earum effingere fabulas: quarum Diaconi de
Langobardis, & Iornandis de Gothis libri sunt pleni.
32 Ingo Wiwjorra, “’Ex oriente lux’ – ‚Ex septentrione lux’: Über den Widerstreit zweier
Identitätsmythen,” in Prähistorie und Nationalsozialismus: Die mittel- und osteuropäische Ur- und
Frühgeschichtsforschung in den Jahren 1933–1945, edited by Achim Leube (Heidelberg: Synchron,
2002).
Classifying the Germanic: The Implications

of Ethnonyms
Returning to the passage from Heinrich Bebel’s 1509 treatise which was quoted at
the beginning, the necessity of a nuanced use of ethnonyms becomes evident.
Tacitus had provided German humanists with the source material needed for the
deceptively simple equation of ancient Germanic barbarians and contemporary
Germans. Historiographers focused on the term Germani, but they still needed to
accommodate other ethnonyms, some of which had, in fact, been far more preva-
lent in Greco-Roman literature than the term Germani itself. If Franci, Gothi,
Vandali, Scoti, Saxones, Hunni and many others were to be understood as part of
the Germanic past, as Bebel and most of his contemporaries assumed, it was neces-
sary to determine how these ethnonyms were related to the superordinate category
of Germani.
The easiest and most frequently employed option was to classify these ethnonyms
as tribal subdivisions of the Germani.33 Tacitus and Pliny the Elder had suggested such
a model, by subdividing the Germani into different gentes or nationes. Occasionally, an
intermediary category was used (labelled as genus by Pliny), designating groups such
as the Irminones, Istvaeones, Ingaevones, Bastarnae, Vandili and Suebi which consisted
of several individual gentes.34
Similar models were employed by early modern scholars in their attempts to struc-
ture Germanic ethnicity. Despite occasional attempts to develop a precise terminology
for different layers of ethnic cohesion,35 few scholars were willing to elaborate on the
exact relationship between Germani as an umbrella term and the constituent gentes.36
33 In his Germania generalis, Conrad Celtis mentions “innumerable tribes of Germanic blood” and
assigns attributes to some of them, such as the “feral” Cauci and the “bibulous” Sicambri. See Conrad
Celtis, “De situ et moribus Germanie additiones,” in Die “Germania generalis” des Conrad Celtis:
Studien mit Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar, edited by Gernot Michael Müller (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 2001), 104.
34 See, for example, Tac. Germ. 38: Nunc de Suebis dicendum est, quorum non una, ut Chattorum
Tencterorumque, gens; maiorem enim Germaniae partem obtinent, propriis adhuc nationibus nominibus-
que discreti, quamquam in commune Suebi vocentur.
35 A notable example is Philipp Clüver, the preeminent specialist on Germanic antiquities in the
early seventeenth century, who employed gens as a superordinate category, denoting a group of
people who share the same language (lingua). Each gens consists of several nationes, identified by
their specific dialects (dialectus). See George J. Metcalf, “Philipp Clüver and his ‘lingva Celtica’,”
Deutsche Beiträge zur geistigen Überlieferung 7 (1972): 92–93.
36 Cf. Harald Bollbuck, “Die Erfahrung der Peripherie: Antikenreferenz und empirisches Wissen in
der norddeutschen Geschichtsschreibung des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Historiographie des
Humanismus: Literarische Verfahren, soziale Praxis, geschichtliche Räume, edited by Johannes
Helmrath, Stefan Schlelein and Albert Schirrmeister (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 285.
78 Stefan Donecker
The most common model perceived Gothi, Vandali and similar entities as kin groups
united by blood ties. They were regarded as branches of the Germanic genealogical
tree; often, an individual progenitor was identified as the founder of the bloodline.
This model of biological kinship was so widely employed that many scholars took it for
granted and did not consider it necessary to elaborate on it any further.
Early modern approaches to Germanic ethnicity, however, were not limited to
the common assumption of blood ties. An alternative interpretation, suggested, for
example, by Johannes Aventinus,37 assumed that the putative ethnonyms did not
necessarily designate groups of common descent, but could rather indicate particu-
lar qualities or traits:
It needs to be noted, that these names, Scythae, Cimbri, Getae, Daci, Dani are not names of
particular people, but common terms for warriors, such as Schweizer or Landsknecht in our
times. We are called Scythians because the old Germans could shoot well with their bows,
Goths because they were good and virtuous, Cimbrians due to their warlike, manly bravery, as
the common saying expresses nowadays: you are a good old warrior, or Kemper in the
Saxonian language.38
A very similar explanation for the Vandal ethnonym was proposed by Hugo Grotius
more than a century later: “Why did some receive this, the others that name?” Grotius
asked. “All those who know the German language understand that [the Vandal ethno-
nym] signifies that they did not inhabit a particular territory, but wandered sometimes
here and sometimes there.”39 The phonetic similarity between Vandali and wandeln,
“to wander”, prompted Grotius to perceive the Vandals as peripatetic vagabonds.
This onomastic technique could be combined with the assumption of biological
ties. In such a model, a particular kin-group (within the wider framework of the
Germanic genealogical tree) would display particular traits, virtues or weaknesses
which determined its name—an approach similar to Jordanes’s explanation of the
Gepid ethnonym, which supposedly derived from gepanta, “slow and stolid”, and in-
dicated that they were an offshoot of the Goths known for being particularly
37 Hirschi, Wettkampf, 332–33; Tiedemann, “Tacitus,” 39.

38 Johann Aventinus, “Chronica von Ursprung, Herkomen und Taten der uralten Teutschen,” in
Johannes Turmair’s, genannt Aventinus, Sämmtliche Werke. Erster Band, edited by Sigmund Riezler
and Matthias Lexer (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1880–81), 339: Das ist auch zu vermerken, das diese
namen Scythae, Cimbri, Getae, Daci, Dani nicht eigne namen eins volks seind, sonder gemeine kriegs-
namen, als zu unsern zeiten die Schweizer und landsknecht. Scytae heissen wir, das die alten
Teutschen wol mit dem bogen haben schiessen können; Gothi aber von der güte und tugent; Cimbri
von der kriegparn, mennlichen tapferkeit, wie dann noch ein gemein sprichwort bei uns gêt: du bist
ein guter alter kempfer oder kemper auf sachsisch sprach [Author’s translation].
39 Hugo Grotius, “Prolegomena,” in Historia Gotthorum, Vandalorum & Langobardorum, edited
by Hugo Grotius (Amsterdam: Elezevir, 1655), 24: Cur autem alii hoc, alii illo nomine, id censeo
fortuitium, prout visum est populis quos attigerant. nam voce & hac & illa eos significari qui non
certis se tenent sedibus, sed nunc hun nunc iluc ambulant, novere omnes qui Germanicum
sermonem.
sluggish.40 But alternatively, such names could be detached from biological kinship:
in the previously mentioned statement, Aventinus seems to imply that “Scythians”
are not to be understood as a particular Germanic tribe known for its shooting skills,
their name instead being an honorific for any Germanic warriors that excelled in
shooting—or an epithet for the Germanic tribes in their entirety, which emphasised
their aptitude for archery.
Among early modern scholars, the early eighteenth-century jurist and historiogra-
pher Johann Ehrenfried Zschackwitz advocated the most radical re-evaluation of al-
leged ethnic blood ties. Zschackwitz acknowledged that the ancient Germani were
divided into different branches (Völcker), which, in turn, consisted of various minor
tribes (Völckerschafften).41 But Zschackwitz advised his fellow historiographers to be
cautious, since not all of the barbarian groups labelled with ethnonyms in Roman
sources proved, at closer scrutiny, to be Völcker in the sense of generation-spanning
kin-groups. Oftentimes, these alleged tribes turned out to be merely warbands, led by
a “prince or another leader of exceptional bravery, who found his native land too nar-
row for his ambitions or, being the youngest, could not have a dominion for himself”
and gathered “a group of good, warlike and bloodthirsty men” to “make their fortune
in the Roman State”.42 Such warlords and their retinues attracted additional followers
on the move, and their incursions were misunderstood as tribal migrations by Roman
writers. Zschackwitz dismissed the idea of Völcker-Wanderungen, collective migrations
of entire kin-groups with their families and livestock, as “a very erroneous delusion
and an utterly false notion”.43 His harsh criticism of previous scholarship serves as a
reminder that early modern intellectuals were fully capable of thinking beyond kin-
ship categories in their efforts to classify the Germanic.
Delineating the Germanic: The Germans

and their Neighbours
Returning, for the third and final time, to Bebel and his line-up of barbarians, the
most obvious difference from modern concepts of the “Germanic” remains to be
40 Iord. Get. XVII, 95.

41 Johann Ehrenfried Zschackwitz, Erläuterte Teutsche Alterthümer […] (Frankfurt: 1743), 18–19.
42 Johann Ehrenfried Zschackwitz, Einleitung zu denen vornehmsten Rechts-Ansprüchen, Derer
Gecrönten Hohen Häupter und anderer Souverainen in Europa […] (Frankfurt: Jungnicol, 1734–35), II,
349: […] also sind auch solche in der That nichts anders, als grosse Krieges-Züge gewesen, indem ein
Printz, oder ein anderer, mit sonderbarer Tapfferkeit begabter Fürst, deme sein Vaterland entweder zu
enge war, oder, der als der jüngste, keine Regierung haben kunte, mit einer Menge guter, Hand-fester und
Blut-begieriger Leute fortgegangen, um in dem Römischen Staate […] sein Glück zu suchen, und allda
einen neuen Staat anzulegen [Author’s translation].
43 Zschackwitz, Einleitung, II, 211: […] in einem sehr irrigen Wahn und ertzfalschen Begriffe.
80 Stefan Donecker
discussed. It is evident that Bebel had a broadly encompassing view of the

Germanic that seems unusual to present-day readers. Huns, Scots and Picts would
hardly appear listed as “Germanic” in a modern textbook.
Yet among scholars of Bebel’s generation, almost any barbarian tribe could be
subsumed under the term “Germanic”. In the following decades, a tripartite distinc-
tion between the Celtic, the Germanic and the Slavonic that mirrored the Roman eth-
nographic categories of Celtae, Germani and Scythae slowly began to emerge, but this
differentiation was fully completed no earlier than the late eighteenth century.
The eastern boundary of the Germanic—i. e., the demarcation vis-à-vis the
Slavonic—proved easier to establish, and was delineated already during the six-
teenth century. Albert Krantz, one of the most influential exponents of humanism
in northern Germany,44 sparked a scholarly debate by asserting that the Vandals
(Vandali) and the Wends (Venedi) had been essentially the same nation.45 This hy-
pothesis, based on the similar ethnonyms and a shared association with the south-
ern Baltic littoral, had already been proposed during the Middle Ages,46 but Krantz’
Wandalia (1519) made it known throughout the Republic of Letters.47 During the fol-
lowing decades, however, the vast majority of scholars came to disagree, regarding
Vandals and Wends as fundamentally different. Their difference was expressed by
defining two opposed ethnic categories, the Germanic and the Slavonic/Sarmatian,
and assigning the Vandals to the former and the Wends to the latter.
This process, however, must not be seen as an exclusively German attempt to dis-
tance themselves from a supposedly inferior Other in the East. Interestingly enough,
the strongest rebuttal of Krantz was formulated by a Polish scholar, the historiogra-
pher, royal secretary and Prince-Bishop of Ermland, Martin Cromer, in 1555.48 Cromer
promoted the idea that the ancient Sarmatians were the ancestors of the Polish
44 Harald Bollbuck, “Urgeschichte als Identitätsmodell: Albert Krantz’ Wandalia,” in Geschichte schrei-
ben: Ein Quellen- und Studienhandbuch zur Historiografie (ca. 1350–1750), edited by Susanne Rau and
Birgit Studt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010); Ulrich Andermann, Albert Krantz: Wissenschaft und
Historiographie um 1500 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999).
45 Albertus Krantz, Wandalia in qua de Wandalorum populis, et eorum patrio solo, ac in Italiam,
Galliam, Hispanias, Aphricam, et Dalmatiam, migratione […] (Cologne: Heil, 1519), fol. a2r–a3v. See
Roland Steinacher, Die Vandalen: Aufstieg und Fall eines Barbarenreiches (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2016),
346; Steinacher, “Vandalen im frühneuzeitlichen Ostseeraum: Beobachtungen zur Rezeption antiker
ethnischer Identitäten im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Die Geschichte der Antike aktuell: Methoden,
Ergebnisse und Rezeption, edited by Karl Strobel (Klagenfurt: Mohorjeva-Hermagoras, 2005), 280–87.
46 Roland Steinacher, “Wenden, Slawen, Vandalen: Eine frühmittelalterliche pseudologische
Gleichsetzung und ihre Nachwirkungen,” in Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen: Von der Bedeutung des
frühen Mittelalters, edited by Walter Pohl (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW, 2004), 331–48.
47 Krantz’ reasoning was far from unusual among humanists of his generation. Aventin and
Irenicus also tended to incorporate Slavonic-speaking groups such as the Wends or Poles into their
concept of the Germanic. See Tiedemann, “Tacitus,” 53; Gotthelf, Altertum, 38.
48 Martinus Cromerus, De origine et rebus gestis Polonorum libri XXX (Basle: Oporinus, 1555).
Steinacher, Vandalen, 347; Steinacher, “Vandalen im Ostseeraum,” 290–92.
nation, an idea matching German scholars’ insistence on a Germanic heritage. This

so-called Sarmatism dominated Polish historiography and the self-perception of the
rzeczpospolita throughout the early modern period.49 Cromer interpreted Krantz’
equation of Vandals and Wends as an attempt to Germanise the Wends and, implic-
itly, the Poles as well. His Polish patriotism required a clear demarcation; accordingly,
he took great efforts to refute Krantz and succeeded in doing so.50 The distinction be-
tween Vandals and Wends became generally accepted and expanded into a general
distinction between the Sarmatian/Slavonic and the Germanic. In the seventeenth
century, attempts to challenge the boundary between the two ethnic categories were
few and far between.
The western boundary between the Germanic and the Celtic remained nebulous
and fluid for far longer. Given that many of the golden generation of German human-
ists who first popularised Tacitus came from Alsace and the Rhine and had a distinct
anti-French stance to their patriotism,51 this seems surprising, at first glance. But in
the sixteenth century, the Celts were, at the most, vaguely associated with, but cer-
tainly not yet firmly linked to the French.52
Unclaimed by any of the major historiographical traditions of sixteenth-
century humanism, the Celts remained available to be incorporated into the
Germanic.53 Thus, Conrad Celtis envisioned the Druids as the cultural and spiri-
tual leaders of the Germanic tribes,54 dismissing Caesar’s explicit statement that
49 Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Frühneuzeitliche Nationen im östlichen Europa: Das polnische Geschichtsdenken

und die Reichweite einer humanistischen Nationalgeschichte (1500–1700) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
2006); Norbert Kersken, “Geschichtsbild und Adelsrepublik: Zur Sarmatentheorie in der polnischen
Geschichtsschreibung der frühen Neuzeit,” Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas 52 (2004), 235–60.
50 Cromerus, De origine Polonorum, 7–13.
51 Bieder, Geschichte, 27; Riess, “Motive,” 21–31.
52 Unlike Celtae, the term Galli had a more straightforward French connotation. In early modern
Latin, Gallus was the standard term for a Frenchman. When Erasmus of Rotterdam devised the label
Gallo-Germania for the Netherlands, Heinrich Bebel firmly rejected the possibility of a shared Gallic-
Germanic past and, with a certain indignation, demanded a decision on Erasmus’s part: aut Gallus, aut
Germanus. See Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, edited by P. S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon,
1906–58), II, 46, as well as Herfried Münkler, “Nationale Mythen im Europa der frühen Neuzeit: Zur
Relevanz mythischer Narrationen bei der Nationalisierung Europas,” Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus 1
(1997): 111–12. But the opposition was not absolute: as several of the examples in the following para-
graphs show, even the Galli could be incorporated into the Germanic past—though not as often and as
easily as the comparatively nondescript Celtae.
53 In addition to the scholars quoted in the following, Franciscus Irenicus, Aegidius Tschudi and
Sebastian Franck also asserted a shared Celtic/Germanic past. Beatus Rhenanus, who insisted on a
distinction between Celtic and Germanic tribes, advocated a minority opinion among his
contemporaries. Hirschi, Wettkampf, 332–33; Riess, “Motive,” 6–7; Tiedemann, “Tacitus,” XXV,
XXXII–XXXIII, 50–52.
54 E. g. Celtis, “Additiones,” 102; Conrad Celtis, Quatuor libri amorum secundum quatuor latera
Germanie (Nürnberg: Sodalitas Celtica, 1502), fol. 36v. In a similar vein, Aventinus, “Chronica,” 366,
82 Stefan Donecker
asserted the contrary.55 In the Baierische Chronik, written in the late 1520s or early
1530s and published posthumously in 1556, Johannes Aventinus argued that
Celtae was merely an older term that preceded Germani, but referred to the same
ethnic entity: “Whenever you read of Celtae, Galli or Galatae among the old Greek
and Latin writers, that is, before the Roman Empire, you have to comprehend that
Germans are meant.”56 Authors who believed that the Galli had been French were,
in Aventinus’s opinion, gravely mistaken. In his view, even the Epistle to the
Galatians had in truth been addressed to the Germans, whom Saint Paul had con-
verted to Christianity.57
In the early seventeenth century, the theory of a shared Germanic-Celtic past
was confirmed.58 In his 1616 treatise Germania antiqua, Philipp Clüver, a historiog-
rapher and geographer based in Leiden and widely considered the foremost expert
on ancient Germanic history among the scholars of his age,59 depicted Germani and
Galli as unius uteri fratres, brothers from the same womb. Together with the
Hispani, Britanni and Illyrii, they belonged to the gens Celtica, the offspring of
Noah’s son Ashkenaz, also known to posterity as Celta. Their consanguinity is also
apparent from their language, since the Gallic and Germanic tongues were, accord-
ing to Clüver, merely dialectal variations of the lingua Celtica.60 Clüver’s authority
ensured that Germanic and Celtic antiquity remained indivisible well into the eigh-
teenth century.
James Macpherson’s collections of Gaelic poems, allegedly composed by the bard
Ossian and published between 1760 and 1763, met with great acclaim among
European men of letters.61 Often simplified and reduced to melancholic moods and
portrayed the druids as “the monks, prophets and teachers of the old Germans” (der alten
Teutschen münch, propheten und doctores). The idea of “Germanic druids” remained firmly entrenched
among early modern German men of letters and found its most intriguing expression in Daniel Casper
von Lohenstein’s historical novel Großmüthiger Feldherr Arminius (1689/90): There, Bards and Druids
are depicted as two competing faction of Germanic priests whose opposition prefigures the conflict be-
tween Protestants and Catholics. See Hirschi, Wettkampf, 348–56; Gotthelf, Altertum, 12, 65–66.
55 Caes. B Gall. 6,21.
56 Johann Aventinus, “Bayerische Chronik,” in Johannes Turmair’s, genannt Aventinus, Sämmtliche
Werke. Vierter Band, edited by Matthias Lexer (Munich: Christian Kaiser, 1882–83), I, 205: Darumb, wo
man bei den gar alten Kriechen und Lateinern nemlich vor dem römischen kaisertum, Celtae Galli Galatae
liest, mues mans alweg für die Teutschen nemen. Solchs hat nit gewist, der den Titium Livium teutscht hat,
nimbt für Gallen Franzosen, so es Teutsch gewesen sein [Author’s translation].
57 Aventinus, “Bayerische Chronik,” II, 780.
58 Christopher B. Krebs, “‘… jhre alte Muttersprache … unvermengt und unverdorben’: Zur
Rezeption der taciteischen Germania im 17. Jahrhundert,” Philologus 154 (2010): 123–24; Metcalf,
“Clüver”; Bieder, Geschichte, 78–79.
59 See Krebs, “Muttersprache,” 121–25.
60 Clüverus, Germania antiqua, I, 37, 48–49, 76.
61 For an overview of recent Ossianic scholarship, see Sebastian Mitchell, “Ossian: Past, Present
and Future,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 39 (2016): 163–68.
misty landscapes, Ossianic poetry made sure that the “Celtic” did, for the first time,
become a household word all over the continent. German men of letters were quick
to revisit the highly prestigious Celtic past and to assert it as part of their proto-
national self-perception.
Modern researchers have insinuated that German and Scandinavian poets and
artists ignored or misunderstood Ossian’s Celtic nature when they tried to turn him
into a Germanic figure,62 but such an interpretation is thoroughly misleading. A di-
viding line between the Celtic and the Germanic had not yet been established, subse-
quently there was no distinction to be ignored. In his influential ode Der Hügel und
der Hain (1767), Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock recalled the bards that once had sung to
his fatherland and bemoaned the downfall of “the old Celtic tongue”, portraying the
Germanic past with Ossianic imagery.63 But by doing so, Klopstock did not want only
usurp a neighboring tradition. On the contrary, he remained faithful to the time-
honoured concept of a shared Germanic/Celtic past that had been developed by
Celtis, Aventinus, Clüver and other scholars of the preceding centuries.64
Ossianism marked the peak of the Germanic/Celtic synthesis, but it also induced
the eventual separation of the two ethnonyms.65 Johann Gottfried Herder had since
the 1770s been highly interested in Macpherson’s publications and their translation
to German. In 1796 he stated: “They confound us with the Gaels, they demand an
Ossian from us. There have never been two nations more different than these two,
which is why they have always been hostile to each other. The Gael sang of his soft,
melancholic sentiments, the Northman sang through his deeds.”66 As the emerging
German national movement began to conceive of the Germanic past as inherently
martial, it felt the need to distance itself from Ossianic emotionalism and, accord-
ingly, to demarcate the Germanic from the Celtic.
62 Cf. Henry Okun, “Ossian in Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967):
339.
63 Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, “Der Hügel und der Hain,” in Sammlung der poetischen und prosai-
schen Schriften der schönen Geister in Teutschland: Enthaltend Klopstoks Oden (Reuttlingen:
Fleischhauer, 1777), 266–77, at 266–67: Laß mich weinen, Schatten! / Laß die goldne Leyer schwei-
gen! Auch meinem Vaterlande sangen Barden, / Und ach! ihr Gesang ist nicht mehr! […] Und in öden
dunkeln Trümmern / Der alten Celtensprache, / Seufzen nur einige seiner leisen Laute, / Wie um
Gräber Todesstimmen seufzen. See also Sandro Jung, “The Reception and Reworking of Ossian in
Klopstock’s Hermanns Schlacht,” in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill
(London: Continuum, 2004), on Ossianic influences in other parts of Klopstock’s oeuvre.
64 Cf. Klaus von See, Deutsche Germanen-Ideologie. Vom Humanismus bis zur Gegenwart
(Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1970), 18.
65 von See, Germanen-Ideologie, 30–35.
66 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Iduna, oder der Apfel der Verjüngung,” in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s
sämmtliche Werke: Zur schönen Literatur und Kunst. Achtzehnter Teil, edited by Johann Georg Müller
(Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta, 1830), 126: Man vermischt uns mit Galen; man fordert einen Ossian von
uns. Nie gab es zwei verschiedenere Völkerstämme als diese beiden; sie sind daher auch jederzeit gegen
einander gewesen. Der Gale sang weiche, traurige Empfindungen; der Normann sang Thaten.
84 Stefan Donecker
Conclusion
Once Tacitus’s Germania had been rediscovered, German humanists were quick to
stake their claim to the Germanic past as part of their own history. The basic assump-
tion of an unbroken genealogical continuity between ancient Germanic tribes and con-
temporary Germans was soon unequivocally accepted, but many important details
remained contested: the Tacitean dictum of Germanic autochthony had to be recon-
ciled with the Bible, Berosus was pitted against Jordanes in a search for spatial origins
in the Near East or the far North. Differing ethnonyms demanded an explanation, and
boundaries between the Germans’ alleged forefathers and their neighbours to the East
and West had to be carefully negotiated.
Only the rise of “Indo-Germanic” studies in the nineteenth century, which soon
established itself as the predominant academic discipline for the study of Germanic
antiquities, put an end to most of these debates. Once language was unequivocally
accepted as the key feature that defined ethnicity, both the boundaries between the
Germanic and the Slavonic as well as the Germanic and the Celtic became firmly en-
trenched. Quests for a Germanic Urheimat continued under entirely new paradigms
of scholarship. Compared to the contested notions of the Germanic formulated be-
tween 1500 and 1800, the nineteenth century established a monumental image of the
German(ic) past that was far more coherent and consistent, and much better suited
for political use and abuse.
During the last decades, historians have taken great efforts to deconstruct this
grand narrative of immutable Germanness. Stressing the polyethnic character of bar-
barian gentes, the fluid and situational nature of ethnicity and the overlapping layers
of social cohesion in antiquity, researchers have convincingly shown that the
“Germanic” was by no means the stable constant that nineteenth- and early twenti-
eth-century scholars had envisioned. And modern academics might find unexpected
associates in their ongoing efforts to interrogate the “Germanic”: early modern schol-
ars—whose image of the Germani appears, in retrospect, as contested, ambiguous,
and devoid of clear demarcations—might turn out to be closer to our present-day un-
derstanding of the Germanic than that of their nineteenth-century colleagues.
Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European

Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme (IEF 332011:
“The ‘Germanic Völkerwanderung’ in Early Modern Thought. Origins and Developments
of a Historiographical Master Narrative, 1500–1830”). The Eberhard Karls University of
Tübingen kindly enabled me to complete the paper as a fellow at the Center for
Advanced Studies “Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle
Ages”. I would also like to express my gratitude to my truly inspirational and wonderful
colleagues, both in the Tübingen research group and at the Austrian Academy of
Sciences’ Institute for Medieval Research!
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Cătălin Țăranu
The Balloon that Wouldn’t Burst:
A Genealogy of ‘Germanic’
The May 2016 conference in York from which the present volume grew had
achieved something momentous even before it started. It faced a number of academ-
ics working on all things Germanic from various perspectives (archaeology, linguis-
tics, philology, legal history etc.) with the fact that whenever two scholars say
‘Germanic’, the thing to which they refer is always different. This is not just an effect
of disciplinary boundaries and of the trend towards increasing specialization. In my
experience (at least with the area of research I am most familiar with—the study of
Germanic heroic poetry), this is true even within the same discipline, and some of
the papers in this volume confirm this intuition in other fields.1 On a very basic
level, I believe this is why scholars can never agree on what exactly ‘Germanic’
points to: it means so many things all at once.
This is the result of a slow accumulation of referents attached to the word, none of
which superseded the one it replaced, but rather accumulated in layer upon layer of
meanings (especially when the word was transferred from the context of one discipline
to that of another). It is this inflation of meanings resulting in an ultimate lack of pre-
cise meaning that makes a legal historian, an archaeologist, and a student of heroic
poetry write about ‘Germanic’ laws, brooches, or poems, and yet refer to things that
have little connection to one another. In the following, I argue that this is precisely the
reason for both the success of the term (it has a centuries-old record of use in a variety
of scholarly disciplines and public discourses) and its quasi-uselessness and even its
dangers. My contribution to this volume also seeks to provide an alternative account of
the long history of the term ‘Germanic’ and at the same time an alternative way out of
the conundrum of whether to use the word (thereby perpetuating its heavy baggage of
nationalism and chauvinism) or to refrain from using it (at the risk of having to invent
a private language that might well not be shared by any other scholar).
In doing this, I do not attempt to trace the history of the concept ‘Germanic’. This
has been done before, and much better than I could—one need look no further than
the York conference itself.2 Instead of an archaeology of the term, in the second part
of this paper I will attempt to provide a genealogy of ‘Germanic’ based on Michel
1 The papers given by James Harland, Eric Lacey, Otávio Luiz Vieira Pinto (to mention only a few)
have revealed similar disagreements within early medieval archaeology, comparative religion, and
cultural anthropology.
2 The keynote lectures given by Philipp von Rummel and Michael Kulikowski (this volume) are
outstanding examples.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-005
90 Cătălin Țăranu
Foucault’s genealogical method first deployed in Discipline and Punish.3 In a nutshell,

in this understanding, genealogy is equivalent neither to a search for origins, nor to
tracing a linear development through time. Instead it seeks to show the plural, con-
tingent, and sometimes contradictory past circumstances that made a concept or an
institution what it is, and in doing so it shows how power determines truth. A genea-
logical analysis eventually shows that all concepts and systems of thought are the
result of contingent turns of history, not the outcome of rationally inevitable trends.4
Genealogy attempts to look beyond ideologies and systems of thought for the condi-
tions of their possibility—thus, Foucault’s goal was to grasp “the conditions that
make certain thoughts and concepts acceptable at a given moment”.5
In the context of the present study, my alternative genealogy of ‘Germanic’ seeks
to disrupt and complement the usual narratives that point to a discrete event (the
Nazi takeover of Germanistik scholarship, nineteenth-century völkisch readings of
Tacitus and heroic poetry, proto-nationalistic readings of ‘Germanic antiquities’ by
early modern humanists etc.) as the origins of ‘Germanic’ or at least as the origins of
its semantic and/or ideological corruption. Rather, I am more interested in the cul-
tural, social, and political conditions that allowed for each meaning of ‘Germanic’ to
get attached to the word. Hence, I argue that one can always go back to an earlier
layer of semantic accumulation in ‘Germanic’, and yet that this type of archaeology
of meaning, although useful, has its limits when it comes to solutions to the above-
mentioned conundrum.
But before doing this, in what follows I attempt to show, by way of several ex-
amples from several different areas of research on Germanic poems, artifacts, laws
etc., the extreme fuzziness of the concept ‘Germanic’, or, in other terms, the philo-
sophical weakness that allowed it to become so easily attached to a range of refer-
ents and thus so open to confusion, a weakness stemming from its constant need to
be defined through something outside itself, whether that Other is Roman, Celtic,
feminine etc.6 In this, I aim to bypass any judgment value attached to using the
term itself. Rather, I attempt to show how successfully ‘Germanic’ (together with all
the connotations it implied in different contexts) fulfilled different cultural needs
(the desire for origins, the desire for continuity with a quasi-mythical past, the
3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, 1975).
4 “Michel Foucault,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/foucault/, accessed March 2017.
5 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer
(New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 61.
6 For ‘fuzzy concepts’, see George Lakoff, “Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of
Fuzzy Concepts,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 2 (1973), 458–508. For ‘philosophical weakness’,
see Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995. Available at: http://
www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/, accessed March 2017.
desire for the unity and homogeneity of an ethnic or social group) which made it so
popular and eventually so scientifically useless.
After 1945, a growing (though by no means universal) awareness of the prob-
lematic nature of the term ‘Germanic’ began to spread among scholars of germani-
sche Altertumskunde (Germanic antiquity), not so much because it was seen as a
faulty concept in itself, but mainly because it carried with it a heavy baggage of
nationalism and chauvinism. Usually, this took the form of lamentations for the
abusive connotations thrown upon ‘Germanic’ and all that it is taken to mean by
the Nazis. But, as Walter Goffart pointedly reminds us, to proffer the Nazi reading
of Germanic as an ‘all-purpose bogeyman’ is to obscure the long tradition of linking
this Romantic idea of the Germanic antiquity to present-day Germans that began
ever-since Tacitus’s Germania became known to humanists in the fifteenth-century:
National Socialist ideologues were petty players in a game whose stars have included the
cream of German erudition, scholars whose memory commands esteem and admiration. Far
from being a disowned side road of Nazi lunacy—how convenient to think so—the illusory con-
nection of Tacitus’s Germania with modern Germany remains fundamental to German self-
awareness.7
Not that this is a singularly German problem—different flavours of Germanentum

abound in the Anglo-Saxonism cultivated in nineteenth-century England (often in
a context of superiority to the Irish) and in the United States from the Founding
Fathers to later imperialistic ambitions.8 However extreme-sounding, Goffart’s
argument is crucial to all scholars who are serious about interrogating the
‘Germanic’: to denounce the linkage of Germanic antiquity to Nazi ideology is to miss
the much more pervasive and less blatantly chauvinistic (though no less dangerous
and fictitious) tradition of considering “Germanic antiquity as a common civilization
of those who spoke the Germanic languages, and a civilization to which they clung
tenaciously through the centuries”.9 Yet the main problems afflicting the study of
Germanic antiquities involve neither racism nor Nazism, since “attributing all effects
to a scapegoat known to be safely dead and buried means that the discipline can rest
content with its condition”.10 Rather,
the same predicaments have been present ever since Grimm created the field and endowed it
with its basic premises: a linguistically defined “Germanentum”, with poorly documented ori-
gins, that might only be illuminated, and too often was, by heroic feats of chronological and
7 Walter Goffart, “Two Notes on Germanic Antiquity Today,” Traditio 50 (1995), 9–30, here 17.
8 Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons
(Hanover, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 1982), 77–98. For American Anglo-Saxonism, see Allen
J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity,
(Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1997).
9 Eric G. Stanley, The Search for Anglo-Saxon Paganism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), 91.
10 Goffart, “Germanic Antiquity Today,” 18.
onomastic manipulation. The idea that the defects of “germanische Altertumskunde” stem
from something as recent and reprehensible as Nazism is wishful thinking.11
The examples I offer below prove that Goffart’s warning is as relevant as it was
twenty years ago, since much recent scholarship (especially literary and legal)
seems little inclined to question its use of what I would call the ‘Germanic para-
digm’, implying on the one hand the continuity of Germanic features of law, ethos,
political organization, literary tastes from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and some
cases even beyond, and on the other hand, the essential unity of such features
across a poorly-defined Germanic ethnic, cultural, or political space, at least in late
Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
I start with the area of research most familiar to me: the study of ‘Germanic heroic
poetry’. This is a label that scholars of medieval literature and history, the media, and
the general public apply to an array of texts that have little in common with each
other. Everything from the stinging Latinate satire of the Carolingian Waltharius to the
dramatic French-inspired romance of the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, going
through the epic sombreness of Beowulf and the earthy provinciality of the Icelandic
sagas, has been labelled ‘Germanic heroic’, for the reasons that they are written in
Germanic languages and feature men fighting. Previous scholarship often frames
these texts in models based on these two terms, but little has been said about the
heavy baggage of masculinism and nationalism that the very concepts ‘Germanic’ and
‘heroic’ carry together and about their linkage in the popular imaginary in the figure
of the ‘Germanic warrior’ (on which more below). While scholars still use these terms
nowadays, no one even attempts to define them, treating it as either an ahistorical no-
tion which presumably refers to something everyone agrees upon, or as an outdated
but heuristically useful concept that we do our job with.
The majority of scholars take ‘Germanic’ as a datum, and project upon it the
image which they need to prove their point. Using Karl Popper’s terms, it is one of
the battles of the war waged across the humanities and social sciences between
methodological essentialism and methodological nominalism.12 In the present case,
essentialism would correspond to the uncritically perpetuated assumption that
there is such a thing as ‘Germanic’. But the great trap of essentialism, as Popper
warns us, is that even though it may have been introduced on the reasonable
ground that it enables us to detect an identity in things that change, it ends up by
being arbitrarily defined according to pre-existent ideas of what these essences
might be. As in some of the following cases, the arguments using ‘Germanic’ in an
essentialist way are circular: the Germanics (as I call what the older Germanistik
scholarship called die Germanen, the mythical early Germans, underlining the arti-
ficiality and the constructedness of the concept) are described as the ones who sing
11 Ibid.
12 Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 26–34.
Germanic poems, make Germanic laws, dress Germanically, think Germanically. When
the Germanic poetry, law, custom, weaponry have to be defined, they are abstractions
drawn from individual cases wrenched from a variety of very different cultural, political,
material contexts and juxtaposed to make up corpora of evidence defined as ‘Germanic’
from the outset.
One influential example is The Camden House History of German Literature series,
of which German Literature of the Early Middle Ages, edited by Brian Murdoch is
the second volume. As can be seen from the title of this collection, its contributors
often skip the ‘Germanic’ used in such cases and go straight for ‘German’.13 Thus, an
assortment of topics as varied as Otfrid of Weissenburg, Latin writing in the Frankish
world, charms, and heroic verse are labelled as ‘early German’, even when they are
about Anglo-Saxon, West Frankish, or Scandinavian material. That this is not a lapsus
calami but part of the same old programme of Germanic continuity with the modern
Germans (albeit implicit and probably considered as self-evident by its authors), be-
comes evident when looking at the first volume of above-mentioned Camden House
series, edited by Brian Murdoch and Malcolm Read, entitled Early Germanic Literature
and Culture. The usual identification of all things Gothic, Frankish, Scandinavian etc.
as ‘Germanic’ is put forward in visual form on the cover, which features one of the
Gallehus Horns juxtaposed over a fragment of Ulfila’s Bible.
It is true that the introduction provides all the perfunctory warning-labels—for
instance:
we may speak of a pre-Christian Germanic religion […], but must remain aware that much of
the material is known to us from relatively late or outside sources, and that even archeologi-
cally we cannot gauge to any real extent the beliefs of the Germanic group, if indeed there was
a coherence to that set of customs at all.14
Yet it still programmatically perpetuates the oft-rehearsed story of the tribes of the
Völkerwanderung, rolling across Europe like billiard balls, and of the essential (linguis-
tic, cultural, and genetic) continuity of the late antique Germani with modern day
Germans—its stated mission is “to provide some insights into aspects of the culture of
the Germanic world from which German literature in the modern sense originated”.15
The first chapter, ‘The Concept of Germanic Antiquity’, which lays the concep-
tual framework on which the entire volume is based, contains a useful short sum-
mary of the history of the literature on ‘Germanic antiquity’ (from Grimm through
Kossinna to Hoops) that is balanced and competent but eerily untroubled by the
13 Brian Murdoch, ed., German Literature in the Middle Ages, The Camden House History of
German Literature 2 (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2004).
14 Brian Murdoch and Malcolm Read, eds., Early Germanic Literature and Culture, The Camden
House History of German Literature 1 (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2004), 16.
15 Murdoch and Read, Early Germanic Literature and Culture, 1.
politics entwined at every point with the scholarship.16 At the end, its author,
Heinrich Beck, acknowledges the problematic nature of the concept (the ‘burden’, as
he puts it), but asks rhetorically “what concept might serve in today’s view to cover
the representation of central and northern European history in the period of the last
millennium BC and the first millennium AD?”17 Indeed, he serenely reports that
Renaissance humanism led to a conscious nationalism in which the Germani rose to become a
unique source of popular Germanic thought and culminated in the formula: Germanic equals
German. The continued existence of this equation in subsequent centuries, down to the pres-
ent, represents an important and much debated topic of recent German intellectual history.18
That this view is not seen as something in need of critique can be seen not only from
Beck’s chapter, but also from the frequency of using ‘Germanic’ and ‘German’ inter-
changeably (with the exception of the linguistic aspects) throughout the volume, and
especially in volume 2 discussed above.
Another one of Brian Murdoch’s projects (Murdoch himself being only one repre-
sentative of a widely-held view), The Germanic Hero: Politics and Pragmatism in Early
Medieval Poetry, is a comparative study throwing together a wide range of heroic nar-
ratives Old and Middle High German, Old English, Old Norse, and even the Latin
Waltharius and the Old French Song of Roland.19 What one review justly qualifies as
‘startling juxtapositions’ between, for instance, Beowulf and the twelfth-century
Herzog Ernst and the thirteenth-century Heinrich von Kempten constitute much of this
book’s popular appeal, but it sacrifices all notions of cultural context to a generalist
comparative approach.20
Michael Speidel’s Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s
Column to Icelandic Sagas takes a similarly wide and carelessly (but excitingly)
comparative road. Speidel’s chapters bear titles such as ‘Wolves’, ‘Bears’, ‘Naked
berserkers’, ‘Lancers’, and each of them brings together a plethora of visual repre-
sentations of ‘Germanic warriors’ in each category from artefacts as different as
fourteenth-century helmets and second-century Roman bas-reliefs.21 Speidel implic-
itly (and often explicitly) derives the direct evolution of representations of bear-like
warriors (only the ‘Germanic’ ones are selected, although occasional mention is
made of similar representations in cultures all over the world) from Indo-European
16 Heinrich Beck, “The Concept of Germanic Antiquity,” in Murdoch and Read, Early Germanic
Literature and Culture, 25–38.
17 Beck, “Concept of Germanic Antiquity,” 36.
18 Ibid., 25–26.
19 Brian Murdoch, The Germanic Hero: Politics and Pragmatism in Early Medieval Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996).
20 Randi Eldevik, “Review of Brian Murdoch, The Germanic Hero: Politics and Pragmatism in Early
Medieval Poetry,” Speculum 72 (1997), 1201–3, here 1201.
21 Michael Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic
Sagas (London: Routledge, 2004).
times through the bas-reliefs on Trajan’s Column to thirteenth-century Scandinavian

rune-stones. Everything remotely similar to Speidel’s ideas of ‘Germanic warrior’ is in-
cluded, so that even the Roman emperor Julian is said to have taken on ‘the berserk
warrior spirit’ since he ‘wore no cuirass when he rode into the Persian ranks during
the ill-fated retreat from Ktesiphon in AD 363’.22 The essentialist idea of the
‘Germanic’ cultural thread running through all these disparate cultural phenomena
is alive and well in Speidel’s book, too.
The extreme fuzziness of the concept ‘Germanic’ is evident also in the earlier
(though still quite influential) The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early
Germanic Culture, an intellectually stimulating, although very speculative look at
the conception of time in what the author repeatedly calls ‘Germanic thinking’ or
‘Germanic philosophy’ from a comparative mythology and religion perspective.23
Bauschatz, as most other users of ‘Germanic’, does not bother to define who exactly
did all this ‘Germanic thinking’. Indeed, what were the ‘early Germanic peoples’ pre-
sumably holding the sophisticated conceptions of time, fate, and the cosmos the au-
thor describes? The Anglo-Saxons on the Continent, before they migrated to Britain
and became the Anglo-Saxons? The speakers of Proto-Germanic? We do not know,
and Bauschatz does not tell us, yet the evidence he does bring to bear on these ghostly
notions is, as expected, Scandinavian and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, always later than the con-
ceptions it is made to support, always much more intricated in cultural and socio-
political webs of meaning than the author wishes to acknowledge, and from which he
detaches them, placing them together instead in a ‘Germanic’ weave of his own (se-
ductive, though speculative) design.
One of the issues here is the same as everywhere else throughout scholarship
using ‘Germanic’ as a shorthand for a collection of referents as wide or as narrow as
each user wishes and whose definition, although assumed to be self-evident, is al-
ways slightly different from each other’s due to the respective areas of interest. Yet
another issue is that even in each of these four examples, the meaning of ‘Germanic’
refers to something always slightly different than in the others: if ‘Germanic thought’
is something that exists in the mind but instantiated in an assortment of texts,
‘Germanic warriors’ is a category of actually existing people (again, brought together
from a variety of temporal and socio-political settings that need not be in any way
‘Germanic’ except in the loosest of associations, see the Julian example above), but
also a category of visual representations, sometimes of these men as seen by cultures
different from their own (Roman bas-reliefs), sometimes of abstract notions disguised
as men (mysterious rune-sculptures), yet other times as depictions of men that might
not be even fighting. On the other hand, Murdoch’s ‘Germanic hero’ is an abstraction
22 Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors, 61.

23 Paul C. Bauschatz, The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture (Amherst:
Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1982).
distilled from an assortment of texts that have little to do with each other, while
‘Germanic literature’ is anything that is written in a Germanic language, plus any-
thing that is written in other languages and coming from different narrative traditions
or cultural horizons that talk about ‘Germanic’ people (such as Tacitus’s Germania)
or that are influenced by presumably ‘Germanic’ traditions (such as the Waltharius).
Whenever the term ‘Germanic’ is taken from one disciplinary context into another, its
meanings are added in new layers upon older layers, and this can be done since the
term had already done such a good job of accommodating so many disjunctive mean-
ings in its centuries of non-stop use.
Yet studies such as the ones discussed above focussing on such ill-defined notions
as ‘Germanic philosophy’ or ‘Germanic hero’ are important in that if looked at criti-
cally, they reveal their own scientific precariousness and thence, the arbitrariness of
all constructions of the ‘Germanic’ from disparate sources that depend so much on
speculation and so little on the ‘hard evidence’ used to buttress other Germanicist ar-
guments (such as philological ‘laws’ used to date a word form or a meter type with
suspicious accuracy or archaeological finds usually taken out of their immediate con-
text and placed in an ahistorical Germanic constellation, as in Speidel’s work). These
studies (with the exception of Bauschatz’s) are recent examples of the traditional use
of ‘Germanic’ post-dating Goffart’s warnings, which thus only confirm his suspicions
about the implicit conceptual framework in which the study of all things Germanic is
grounded.
Going outside my area of specialty, I next take a brief look at what scholars mean
by ‘Germanic’ in archaeology and legal history. As James Harland explained in his
presentation and as he argues throughout his work,24 the danger for archaeologists
in using terms like ‘Germanic’ is precisely that they implicitly propose dichotomous
relationships between some artefact types and others, which allows for appeals to
implicit tradition to be made.25 At the same time, to talk about ‘Germanic artefacts’ or
‘Germanic archaeological cultures’ (including using the subcategories ‘Anglo-Saxon’,
or ‘Continental Saxon’ etc.) presupposes the unchanging nature of ethnic character-
istics, at least to the extent that it becomes knowable in material artefacts.
Of course, in spite of the prevalence of uncritical uses of ‘Germanic’ and
‘Anglo-Saxon’ in archaeological scholarship, there are some critiques of the cavalier
use of ‘Germanic’ in this area of research. James Gerrard, for example, argues that
the emergence of ‘Germanic’ burial practices in eastern Britain need not have had
24 Cf. Harland, “A Habitus Barbarus in Sub-Roman Britain?,” this volume.

25 I am deeply grateful to James Harland for sharing some of his doctoral research with me. I am
especially thankful for his account of the debates in archaeology surrounding ethnicity, about
which I would otherwise be mostly ignorant. The present paper owes much to his galvanizing en-
ergy in laying bare the assumptions all scholars make (but are silent or even unconscious about)
and in bringing into the open the inescapable entanglements of scholarship and politics.
anything to do with signaling ethnicity, and that such practices represented a shift
toward symbolic emphasis on martial prowess as an indicator of status:
the label ‘Germanic’ is used here to describe a series of cultural phenomena that clearly have
their origins, at least in part, in northern Germany. The use of this term does not necessarily
imply anything about the genetic makeup, or linguistic abilities, or ethnic identity of the indi-
viduals and communities to which it is applied.26
Interestingly, while Gerrard convincingly detaches ‘Germanic’ from any essentialist

notions of ethnic continuity, he does identify ‘Germanic’ as a marker of status, and
especially of ‘martial prowess’. In this I see an instantiation of the ‘Germanic’ pre-
supposing the ‘heroic’ so prevalent in the scholarship surrounding Germanic heroic
poetry. To simplify and vulgarize, if for archaeologists aware of the baggage of the
term, ‘Germanic’ might mean ‘warlike Continental men’ (and it usually is taken to
refer to men) as opposed to ‘peaceful British natives’, we have yet another ingredi-
ent added to the semantic salad.
A recent article by Daniela Fruscione attempts to deal with the question
whether the use of ‘Germanic’ in the scholarship on early medieval law is justified
or not.27 While she justly argues that there is no evidence of a uniform identity-
consciousness among the speakers of early medieval Germanic dialects, Fruscione
concludes that “one can only do so badly without” the concept ‘Germanic’,28 which
is usually seen as a stand-in for ‘archaic’ law. But the benefits of using the term
outweigh its dangers, since within the
legal system of the various Germanic peoples and elements of generally archaic law, there are
identifiable and distinguishable Germanic forms and patterns. In their historical and geo-
graphical context and in relation to Roman legal culture, these archaic traits can be called
“Germanic”.29
Yet this argument seems to be moving the goalposts—one would still need to define
how these traits are ‘Germanic’. In any case, it appears that for scholars of early
medieval law, ‘Germanic’ means archaic and/or ‘barbarian’ as opposed to Roman.
We can see even from these few examples that ‘Germanic’ can mean many dif-
ferent things and that by the simple act of saying or writing ‘Germanic’, each
scholar either points to a different referent, or even sometimes constructs an en-
tirely new referent that does not supersede the others, but is added to the collection
of signifieds that the signifier stands for. At this point one possible conclusion
would be that ‘Germanic’ is a floating signifier. For Claude Lévi-Strauss, a floating
26 James Gerrard, The Ruin of Roman Britain: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), 180; 201–7.
27 Daniela Fruscione, “On ‘Germanic’,” The Heroic Age, 14 (2010). Available at: http://www.heroi
cage.org/issues/14/fruscione.php, accessed March 2017.
28 Ibid., §8.
29 Ibid.
signifier represented ‘an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of

meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning’. As such a floating signifier may
‘mean different things to different people: they may stand for many or even any sig-
nifieds; they may mean whatever their interpreters want them to mean’.30
Yet if the term ‘Germanic’ is so fraught with methodological dangers, why do we
keep using the word, then? There are so many available words and phrases: thus, why
not say ‘Continental warlike burials’ rather than ‘Germanic burials’, or ‘archaic barbar-
ian law’ instead of ‘Germanic law’, or ‘martial poems from Iceland/Anglo-Saxon
England’ etc, rather than ‘Germanic heroic poetry’? Germanic stands for so many
things that in a way it stands for nothing and this is precisely why it has endured: its
seductive simplicity, and, why not admit it, its ties to strong emotional foundations
made so much easier by this simplicity and conceptual fuzziness.
Of course, I am not thinking just about academia here: one need look no further
than to the current ‘Germanic genes’ craze. The latest advances in genetics have
made recreational genomics possible: in exchange for £159 and a DNA-bearing
mucus sample, a multitude of companies such as iGENEA offer to identify the client’s
early medieval ancestry. Their tagline is: “Are you a Germanic tribesman?”.31 In con-
nection to this, the great public interest aroused in Britain by scholarly projects
studying ‘Germanic genes’ such as the recent University of Leicester Impact of
Diasporas project (however misleadingly covered by the media), bear testimony to a
strengthening of a desire for origins among the general English public in the last de-
cade, a phenomenon to which the sociological strand of the Leicester project was
dedicated.32
But words are never just words—they have baggage, auras, forcefields, that order
the thinking that can be done with them in certain patterns and prevent that done in
others. Although as scholars we would like to think of ourselves as immune from this
simplistic thinking, linguistic habits are often symptoms of underlying feelings. And I
would argue that the habit of using ‘Germanic’ is our tribute to the long illustrious
tradition of scholarship that was done around and with this concept and with which
we cannot bear to part. This stems from our desire for scholarly origins which we feel
compelled to feel bad about (and it is this repression of desire that is evident in our
caveats about using these outdated notions), but which on a certain level we want to
be connected with: Grimm, Tolkien, the early modern humanists, the nineteenth-
30 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, (London: Routledge, 1987 [1950]), 63–64.
31 https://www.igenea.com/en/origins-analysis, accessed February 2017.
32 The Impact of Diasporas project was undertaken at the University of Leicester and aimed to re-
analyze cultural, linguistic, and genetic interactions between the Anglo-Saxon and Viking waves of
migrants coming to Britain and pre-existing populations. Available at: http://www2.le.ac.uk/proj
ects/impact-of-diasporas, accessed March 2017. The modern-day sociological research part of it re-
sulted in Marc Scully, Turi King, and Steven D. Brown, “Remediating Viking Origins: Genetic Code
as Archival Memory of the Remote Past,” Sociology 47 (2013): 921–38.
century forebears of our respective fields whom, however badly their scholarship may
have dated, we still regard with a warm fuzzy feeling of respect (and, why not, envy)
for some of their intuitions, also for their scholarly dedication and productivity. I be-
lieve it is this different form of emotional appeal (not as blatant, but possibly as dan-
gerous as the one concerned with finding one’s Germanic tribesman ancestors) that
makes scholars cling to the term ‘Germanic’ with its entire history still living within
itself.
In this case, ‘Germanic’ may be an empty signifier, but it is certainly filled with
much emotion. Here, Erensto Laclau’s understanding of empty signifier is perhaps
more useful than Lévi-Strauss. For Laclau, an empty signifier is the hegemonic repre-
sentative of a collection of various popular demands, constituting a chain of equiva-
lence.33 This chain of unsatisfied demands create an unfulfilled totality, inside of
which one signifier subordinates the rest and assumes representation of the rest via a
hegemonic process. Although Laclau refers to multiple popular demands existing si-
multaneously in one specific political context that coalesce into one signifier, I would
like to extend his definition diachronically so that an empty signifier can be some-
thing accreting in successive eras as well as within one socio-political ecosystem.
Put in these terms, ‘Germanic’ can be said to be an empty signifier already in
the context of nineteenth-century thought, which saw contemporary bourgeois lib-
eralism and parliamentarism as being mirrored in the early Germanic past, and
honored the Germanen as progenitors of a desirable future.34 Yet, as Goffart ex-
plains, by the 1930s, primitive assemblies and republican institutions were discred-
ited, and in the teachings of the new school of New German Constitutional History,
the Germanen turned out to have been quintessentially aristocratic; they prized leadership
(Führertum) and rallied about kings and noblemen whose god-given talents they revered. The
Germanic ‘sacral kingship’ emanating from god-descended families, which went unnoticed by
nineteenth-century scholars, had risen to eminence since the early 1930s. By the discovery of an
enduring primitive aristocracy rooted in religion, Altertumskunde provided the Germanen with
something comparably attractive to the lost mission of liberty.35
Hence, ‘Germanic’ became doubly an empty signifier in its supporting both of these
disjunctive definitions and yet newer definitions in the years to come. Our pointing
out the baggage of the term does nothing as long as we ensure its survival by en-
gaging in scholarship that uses the term ‘Germanic’, whether or not we believe
there is anything essentially ‘Germanic’ about genes or laws or heroic poetry or
burial finds. At this point, perhaps it is more useful to think of the ‘Germanic’ as a
balloon that keeps getting bigger and bigger with each new meaning that is stuck
inside it, never allowing any to escape; a balloon that never pops because its walls
33 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 131–32.

34 Goffart, “Germanic Antiquity Today,” 10.
35 Ibid.
are so yielding; finally, a balloon that hovers ominously above all of our respective
fields of research, but that ultimately makes for a rather impressive view. Each
speech act using ‘Germanic’, even with the best of intentions, does nothing but
inflate that balloon a little further.
What can we do, then? Eliminating the term itself is not a solution, partly be-
cause the problem isn’t what the term stands for, but rather the fact that it stands
for too many things, some of which provoke strong emotions. I would suggest that
wringing our hands about the baggage of the word in preambles to our monographs
and articles so that we can continue using it without compunction is a step forward
(unless it is in fact worse because we acknowledge the problem but do not act on
it), but is not enough. Rather than retelling each time the same history of the word
with its well-known milestones (the early modern humanists, the nineteenth-
century nationalists, the Nazis), perhaps a more fruitful strategy would be drawing
its genealogy every time we use it.
By genealogy I refer to Foucault’s understanding of the word (itself inspired by
Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals). Genealogy in Foucault’s understanding “rejects
the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It
opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’”.36 Instead of origins or deeper meanings,
“Foucault, the genealogist, finds force relations operating in particular events and
historical developments”.37 In other words, unlike history, this type of genealogy
seeks to bypass the logic of serial developments and teleology (in the present case,
listing the uses of the term ‘Germanic’), pointing to the fact there is nothing inevita-
ble in these developments. A genealogy in a Foucauldian sense is not meant to pro-
vide an orderly series of events linked by causation, but rather to explode the notion
of a development following from discernible origins to deducible end-points that we
can always explain and understand, provided we hold all the elements of the ques-
tion: “The task of Foucault’s genealogy is to offer us a different interpretation, to make
a different perspective known, in order to allow for the possibility of our becoming
otherwise than we are”.38 It is here that the potential of genealogy lies: it can pro-
vide, if not a solution to our conundrum, at least a strategy that would bypass the
horns of the dilemma (either not using ‘Germanic’ and risking to ignore the scholar-
ship done with it or using it and perpetuating its problematic baggage).
Making a list of the people who employed it and of the noxious uses to which it
was put makes a morality play out of the history of ‘Germanic’: the word is now tainted
by association with those uses and we should feel bad for using it. A genealogy
36 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 76–100, here 77.
37 Evangelia Sembou, “Foucault’s Genealogy,” transcript of presentation at the 10th Annual Meeting
of the International Social Theory Consortium (Univ. College Cork, Ireland on 16–17 June 2011).
Available at: https://www.academia.edu/679231/_Foucaults_Genealogy_, accessed March 2017.
38 Sembou, “Foucault’s Genealogy,” 20.
eschews this type of logic by revealing the contingencies found at all points in the his-
tory of the concept: ‘Germanic’ does not mean just ‘that’ (nationalism), it also means
‘this’ (pan-Gothicism) and ‘this’ (martial status), and a plethora of other things. The
forces that made these evolutions possible are scientific, social, political, emotional:
they are just as real and effective as the will of individual actors who define words and
draw borders. Genealogy helps us acknowledge this multiplicity, and thereby opens
the possibility that we do not need to scrub ‘Germanic’ clean of its connotations accu-
mulated through time, we can only inhabit it, make it our own by defining our own
use of it (which will fatally never be quite the same as that of other scholars) while also
making explicit all the layers of meaning that are already attached to it.
As an example of where genealogy can lead us in our task of interrogating the
‘Germanic’, I suggest that whenever we historicize the uses of the word, proposing its
origins in either nineteenth-century nationalistic legal scholarship or from Grimm or
the sixteenth-century humanists (etc), we can always point to yet another point of
inflection in the genealogy of the term. From a Foucauldian perspective, whenever
we think we have reached the origin of the term, there is another origin presenting
itself as just as valid. Thus, I propose to look to the ninth century for yet another
point of origin for the popularity of ‘Germanic’, as a word but especially as an empty
signifier on which a chain of equivalences is centered.
For Carolingian intellectuals of the ninth century, the question was not so much
about being ‘Germanic’, as it was about being ‘Gothic’. Yet, I suggest that, even if the
words may not be the same, the socio-cultural, political, and emotional needs that
led to the sudden popularity of Teutones and Teudisci among Carolingian intellec-
tuals are, mutatis mutandi, similar to the ones that made ‘Germanic’ so popular, and
ultimately so controversial, in modern and present times.
‘Carolingian Gothicism’ consisted in a wave of accounts of Frankish origins that
clearly show that at least some ninth-century Franks believed that the Goths were of
Scandinavian origins, and that they were the ancestors of the Franks (but also of
other Germanic peoples such as the Danes and Saxons, who were thus seen to be
related).39 The present argument owes much to Roberta Frank’s study of ninth-
century ‘Gothicism’, as she calls this sudden interest in all things Gothic and/or
‘Germanic’ on both sides of the Channel, a useful label which I will use henceforth to
refer to the larger phenomenon.40
39 For a more detailed account of Carolingian and especially Anglo-Saxon Gothicism, see Cătălin
Țăranu, “Goths, Geatas, Gaut: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition”, in Transforming the
Early Medieval World: Studies in Honour of Ian N. Wood, edited by N. Kıvılcım Yavuz and Ricky
Broome (Leeds: Kısmet Press, forthcoming).
40 Roberta Frank, “Germanic Legend,” in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature,
edited by Michael Lapidge and Malcolm Godden (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991),
82–100.
The link between ‘Teutons’ as a catch-all term for Germanic peoples and lan-
guages, and the Goths as a legendary people to whom everyone wanted to be re-
lated, was already in place by 893, when Archbishop Fulco of Reims, in a letter to
Arnulf, king of the east Frankish kingdom, used the word ‘Teuton’ to describe the
written sources (libris teutonicis) in which Arnulf could read about Ermanaric, the
legendary Gothic leader who by this time must have been part of the same complex
of narratives as Attila and Walter of Aquitaine.41
Matthew Innes traces the connection between these notions back to an early
Carolingian origin in the western part of the empire: at Tours around 830 the
‘Teutons’ in Virgil’s Aeneid, VII.741, were glossed as ‘the people of Germania […] who
speak the lingua theodisca’.42 The example brings together all three names used in
Carolingian sources for a ‘Teutonic’ ethnic group, the ‘theodisca’ language they
speak, and the territory they occupy (‘Germania’). The fact that two of the three origi-
nate in the Latin Antiquity does not prevent them from having been reemployed (pre-
cisely because of the prestige due to the Classical echoes they evoked) by the
Carolingian elites to name a newly emerging community of language, ethnicity and
territory. As Walter Pohl shows, ‘the same biblical and classical [ethnographic] models
could serve to establish new systems of perception and to legitimise the existence of
the new ethnic kingdoms’.43 Tacitus’s Germania would have provided one of the sour-
ces for this model—its first certain use after 525, when it is cited in Cassiodorus
Variae, occurs in the mid-ninth-century Translatio Sancti Alexandri by Rudolf of
Fulda.44 Tacitus (and especially the Germania) was virtually unknown in this period,
so why was this source used in this context?
The reasons for this have everything to do with the search for origins that
we might be tempted to label ‘Germanic’ that had begun at this time in the Carolingian
world—even if only because they were tied to the rediscovery of the ethnonym Germani
and its use in contemporary identity building. The connections are there, though they
appear in a constellation that appears strange to us, even as we recognize its main
41 The letter is transmitted through the summary recorded by the tenth-century historian of Reims,
Flodoard, in Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, 4.5, edited by Martina Stratmann, MGH Scriptores, vol. 36
(Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1998), 383.
42 Matthew Innes, “Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past”, in The Uses of
the Past in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Yitzak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2000), 227–49, here 232. See also Heinz Thomas, “Der Ursprung des Wortes
Theodiscus,” Historische Zeitschrift 247 (1988): 295–331.
43 Walter Pohl, “Telling the Difference: Signs of Ethnic Identity,” in Strategies of Distinction: The
Construction of the Ethnic Communities, 300–800, edited by Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz
(Leiden: Brill, 1998), 17–69, here 68.
44 Frank, “Germanic Legend,” 104. Cassiodorus, Variae, in MGH Auctores antiquissimi, vol. 12,
edited by Theodor Mommsen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1894), 143–44. Rudolf of Fulda, Translatio Sancti
Alexandri, in Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-
historische Klasse, edited by Bruno Krusch (Göttingen, 1933), 405–37.
features: related languages of groups of people taken as proof for their common origin
placed under the prestigious label of the Germani or Teutoni of classical ethnography.
This is not to suggest that the Carolingians already thought in terms of the modern con-
cept of ‘Germanic’ (or rather, in one of its many more or less connected embodiments,
as I have striven to show), but that similar desires working with much of the same pri-
mary sources lead to similar results, and that fictitious national or trans-national com-
mon origin stories are no more a feature of early modern pan-Germanism than of the
Carolingian era.45
Rudolf begins his account of the translation of the relics of St. Alexander by going
back to the origins of the Saxons: in a surprising reverse migration myth, he asserts
that the Saxons had sailed from Britain to the Continent. In this origin story, he makes
heavy use of three chapters from Tacitus’s Germania by changing what the Classical
writer ascribed to the Germani to refer to the Saxons: “Tacitus’s noble barbarians have
become Rudolf’s noble pagans”.46 The codicological context of this unique copy of
Tacitus is also relevant and shows the same propensity for origin stories. The
Germania is found in the so-called Jesi manuscript (also known as Codex Aesinas,
now at the National Library in Rome, catalogued as Codex Vitt. Em. 1631), which also
contains Tacitus’s Agricola and the Bellum Troianum by the spurious author Dictys
Cretensis, and which was probably written at Fulda in the second quarter of the ninth
century, where it was used by Rudolf.47 It is well known that Fulda was one of the
crucial cultural centres of interest in the vernacular in the Carolingian Empire.48
Thus, Rudolf was certainly not the only one keenly interested in narratives about
the origins of the Germanic-speaking peoples of the empire. The Germania provided
the necessary classical legitimation for this new preoccupation. But the latter also
had more immediate origins in the political community that developed in the east
Frankish kingdom in the later ninth century. This created a fertile environment for
the emergence of a linguistic self-consciousness, “the recognition that the inhabi-
tants of the kingdom shared a language which differed from that spoken in much of
west Francia”, which was linked at least by some Carolingian writers to the presti-
gious common origins provided by Classical ethnography’s famously creative labels:
‘Teutones’, ‘Germani’.49
45 For a lucid argument on the danger of considering a purely non-national Middle Ages as the
homogenous Other of modernity in the context of postcolonial theory, see Kathleen Davis,
“National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation,”
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 611–37.
46 Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the
Third Reich (New York: Norton, 2012), 63.
47 Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2004), 42.
48 Hans J. Hummer, Politics and Power in Early Medieval Europe: Alsace and the Frankish Realm,
600–1000 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 136–37.
49 Innes, “Teutons or Trojans,” 232.
That Carolingian intellectuals were deeply thinking about the Germanic vernacu-
lars, their links with ethnicity, and how these new connections could be fit into
Classical ethnographical models is visible from Freculph of Lisieux’s world chronicle.
This account, written in the 820s and 830s, associates the well-established legend
that the earliest Franks were the descendants of the Trojans with the unexpected
foray into the Scandinavian and Gothic origins of the same people: ‘other men insist
that they [the Franks] had their origins on the island of Scandza, the womb of na-
tions, from which the Goths and the other came: what is more, the idiom of their lan-
guages shows this’.50 Here Freculph is paraphrasing Jordanes’s account of the origins
of the Goths: ‘Long ago the Goths are said to have come from the island of Scandza,
as from a hive of races or a womb of nations, under their king Berig’.51
Writing c. 805, Abbot Smaragdus of St Mihiel was struck by the similarities of
Gothic and Frankish personal names and explained this by the existence of a histori-
cal link between the two peoples.52 Walahfrid Strabo, writing in the 840s, also linked
the Gothic language, and thus their history, to that of the Franks: Goths “spoke our—
that is, the Teutonic—language (nostrum, id est Theotiscum, sermonem), and, as
chroniclers show, late scholars of that people translated the holy Scripture into their
own language, of which today a few traces are found”.53 The ‘few traces’ of these
translations in Walahfrid’s day may refer to the several copies of Ulfila’s Gothic trans-
lation, including the Codex Carolinus at Grimald’s monastery of Wissembourg.54
Indeed, the interest in the Gothic Bible of Ulfila was not restricted to Walahfrid: the
Salzburg teacher Baldo, who wrote a commentary on Gothic letters, copied excerpts
from Ulfila’s Bible, tried to translate these excerpts into Frankish, and included pho-
netic marks for pronunciation. Even in the absence of the explicit link with Frankish
origins, there is clearly a very strong interest in the Goths at this time.
The honour of being ‘Teutonic’ and/or Gothic by descent was not confined to
Franks, but extended by Carolingian intellectuals to the Danes and the Saxons. With
the Saxons, this is to be expected of the Saxons since all Carolingian kings since
Charlemagne tried to secure the loyalty of the Saxon elite by the discourse of oneness
50 PL 106, cols. 957–1258, here col. 967: Alii vero affirmant eos de Scanza insula, quae vagina gen-
tium est, exordium habuisse, de qua Gothi et caeterae nationes Theotiscae exierunt: quod et idioma
linguae eorum testatur.
51 Jordanes, Getica, edited by Mommsen, 60: Ex hac igitur Scandza insula quasi officina gentium
aut certe velut vagina nationem cum rege suo nomine Berig Gothi quondam memorantur egressi.
52 Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, Liber in Partibus Donati, edited by Bengt Löfstedt, Louis Holtz and
Adele Kibre, CCCM 68 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 20–24.
53 Walahfrid, De Exordiis et Incrementis quarundam in observationibus ecclesiasticis rerum, chap-
ter 7, edited by Alice Harting-Correa (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 72.
54 Peter Heather and John Matthews, The Goths in the Fourth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ.
Press, 1991), 155–58. Eric J. Goldberg, “‘More Devoted to the Equipment of Battle Than the Splendor
of Banquets’: Frontier Kingship, Martial Ritual, and Early Knighthood at the Court of Louis the
German,” Viator 30 (1999): 41–78, here 78.
with the Frankish aristocracy. Einhard wrote that the defeated Saxons ‘were joined to
the Franks and made one people with them’.55 This ‘Teutonic’ ethnicity was spacious
enough to accommodate even groups which did not have political ties with the
Franks as close as the Saxons or other eastern-Rhenish ethnic groups. As Innes re-
ports, Hrabanus Maurus (Walahfrid’s teacher and Freculph’s friend), identified the
Danes as ‘Germanic’ because of their language and argued that they descended from
the Marcomanni.56 In a panegyric description of the baptism of the Danish king at
Louis the Pious’s court in 826, Ermold the Black also made a link between the Franks
and the Danes, and claimed that the Franks originally came from Scandinavia.57
What is clear from all this evidence is that at least some Carolingian textual com-
munities were envisaging themselves as either Goths or related to other ‘Germanic’ na-
tions (or, to use the Carolingian term, nationes theodiscae). Yet this interest in the
Goths might not have been just about Gothic ancestry or ethnicity, but about a sense of
trans-ethnic identity whose necessity was felt in the context of two contradictory socio-
political forces in Carolingian society at this time: (1) new definitions of what it meant
to be Frankish that did not depend on ethnicity, but on Christianity and loyalty to the
Carolingian kings; on the other hand, (2) the increasing awareness of linguistic links
between the Germanic vernacular dialects spoken in the western parts of the empire.58
55 Einhard, Vita Karoli Magni, MGH Scriptores rerum Germanicarum, vol. 25, edited by O. Holder-
Egger (Hanover: Hahn, 1911), 9 and 11.
56 PL 112, cols. 1579–83. For more on Hrabanus and the vernaculars, W. Haubrichs,
“Althochdeutsch in Fulda und Weissenburg – Hrabanus Maurus und Otfried von Weissenburg,” in
Hrabanus Maurus: Lehrer, Abt und Bischof, edited by R. Kottje and H. Zimmerman (Wiesbaden:
Steiner, 1981), 182–93; Michel Banniard, “Rhabanus Maurus and the Vernacular Languages,” in
Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Roger Wright (Leicester:
Leicester Univ. Press, 1991), 164–74. All referenced in Innes, “Teutons or Trojans?,” 234.
57 Ermold the Black, In Honorem Hludovici Pii, edited by Edmond Faral, Poème sur Louis le Pieux et
épitres au roi Pépin (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1932), 144 (line 1899).
58 For new definitions of ‘Frankishness’, see Helmut Reimitz, “Omnes Franci: Identifications and
Identities of the Early Medieval Franks,” in Franks, Northmen, and Slavs, Identities and State Formation
in Early Medieval Europe, edited by Ildar H. Garipzanov, Patrick Geary, Przemysław Urbańczyk
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 51–69; Ian Wood, “Defining the Franks: Frankish Origins in Early Medieval
Historiography,” in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, edited by Simon Forde, Lesley
Johnson and Alan V. Murray (Leeds: School of English, Univ. of Leeds, 1995), 47–57; Richard Broome,
“Approaches to Community and Otherness in the Late Merovingian and Early Carolingian Periods”
(PhD thesis, Univ. of Leeds, 2014), 29–88. For ethnicity and language, see Michel Banniard,
“Latinophones, romanophones, germanophones: interactions identitaires et construction
langagière (VIIIe–Xe siècle),” in Médiévales 45 (2003): Grammaires du vulgaire, 25–42; Parshia
Lee-Stecum, “Otherwise the Same: Latin Models of Poetic Self-presentation in the Evangelienbuch
of Otfrid (1.1.1–126),” in Germanic Texts and Latin Models Medieval Reconstructions, edited by
Karin Olsen, Antonina Harbus, Tette Hofstra, 93–106; Jennifer Neville, “History, Poetry, and
“National” Identity in Anglo-Saxon England and the Carolingian Empire,” in Germanic Texts and
Latin Models Medieval Reconstructions, edited by Karin Olsen, Antonina Harbus, Tette Hofstra,
This awareness can be seen from the attempt to posit the Franks as being related to
other peoples speaking what today we call ‘Germanic’ languages or dialects, some-
times in correlation to their common Gothic or Scandinavian ancestry. In any case,
what this pan-Gothic awareness seems to point to is more than simply a pre-modern
version of nineteenth-century nationalism (such as pan-Slavism), but rather a broader
type of trans-national ethnic belonging. As I argued elsewhere, what has been termed
‘Gothicism’ can be seen as an identity starter kit that was used for a number of cultural
and political needs in Carolingian Francia and Anglo-Saxon England, not just as a
strategy of nation-building, but a way of opening up a trans-ethnic identity that would
join the Anglo-Saxons with a number of other ethnies on the Continent (Saxons,
Franks, Danes) in an ideal Gothic kinship.59
Thus ‘Gothicism’ was an important identity-forming strategy in the early Middle
Ages, although at least for some Carolingians, to be descended from the Goths was
another way of saying you speak lingua theodisca, while for others, or sometimes the
same writers, your lingua theudisca pointed to your descent from the Teutoni or
Germani. Although when saying that these were manifestations of premodern nation-
alism or trans-nationalism, it is important that these early medieval origin stories are
not to be seen teleologically as the acorn from which the modern nations arose.60 Yet
language was, even more so than in later times, the main ingredient for a sense of
ethnic belonging, and the lingua theodisca (which probably included all the still mu-
tually intelligible Germanic dialects spoken in the eastern Carolingian Empire) cer-
tainly became one of the main coagulating factors for a common ethnic identity in
the Eastern Frankish territory formerly part of the Carolingian Empire after the civil
strife of the 820s and 830s.61 And the speakers of theudisca were linked by at least
Rudolf and the unknown Virgil glossator of Tours to Germania and, in the former
case, to Tacitus’s Germani. In any case, as Innes argues, teutonicus was used by
Carolingian writers as a classical synonym for theodiscus and by the tenth century
teutonicus became equivalent to ‘German’.62
Following Matthew Innes, I have argued that at least some Carolingians
thought of contemporary Germanic-speaking groups as related under the um-
brella of classical ethnographic labels (be they Teutoni or Germani, and
107–26; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change,
950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1993), 198–204.
59 Țăranu, “Goths, Geatas, Gaut”.
60 Cătălin Țăranu, “The Making of Poetic History in Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian
Francia” (PhD thesis, Univ. of Leeds, 2016), 131.
61 Țăranu, Poetic History, 129–43.
62 Innes, “Teutons or Trojans,” 232. See also Heinz Thomas, “Der Ursprung des Wortes Theodiscus,”
Historische Zeitschrift 247 (1988): 295–331, and Thomas, “Frenkisk: Zur Geschichte von theodiscus und
teutonicus im Frankenreich des 9. Jahrhunderts,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte des Regnum Francorum.
Referate beim Wissenschaftlichen Colloquium zum 75. Geburtstag von Eugen Ewig am 28. Mai 1988,
edited by Rudolf Schieffer (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1990), 67–95.
sometimes both). What is more, I have sought to think through the implications of
this fact for my attempt at a genealogy of ‘Germanic’. The fact that in the Carolingian
intellectual imaginary, ‘Germania’ as a location (and at least in Rudolf’s case,
Tacitus’s Germani as equivalent to the Saxons), the phrase lingua theodisca or teu-
tonica, and the label nationes theodiscae (always in the plural, to refer to the eth-
nies speaking theodisc languages) are connected into something similar to and yet
of course not completely the same as the modern-day construction of ‘Germanic’
should give us pause.
In our time as well as in the nineteenth century, and not unlike in the sixteenth
century, ‘Germanic’ extends its aura of mythical origins over the minds of scholars
and laypeople alike, just like ‘Teutonicus’ and ‘Theodiscus’ did among ninth-
century Carolingian elites. The connotations might have been different, because
they responded to different socio-political, cultural, and emotional needs, yet these
needs are similar: they refer to something greater than the current anxieties of an
age, something ancient and powerful, something that is in a murky way not merely
connected to us but that is fundamental to who we are. These words are about an-
cestors living in times that felt more substantial than what we are living now.
Thus, the thinking about national and trans-national identity underlying the
concept ‘Germanic’ is never pinpointable to one moment of origin, and thus never
solvable by simply detaching it from that origin. Foucault’s concept of genealogy
provides a framework for thinking through precisely this fact: that we can neither
erase the nationalistic history from the word, nor completely replace the latter. We
can and should, however, draw its genealogy. This is what the present contribution
has aimed to do.
The result of a genealogical approach is the realisation that ‘Germanic’ never
meant just one thing; that it was never meant to be a rigorous scientific concept, but
an all-encompassing floating signifier that contained in it any number of connota-
tions its users attached to it (the proud ancestors, the noble fatherland, the ancient
warriors, the free democratic people, the leader-loving aristocracy, a pan-Northern
transnational union, local patriotism, etc). A genealogy does not gloss over this mul-
tiplicity (as a simple archaeology of the uses of the term might, which assumes that
many of these senses are dead and buried, or, at least, buriable), but dwells on it,
always awake to the fact that there is no inevitability, no teleology in the ways the
term was and is used. Since we all blow more air into the ‘Germanic’ balloon what-
ever we do, just by employing it, we might as well rigorously define our own use of
the word, while having no illusions that we can tame it or confine it to the rigours of
one discipline alone. Genealogy helps us embrace its ‘balloon-ey’ nature and makes us
aware of the fact we are never in a position to erase the “tainted” history of the word,
but only to add to it and thus become ourselves a part of the genealogy of ‘Germanic’.
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Otávio Luiz Vieira Pinto
What Can Cultural Anthropology
Do for Medievalists? A Methodological
Discussion of Ethnicity Applied
to Late Antique and Early Medieval History
Social and cultural interactions between Romans and alien groups have been a
dominant staple of late antique and early medieval scholarship.1 The study of this
broad phenomenon often requires a number of theoretical categories to cope with
the perceived reality of the sources. To accommodate the movement of distinct peo-
ples, we have to embrace concepts such as migration, integration, disruption, etc.
Chief among these concepts is the often-murky ‘ethnicity’. In general terms, ethnicity
has been applied by historians as a technical word for ‘identity’—with a less abstract,
more attainable content. While identity implies a certain psychology of identification
and a sense of belonging, ethnicity seems to comprise a more objective explanation:
it points to social and cultural constructs shared by a particular group. In this sense,
while identity stems from the individual, ethnicity is a wider category, describing a
cohesive societal formation.
Naturally, the application of the concept of ethnicity requires, then, palpable,
qualifying elements. A society can be only analysed under the scrutiny of ethnicity if
we understand what defines that formation as such. Traditional songs, name-giving,
1 The discussion about ‘Early Medieval Ethnicity’ is endless, as it has been dominating academic
studies for more than four decades—departing from the classic work of Wenskus (which I will discuss
further below). It is certainly unfair to place every single study concerned with post-Roman identities
in the same basket, but it is more or less clear that the definition of ethnicity employed in a great part
of these works is either situational, circumstantial or, at least, not deeply concerned with long-
standing anthropological debates and conceptualisations. Among the most recent and important
studies, we could name Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann, eds., Strategies of Identification:
Ethnicity and Religion in Early Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); John V. A. Fine, When
Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans: A Study of Identity in Pre-Nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and
Slavonia in the Medieval and Early-Modern Periods (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2010);
Herwig Wolfram, “Origo et Religio. Ethnic Traditions and Literature in Early Medieval Texts,” Early
Medieval Europe 3, no. 1 (30 January 2007): 19–38; Patrick Amory, People and Identity in Ostrogothic
Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003); Walter Pohl and Helmut Reimitz, eds.,
Strategies of Distinction: The Construction of the Ethnic Communities, 300–800 (Leiden: Brill, 1998);
Walter Pohl, “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” Archaeologia Polona 29 (1991):
39–49. Moreover, it is worth stressing the methodological discussions present in Robert Bartlett,
“Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 39–56; Patrick Geary, “Ethnic Identity as a Situational Construct in the Early
Middle Ages,” Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 113 (1983): 15–26.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-006
112 Otávio Luiz Vieira Pinto
mythological accounts, political structures; everything is open to ‘ethnicness’, that is,

of being seen as a category of wide, cultural identity. However, as a scientific cate-
gory, ethnography requires observation, the only way through which the canvasser
can access (and assess) the nature of what creates the social bond of identity. It is
logical that, in the case of the historian, the chronological gap between researcher
and research makes it impossible to determine ethnicity through direct observation.
This epistemological problem cannot be ignored or glossed over. Cultural
Anthropology has been concerned with the conceptual boundaries of ethnicity for
the past decades, resulting in contradictory definitions, plural methodologies and,
above all, different schools of thought.2 Diverse threads of ethnographic methods
are constantly developed and applied to different contexts. The debate about ethnicity
among indigenous peoples is unlike that of cosmopolitan, urban areas, and precisely
because there are so many different cultural and societal spheres, methodology is
rendered especially important. Categories of analysis are dependent on the object
of study, and they invariably obey the reality and contingencies of this dialectical
relation (that is, ethnic categories and ethnic subjects).
The question surrounding the methodological nature of ethnography should es-
pecially concern historians of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. As a mo-
ment deeply marked by the continuing appearance of non-Roman players, ethnicity
plays a key role in understanding the nature of the new societies that emerge in
texts and accounts of the period: many of these new players were deemed to belong
to the so-called ‘Germanic people’. The problem is that the application of the con-
cept of ethnicity in late antique scholarship tends to be reckless, merely enabling
new, technical ways of referring to turgid perceptions of identity.3 At the core of the
problem lies a lack of rigour; there is no attention to a definition of what ethnicity is—at
least, not one that respects the enormous contribution of anthropological scholarship.
By under-defining ethnicity, we incur a consequential deficiency in the establishment
of categories through which historical, cultural identities can be studied.
Therefore, in the next few pages, I will discuss some of the many ways in which
perceptions of ethnicity have been portrayed in scholarship. With enhanced con-
ceptual accuracy, I hope that we will be able to better understand the meaning and
implications of such ethnic terms as ‘Germanic’ when dealing with late Antiquity
and the early Middle Ages.
2 Cf. Philippe Poutignat and Jocelyne Streiff-Fenart, Teorias da Etnicidade (São Paulo: Editora
UNESP, 1997).
3 The difficulty in dealing with methodological analysis of ethnicity and historical realities is at the
core of Gillet’s rather problematic criticism of ‘ethnogenesis’—the issue here is that, more often than
not, the concept of identity is regarded, for better or worse, as a political (or positivist) notion. Cf.
Andrew Gillett, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
What Can Cultural Anthropology Do for Medievalists? 113
Perceptions of Ethnicity: The Many Ways

of Defining the Other
The idea that Roman sources can be surrogate observers in the collection of ethno-
graphic data is rooted in the classic anthropological debate of etic and emic perspec-
tives. The emic approach places the gestation of ethnic traits on the investigated
group: based on self-perceptions of worldview, societal behaviour, and cultural ele-
ments, the observer can draw conclusions. The etic approach is ‘scientist-orientated’,
that is, it postulates that self-awareness of ethnic categories is unattainable within
the investigated group. Therefore any framework of analysis will derive from the ob-
server’s perspective.4 These positions engender a distinction between ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ definitions of ethnicity—respectively, regarding ethnic groups as either
(1) social and cultural entities with distinct boundaries characterised by relative isola-
tion and lack of interaction, or (2) culturally constructed categorisations that inform
social interaction and behaviour.5 The concerned late antique historian commonly
becomes lost in deciding between these perspectives: are Roman sources agents of
ethnic construction through the rhetoric of their texts? Can we pass through the
barrier of the observer and understand elements of ethnicity that are intrinsic to
the self-perception of tribal groups? These questions have to remain more or less
unanswered, as the methodological problem relies not on the nature of the sour-
ces, but rather in the accepted nature of ethnicity as an analytical category. It is
pointless to make enquiry into the extent of the anthropological fidelity of the his-
torical material if we cannot decide what exactly composes the social identities of
the groups we study and, moreover, whether these social identities exist in them-
selves, i. e., regardless of what the observer has to say. Moreover, even outside the
fields of late antique and medieval studies, the stark contrast between a direct etic
and emic perspectives is criticised. Jones states that:
It has long been recognized that such a simplistic distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’
definitions of ethnicity is problematic as it entails the naive pre-supposition of a value-free objec-
tive viewpoint located with the researcher, versus the subjective culturally mediated perceptions
of the people being studied. […] it is generally accepted that the categories of the social scientist
and the people being studied are equally subjective, and constitute different, although sometimes
overlapping, taxonomies embedded within diverse frameworks of meaning. However, the situa-
tion is more complex because the distinction between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ definitions of
ethnicity also relates to a difference of opinion about the nature of ethnicity itself. Are ethnic
4 Cf. Thomas N. Headland, Kevin L. Pike, and Marvin Harris, eds., Emics and Etics: The Insider/
Outsider Debate, Frontiers of Anthropology (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990); Marvin
Harris, “History and Significance of the EMIC/ETIC Distinction,” Annual Review of Anthropology 5,
no. 1 (1976): 329–50.
5 Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present (London:
Routledge, 1997), 57.
groups based on shared ‘objective’ cultural practices and/or socio-structural relations that exist
independently of the perceptions of the individuals concerned, or are they constituted primarily
by the subjective processes of perception and derived social organization of their members?6
This problem, after all, plagues both the social scientist and the historian. Distance
in time does not alter the epistemological concept of ethnicity, it simply creates dif-
ferent methodological obstacles. Regardless, current anthropology seems to have
settled on an answer to this question: ethnic groups have to be understood as self-
defining systems, with emphasis on the fluid and situational nature of both group
boundaries and individual identification.7
The different methodologies and definitions that surround broad notions of etic
and emic, of subjective and objective approaches to ethnicity end up creating two
general modes of understanding of identity, primordialist and instrumentalist. The
primordial imperative postulates that certain ethnic traits are bestowed at birth:
[…] immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that
stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language
[…] and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech and custom,
and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of
themselves. One is bound to one’s kinsman, one’s neighbour, one’s fellow believer, ipso facto;
as the result not merely of personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred
obligation, but at least in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attrib-
uted to the very tie itself.8
In other words, the primordial imperative, championed by ethnologists like Shils and
Geertz, proposes that tribal, basic ethnic bonds are involuntary and coercive, regard-
less of social circumstances or political contingencies.9 To back the supposition of
primordial elements of identity based on language, geography, and kinship, the de-
bate entails elements of psychology and socio-biology in an attempt to understand
the very essence of human (and communal) nature. Amidst the investigation for
these a priori elements of humanity itself, primordialists tend to associate, therefore,
the idea of ethnicity and kinship—social identity would be, in this sense, an extended
form of kin relationship and, as states van der Berghe, a form of kin selection.
Ethnicity becomes race.10
6 Jones, Archaeology of Ethnicity, 57.

7 Ibid., 64.
8 Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New
States,” in Old Societies and New States, by Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), 109.
9 George M. Scott, “A Resynthesis of the Primordial and Circumstantial Approaches to Ethnic
Group Solidarity: Towards an Explanatory Model,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 13, no. 2 (1990): 151.
Cf. Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States”;
Edward A. Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology, 2 vols (Chicago: Chicago Univ.
Press, 1957).
10 Pierre L. van den Berghe, “Race and Ethnicity: A Sociobiological Perspective,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 1, no. 4 (1978): 405.
On the other hand, instrumentalist approaches offer an entirely opposite ac-

count of ethnicity. Although this perspective engenders a variety of different con-
ceptions and methodologies to assess ethnic traits, the fundamentals remain the
same: ethnicity is a social tool that moderates the contact among various groups of
interests. Advocated mainly by Barth and Cohen, instrumental ethnicity has at its
core the idea that ethnic groups do not exist in isolation, and ethnic boundaries are
the very fabric of social identity.11 In other words, it is contact, interaction, and so-
ciability that create the notion of ethnicity. This is a tremendous departure from the
primordial imperative and the classic ethnographic method of understanding ethnic
qualifiers within the premise of ‘purity’. Instrumentalist theories also leave space
open for individual perceptions of ethnicity—that is, individuals contained by a cer-
tain ethnic system can experience fluidity of their own notion of identity depending
on social, political and economic interests.
While both broad perspectives attract criticism, they each touch on crucial el-
ements of ethnicity, from the psychology of belonging and the symbolic coercive-
ness of basic ethnic impulses to the impact of social networks on the collective
perceptions of culture and individual self-identification. McKay proposes that:
Ethnic tension or conflict which is purely ideal or purely material constitutes a minority of all
cases. It is surely the case that all polyethnic societies are characterized by a combination of
instrumental and affective bonds. […] It seems pointless to bifurcate ‘theories’ into primordial
or mobilization camps, when it is obvious that both dimensions are involved.12
The idea of late antique and early medieval ethnicity can be seen to float around
these two dimensions, although it is easy to understand why any reference to ‘race’
or socio-biological categories of identity rings a very dangerous tone to historians.
Through the distance between past and present, many have created a theoretical
bridge, a continuum that, more often than not, legitimises modern prejudices (with
racialist or racist overtones) by asserting an unquestionable weight of tradition upon
contemporary ideas.13 In this sense, ‘Germanic people’, for example, if understood in
11 Cf. Abner Cohen, ed., Urban Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 2013); Fredrik W. Barth, ed., Ethnic
Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget,
1970).
12 James McKay, “An Exploratory Synthesis of Primordial and Mobilizationist Approaches to
Ethnic Phenomena,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 5, no. 4 (1982): 401–2.
13 A prime (and extreme) example of the racialist employment of historical ethnicity is the founda-
tion of the Nazi Ahnenerbe, an institute envisioned by Heinrich Himmler as a path to the study of the
archaeology and culture of the ‘superior Aryan race’. Among those funded by the Ahnenerbe, Frazn
Altheim is an illustrious case—the German scholar would become famous for his studies on the Huns
and Central Asian nomadic groups. In: Harun Yilmaz, National Identities in Soviet Historiography: The
Rise of Nations Under Stalin, Central Asia Research Forum (London: Routledge, 2015), 60; Michael
H. Kater, Das ‘Ahnenerbe’ der SS, 1935–1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Munich:
Oldenbourg, 2006), 78–79. For more on the foundation and manifesto of the Ahnenerbe, cf. Heather
A. Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
terms of race and kinship, can effortlessly become an argument in favour of current
nationalism. With that in mind, many scholars employ conscious efforts in order to
neglect the very idea of race or blood kinship in historical studies—by affiliating
themselves to extreme instrumentalist notions of ethnicity, any primordial impera-
tives have to be abhorred. Yet, although this position is justifiable, it does not neces-
sarily propose an explanation or a conceptualisation for ethnicity.
Imposed Ethnicities: The Ethnographic Discourse

of the Status Quo
So far, we could (very simplistically) define ethnicity as a form of social organisa-
tion, based on categorical attributions that classify people according to a perceived
origin and that, in social interaction, are validated by the activation of a variety of
cultural signs that can be socially distinctive.14 This minimal definition can direct
us to the conclusion that ethnicity depends on mutable processes in which partici-
pants identify themselves but are also identified by others. It requires a certain
dichotomy that is established and enforced by cultural differentiation. Ethnic
identity, therefore, is never brought into being merely by endogenous means
(transmission of the ethnic essence through belonging), but is also, always and
inevitably, constructed by the perception of and interaction with those who do
not belong to the specific ethnic group.15 Therefore, the dynamism of ethnicity is
due to the dialectic between exogenous and endogenous definitions of ethnic be-
longing. This realization is fundamental, because the action of extraneous ele-
ments in the definition of identity creates a relation of force; if there is imbalance
between parties, one will impose identity upon the other, while simultaneously
denying the right of self-identification to the other party.16 This is precisely the
case with colonial ethnography or even ethnography that is still contaminated by
colonial or imperialist paradigms. One could go further and say that, indeed, any
ethnography establishes an immediate relation of power: to the ethnographer is
reserved the power of naming, of establishing the categories and defining the ele-
ments that compose the identity.
The dynamic of force between the one that identifies and the one who is identi-
fied is one of the central aspects of neomarxist takes on ethnicity. This approach, for
instance, links ethnicity, its creation, and its diffusion to the functions that different
social classes play in any given society. In other words, this instrumentalist vision
14 Poutignat and Streiff-Fenart, Teorias da Etnicidade, 141.

15 Lee Drummond, “Ethnicity, ‘Ethnicity’ and Culture Theory,” Man 16, no. 4 (1981): 693–96.
16 Poutignat and Streiff-Fenart, Teorias da Etnicidade, 142.
asserts that social roles are intrinsically linked to the perception of ethnicities, and
therefore are also dependent on political and economic (that is, material) circumstan-
ces. Widely employed by scholars such as Wallerstein and Balibar to explain questions
of racism and immigration under a capitalist world system, Neomarxist ethnography
brings an important aspect to the academic debate: the correlation between ethnicity
and hegemonic political entities.17 It postulates that the hegemony of a cultural system,
through politics and economy, will create disparity and more acute perceptions of
ethnicity and belonging. Moreover, although this paradigm is a product of an analy-
sis of current Western society, it seems to be quite fitting for the Roman context:
Rome, as a cultural institution and the most outstanding political force at that
time and place, exerted a level of ‘cultural imperialism’ that forced interaction
with foreign tribes. This interaction took the form of economic regulation, geo-
graphical expansion, military conscription and, as has been said, cultural hege-
mony (Romanisation).18 The unbalanced interaction contrasts two different ontological
systems: the Roman res publica, functioning as a ‘modern state’, and the ‘Barbarian
organisations’, functioning like tribal societies outside the existential boundaries
of the state—if we want to apply a coeval framework of comparison. Hence, this
disparity creates conflicting worldviews and, naturally, generates ethnographic
discourses that could be analogous to the colonial accounts of European and
North American ethnographers recording the customs and aspects of tribal socie-
ties which were suddenly faced with the reality of a ‘civilised’ world. This perspec-
tive has, in other words, a profound implication for ethnographic epistemology:
ethnicity is created and postulated by contrast, comparison, and cultural dispar-
ity. Therefore, ethnicity is understood and imposed by someone else, who is not
part of the communities under anthropological scrutiny. It is not the science of
defining the self, but the science of defining the other.
Hence, departing from instrumentalist standpoints, Balibar and Wallerstein ‘po-
liticise’ their ethnographic analyses in order to cope with world systems, that is, in
order to understand the formation of identity in a completely integrated reality. The
17 Cf. Étienne Balibar and Immanuel M. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
(London: Verso, 1991).
18 The idea of cultural hegemony is certainly complex. It does not only exert its influence in the
Roman past, but also became a matter of debate among modern critical scholars, who started ques-
tioning the political and ideological outlines of the concept of “Romanisation”, cf. Tonnes Bekker-
Nielsen, ed., Rome and the Black Sea Region: Domination, Romanisation, Resistance (Aarhus: Aarhus
Univ. Press, 2006); Richard Hingley, Globalizing Roman Culture: Unity, Diversity and Empire (London:
Routledge, 2005). For a discussion of cultural hegemony and imperialism, cf. Bernd Hamm and
Russell C. Smandych, eds., Cultural Imperialism: Essays on the Political Economy of Cultural
Domination (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005). Although applied to a very different context, the
notions expressed by Sider in relation to cultural dominance and imperialism in a class-based society
are rather interesting, cf. Gerald M. Sider, “The Ties That Bind: Culture and Agriculture, Property and
Propriety in the Newfoundland Village Fishery,” Social History 5, no. 1 (1980): 14–15.
different, unequal forces that act on the construction of ethnic perceptions is then
represented in a more engaged, specialised academic jargon: we see the emergence
of terms like ethno-class, used by neomarxist anthropologists as a concept that does
not dissociate the idea of social role and ethnic perception; and, specifically in the
case of Balibar, the concept of ‘fictive ethnicity’. He says:
I apply the term ‘fictive ethnicity’ to the community instituted by the nation-state. This is an
intentionally complex expression in which the term fiction, in keeping with my remarks
above, should not be taken in the sense of a pure and simple illusion without historical effects,
but must, on the contrary, be understood by analogy with the persona ficta of the juridical
tradition in the sense of an institutional effect, a ‘fabrication’. No nation possesses an ethnic
base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within
them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized—that is, represented in
the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity
of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions.19
The acceptance of fictive ethnicities imposes a great paradigm shift in ethnographic

studies. It postulates that cultural (communal) identities are created to obey a more
powerful, hegemonic narrative. In other words, they are imposed over those who are
identified as belonging to a certain ethnic group. They do not exist as a given fact—
diametrically opposed to the idea of primordialism—but are shaped. In this sense,
categories such as ‘language’ and ‘race’ operate as elements of ‘ethnic cohesion’,
they “express the idea that the national character is immanent in the people and con-
vert the historicity of populations, of their diverse languages and ‘races’, into a pre-
destined fact of nature”.20
Under Balibar’s model, therefore, ethnicity is a narrative—and, in consequence,
the very notion of state, of community, is also a narrative.21 A narrative of force, of
establishing the dominant power responsible for ‘naming’ the categories of identity
and the lines of ethnic belonging, but nonetheless a narrative. Naturally, this as-
sumption has non-written implications of perceptions of reality. It enters a realm of
sociology (or anthropology, or philosophy, or all of the above) in which data is not
necessarily material, but the result of ontological abstractions. To perceive and ac-
cept fictive ethnicities, then, one needs to accept that elements of identity will not
be surmised through observation alone. The image of the lone, undisturbing ethnog-
rapher loses it power when faced with a dynamic reality of socio-politic narratives and
constantly moving ethnicities.
19 Étienne. Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities, edited by Étienne Balibar and Immanuel M. Wallerstein (London: Verso, 1991), 96.
20 Juliana Merçon, “Fictive Ethnicity, Language and Race: A Brief Start for a Longer Discussion on
Schooling and Identity,” Das Questões 1 (2014): 86.
21 Étienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 262–63.
Despite this raison d’être, conceiving ethnicity as part of a ‘fictitious’ narrative

incurs further epistemological implications. The link between national and ethnic
discourse highlights the internal logic of the argument itself, that is, the dialectic
between the ur-justification and the constant fluidity of ethnicity. What does that
mean? In order for it to make sense, the fictive ethnicity requires categories that
bind its participants together and, above all, create an innate sense of belonging.
Through tales of origin, race, and language, the ‘identity narrative’ creates a self-
legitimising tradition that survives superficial scrutiny, as it has the approving hand
of history over it. In other words, the weight of the past and tradition is indispens-
able when creating the sense of shared community. However, at the same time, the
necessity of ‘fitting’ within the wider, hegemonic narrative makes the fictive ethnic-
ity constantly fluid. It has to change and adapt according to socio-political contin-
gencies. Hence, fictive ethnic groups conserve a traditional, immutable category of
identity while, at the same time, regularly changing and adapting themselves as a
group.
What is ethnicity, then? Thus far, it has still seemed possible to agree that eth-
nicity, as is a collection of elements that categorise and circumscribe the identity of
a community. It is comprised of symbols, signs and inter-recognised traits of cul-
ture, all acting in order to label the boundaries of a group as such. However, defin-
ing how ethnicity is created (or even if ethnicity is real) is more complicated. We
saw that ethnicity can be viewed as primordial imperative, that is, an innate socio-
biological, coercive kinship that dictates impulses of belonging; it can be viewed as
a trait of communal interest and self-preservation, a utilitarian element of socialisa-
tion; it can be viewed as an entanglement of both these perspectives; and it can
also be viewed as a narrative of power, of unequal categorisation. In other words, it
is debatable whether ethnicity sprouts from self-identification or is ascribed by the
other onto the self (rather than being the definition of the self in contrast to the other).
In this sense, it is also debatable whether ethnicity is real or a social fiction, that is, a
created, theoretical element. However, despite the many ways whereby it is possi-
ble to interpret and assess ethnicity, it seems plausible to assume that ethnicity is
an important element of human sociability. From the smallest tribe to the most
hegemonic nation, a level of ethnic identification is necessary for the very existence
of societal survival.22 Therefore, the different applications and conceptions of ethnic-
ity are contextual, but the ‘nature’ of ethnicity, that is, communal cohesion, is ahistor-
ical. Consequently, if ethnicity is the academic translation of a human phenomenon,
then it can be ascribed in hindsight—it can be perceived and studied in historically
and chronologically distant groups. It is precisely because ethnicity is a human phe-
nomenon that late antique and early medieval historians cannot shy away from the
scholarly debate. That the societies we are studying are ancient and long departed is
22 Merçon, “Fictive Ethnicity, Language and Race,” 85.

no excuse to avoid the many questions concerning the anthropological discussion of

ethnicity. The employment of this concept cannot lack accuracy, nor can it ignore the
background discussed above. Unfortunately, this happens all too often, as if the chro-
nological gap separating our work from the modern day justified an unspecific, diffuse
usage of the concept of ethnicity.23
Moreover, perhaps with the exception of Balibar (to a certain extent) and cer-
tain branches of ‘anti-colonial’ ethnography, some of these methodological assump-
tions fail to take into consideration the extent to which the written record of ethnicity
creates a reality of its own.24 It is in the very nature of ethnography that both catego-
ries of identity and cultural elements that create a community have to be described,
analysed and recorded. Ethnicity, as perceived in a group, is a written, well-thought
account—it does not represent, in itself, the ‘purity’ of identitarian qualifiers, but it
rather accounts for a cognitive process in which the scientist processes the informa-
tion that he or she considers to be ethnic. If ethnicity is inherently part of a written,
analytical discourse, we could go to the extreme and say that, as a field of knowl-
edge, it is always created through narratives and ascribed by the writer. As a dis-
course, ethnic identity does not exist beyond the limits and boundaries imposed
through the eye of the beholder. As a rhetorical tool, ethnicity is understood and im-
posed by someone else who is not part of communities under the anthropological
scrutiny.
Through the postulation of fictive ethnicity and assuming that the ethnic dis-
course is part of a rhetorical strategy of distinction, we can return to the late an-
tique and early medieval discussion. Without necessarily defining the employed
concepts and perceptions, historians have been close to this definition in the sense
that barbarian identities are mostly understood as construction. Not many would
say that barbarian ethnicities are fictive, but they certainly are seen through lenses
23 However, it has to be said that even among ethnographers, ethnologists and anthropologists,
ethnicity is seldom defined and conceptualised. Poutignat and Streiff-Fernart noted that “a revista
das definições, proposta por Isajiw em 1974 punha em evidência a imprecisão e a heterogeneidade
do conteúdo da noção. Dos 65 artigos sobre a etnicidade passados em revista pelo autor, a maioria
não comportava nenhuma definição explícita, e as poucas que foram propostas pareciam, ao
mesmo tempo, vagas e heteróclitas”. In: Poutignat and Streiff-Fenart, Teorias da Etnicidade, 85.
Out of these 65 articles, Jones affirms that only 13 had some sort of definition, in: Jones, The
Archaeology of Ethnicity, 56.
24 “[…] through socially shared mental representations, social power is reproduced by its discursive
enactment and legitimation”, in: Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and Cognition in Society,” in
Communication Theory Today (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993), 108. Also, cf. Yasmin Jiwani and John
E. Richardson, “Discourse, Ethnicity and Racism,” in Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction,
edited by T. A. van Dijk (London: Sage Publications, 2011), 241–62; Teun A. van Dijk, “Analyzing
Racism Through Discourse Analysis: Some Methodological Reflections,” in Race and Ethnicity in
Research Methods, edited by John Stanfield (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 92–134.
of Roman erudition.25 In other words, some could say that what we have are percep-
tions and receptions of ethnic traits (as if, in general, ethnography itself were not a
systematised perception of a certain ethnic, cultural system). The problem with this
understanding is that it is generally encapsulated in a paradox: textual traits of
identity are constructed, but there must be a level of ‘reality’ that texts cannot
reach. We end up with a dual perception of ethnicity, then—constructed but real.
Before continuing, we first need to understand, as clearly as possible, what ex-
actly the components of Late Antique ethnicity would be. Given that most of our
written information on barbarian identity comes from Greek and Latin texts, the
most prominent category of ethnic identification is the ethnonym. Sometimes, attached
to the ethnonym, we can find physical descriptions, political organisation, religious
practices or social behaviour. Beyond that, another constant aspect highlighted by
sources is the geographical placing of a group. Therefore, ethnonyms and geographical
locations are the staples of late antique ethnicity.26 Although Woolf calls ethnicity “the
creation of new stories in the Roman West,”27 I would argue that folktales are but a
sub-product of ethnic discourse; ethnicity, in its most basic late antique definition,
seems to be the art of naming the other. By attaching a name to a group, people in the
empire were able to understand and process knowledge of other people outside the
boundaries of the imperial reality.
Naturally, this is a very straightforward and basic notion, but it does help us to
understand how ethnicity was categorised. As a genre, ‘ethnography’ was part of ge-
ography: describing people was part of describing lands and, therefore, a way to
comprehend the world.28 Among scholars, even if the geographical scope is some-
times left out of the academic ethnic analysis, the ethnonym seems to be recognised
as the central issue of the debate. Stemming from the usage of ethnonym in the sour-
ces, Wenskus composed what might be the most famous and applied notion of iden-
tity for late antique and early medieval groups. The German scholar, investigating the
process through which Germanic groups were formed and identified, identified socio-
25 Concerning the ‘Gothic identity’, for example, cf. Brian Swain, “Goths and Gothic Identity in
the Ostrogothic Kingdom,” in A Companion to Ostrogothic Italy, edited by Jonathan J. Arnold, M. Shane
Bjornlie and Kristina Sessa (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 228–29; Michael Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars From
the Third Century to Alaric. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 41–42.
26 Emma Dench, “The Scope of Ancient Ethnography,” in Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches,
edited by Eran Almagor and Joseph Skinner (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 257–68; Yasmin Syed,
“Romans and Others,” in A Companion to Latin Literature, edited by Stephen Harrison (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), 371.
27 Greg Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (Malden:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 3.
28 Natalia Lozovsky, “Geography and Ethnography in Medieval Europe: Classical Traditions and
Contemporary Concerns,” in Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern
Societies, edited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J. A. Talbert (Chichester; Malden: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), 311–13.
political cores called Stämme, that is, ‘tribes,’ ‘trunks’ of people sprouting from an an-
thropological tree. The popularised understanding of his monumental work concen-
trated on the notion of the Traditionskern, that is, a nucleus of people of aristocratic
background who would form and perpetuate tribal polities, thus forming the stan-
dard sociological measure for larger units. These larger Stämme would keep cul-
tural cohesion by employing notions of kinship and commonality of origin.29 This
notion found equal amounts of adherence and criticism, and it opened the gates
for an analysis of ethnicity that is, at the same time, symbolic but real. In other
words, the idea of the Traditionskern would allow the historian to perceive the
ethnicity of the Stämme in symbolic, constructed terms, but more or less free from
the Latin and Greek bias. It became a method of scrutiny that seemingly brought
us the closest to actual ethnographic observation.
Wenskus’s method was so widely imitated, then, because it translates into an
academic discourse the desire to unveil the ‘real’ elements of ethnicity of long-gone
people. Looking closely into traditions, names and ‘Germanic’ notions and catego-
ries of identity creation, we could reach a Roman-free ethnography. Yet, as com-
mendable and useful as this method might be, we should bring Balibar’s fictive
ethnicity into this discussion. The Roman Empire, as said before, was undoubtedly
the strongest cultural power during late Antiquity; from the shores of Portugal to
the Black Sea, to Asia Minor and to the gates of Persia, Roman reality was the hege-
monic norm. It was a cultural empire in every sense. For analytical purposes, this
hegemony (or even ‘cultural imperialism’) can be seen as similar to that of modern
nation states; and if nation states are responsible for creating, narrating and enforc-
ing smaller fictive ethnicities, then we can see how Rome exerted enough symbolic
power to create, narrate and enforce smaller fictive ethnicities. This is not to say that,
because ethnographic accounts are confined in Roman sources, we can only receive
a Roman point of view; assuming that fictive ethnicities correspond to an imperial
reality, this is to say that, in fact, Barbarian identities were created, and existed, be-
cause of Roman political, cultural and even existential contingencies. The tribal notion
of barbarian ethnicity is registered because the imperial Weltanschauung required
these narratives to configure in order to configure itself as such: a world system whose
boundaries delimited the frontiers of civility. Certainly, the limit between (a very loose
comprehension of) barbarism and civility is at the heart of any ethnographic account.
In simple terms, observing and describing ethnic traits both require an awareness of
one’s own reality—one that can be contrasted with that of the observed.
In this sense, we can see the ‘Germanic’ category as a by-product of both
the Roman accounts and the modern scholarship (or, better, as a mix of both).
29 Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 2003), 77. Also, cf. Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der
frühmittelalterlichen Gentes (Köln: Böhlau, 1977).
A by-product because both Rome and ourselves, as historians, are embedded in heg-
emonic/dominant narratives and perceptions. The narrative logic in which ethnicity
can operate, thus, renders the ‘Germanic people’ as actors whose very ethnicity, for
our purposes, is fictitious.
The time gap that separates the modern researcher from the past, the reality
that ‘Germanic people’ originated and developed outside of the Roman Empire, and
the nature of the sources available today put us in the shoes of the ‘civilised’. Our
analysis will always be one of ascribing, and we have to be certain of what we un-
derstand as ethnicity and who are these ancient ‘Germans’ before we try to unveil
whichever aspect of these past societies we want to unveil. In other words: I believe
that historians and scholars can write about ‘Germanic people’—as long as they
know what they mean and where they go with that. If ethnicity is to be debated, not
only does it have to be thoroughly understood, but must also be taken into account
alongside the agency of the scholar who examines it.
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Michael J. Kelly
From Rhetoric to Dialectic: The Becoming
‘Germanic’ of Visigothic (Legal-)Literature,
and (Postulating) the End of a ‘Truth’
Many of the readers of this essay are likely familiar with the general historiography of
early medieval law and literature, from the nineteenth century forward, and under-
stand, therefore, the constellation of modern(ist) nationalism, racism, philology, anti-
quarianism, the development of historical ‘science’ and ultimately fascism that
cemented a ‘Germanic’ heritage for the Liber Iudiciorum. Some will also be well-
versed in the history of the late modern poststructuralist (from Saussure) and then
postmodernist turns, as they were taken-up by historical scholarship. During this mo-
ment, scholars employed new forms of reading and representing the early medieval
Iberian past, which recognized the centrality of language to ‘facts’ and so identity.
This led to novel ways of thinking about our abilities to ‘know’ the Visigothic texts
and their meanings, and to challenge modernist claims about heritage. Yet, it stands
that the latest edition—a product of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica—and the
translation of the Liber Iudiciorum—both more than a century old—and much of the
scholarship on the code since, refer to it in problematic categorical ways. Today’s meta-
modernist scholars are reintroducing uncritical, a-theoretical objectivist truth claims,
including ethnographic categories such as ‘Germanic’ (which would be ironic here, if
one still saw historiography essentially as a knowledge that builds upon itself).
The romantic, modern origins of Germanicism may be evident to most scholars,
thanks to recent work in the field. However, these origins were not the a priori product
of the modern world and its classicized ethnography of the Early Middle Ages. This
essay shows that the ideas that forged them are rooted in historical acts of early mod-
ern scholars and their inaugural editions of the Liber Iudiciorum: Pierre Pithou’s
Codicis legum Wisigothorum libri XII, printed in Paris by Sèbastien Nivèlle on the Ides
of March 1579; André Schott’s Hispania Illustratae, printed in Frankfurt by Claudium
Marnium in 1606; and Friedrich Lindenbrog’s Codex Legum antiquarum, in quo conti-
nentur leges Wisigothorum, printed in Frankfurt by Iohannis and Andrea Marne in 1613
(the Madrid edition of 1600 will be noted separately). Pithou rightly created for the
Liber Iudiciorum an Iberian heritage, which was followed in Britain well into the 1800s
and to some degree past that. Schott followed Pithou by further entrenching the narra-
tive of Spanish origins (elaborated by the Madrid edition). The Lindenbrog edition was
the first to cut from the existing Anglo-Belgian-French-Spanish tradition(s) by claiming
explicitly that the Liber Iudiciorum was evidence of ‘the gloriousness of the Germans’
and that it should be published to provide further historical grounding for German
greatness. From this would emerge the ahistoricizing dialectic that we (Visigothic
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-007
128 Michael J. Kelly
scholars) are yet to fully overcome. The category ‘Germanic’ may be a fair one for cer-
tain bodies, languages and truths from early medieval Europe, but it is not so for the
Liber Iudiciorum.
On the ‘Germanic’
Despite convincing refutations of Germanicism as a historical category for the
field, it remains an active part of the fabric of early medieval history, from re-
vamped (Germanicizing-) ethnogenesis theories to regurgitated pre-linguistic-turn
approaches. In a 2016 review article for the American Historical Review, Andrew
Gillett, in analyzing two 2014 books on the Ostrogoths, in which one can find the
claim that the Ostrogoths were the first Germanic state, shows that the
Germanicist view persists. This is perhaps a frustrating discovery for a scholar
who in 2002 published an important volume that deconstructed this very histori-
cal mindset and method.1 Wolf Liebeschuetz, in his 2015 book, East and West in
Late Antiquity, a collected volume of twenty-two of his articles published mainly
between 2006 and 2013, remarkably sidesteps postmodernism and poststructural-
ism in the attempt to reconcile today’s “dogmatic” deconstructive approach to
Germanicism with Reinhard Wenskus’s Traditionskern, maintaining that “ethnic-
ity clearly did matter” and, moreover, that identity is not something one chooses.2
Liebeschuetz’s position is understandable given the commitment to his outstand-
ing research contributions and his complicated personal relationship to German-
ness. However, as in the instances of the two books Gillett reviewed in 2016, it is evi-
dent that the re-emergence, or the lack of disappearance as Walter Goffart would
imply, of the ‘Germanic’ as a supposed legitimate historico-ethnic category in early
medieval studies is not isolated. Take, for instance, Chris Wickham’s employment of
the ‘Germanic’ in his 2005 Framing the Early Middle Ages.3 Archaeological texts do
little better than historical at employing alternative terminology. It is not difficult to
find in new publications of all sorts references to barbarian ‘Germanic’ grave goods,
1 Andrew Gillett, “Review of Jonathan J. Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014) and Massimiliano Vitiello, Theodehad: A Platonic King at the
Collapse of Ostrogothic Italy (Buffalo, NY: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2014),” American Historical Review
121, no. 2 (2016): 635–36; Andrew Gillet, ed., On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in
the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
2 As well as one from 2000, one previously unpublished and one then forthcoming in the Journal of Late
Antiquity. Wolf Liebeschuetz, East and West in Late Antiquity: Invasion, Settlement, Ethnogenesis and
Conflicts of Religion (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2015), 210; xxv–xxvi; 99.
3 Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 80ff.
From Rhetoric to Dialectic 129
sometimes without critical attention paid to the terminology,4 despite the convincing
protestations by Philipp von Rummel in his 2007 volume, Habitus barbarus.5
Germanicizing the Liber Iudiciorum

So, what do these issues of Germanicism and early medieval ‘ethnic’ identities—and
our continuing need to (ever-further) reconsider them—have to do with Visigothic
law, namely the Liber Iudiciorum, the illustrious legal-historical narrative of seventh-
century Iberia? The Liber Iudiciorum, which will be referred to herein most of the
time simply as the LI, was constructed and issued in the middle of the Iberian
Peninsula by people who were born in that land, brought up with local culture and
who relied on a legal and literary tradition endemic to Iberian regions and the
broader Mediterranean. A product of deliberation between diverse Iberian networks,
the LI is the first law-code issued by a Catholic king, in a Catholic kingdom, in the
Iberian Peninsula. Promulgated by the Visigothic King Recceswinth in Toledo and
approved in December AD 653 by all those present at the Eighth Council of Toledo in
the Praetorian Church of Sts. Peter and Paul,6 the LI is the ultimate product of a
4 One can find the sentiment, for example, in Spanish archaeological scholarship, published by
Cambridge: “There is evidence for a similar slow, small-scale migration of both men and women from
more than one region over many generations from the early medieval cemetery of Alegría-Dulantzi in
Spain, where most of the burial population, including individuals with ‘Germanic’ grave goods, appear
to have been born locally.” – L.A. Ortega, I. Guede, M.C. Zuluaga, A. Alonso-Olazabal, X. Murelaga,
J. Niso, M. Loza, and J.A. Quirós Castillo, “Strontium Isotopes of Human Remains from the San Martín
de Dulantzi Graveyard (Alegría-Dulantzi, Álava) and Population Mobility in the Early Middle Ages,”
Quaternary International 303 (2013): 54–63. The authors here recognize the problem with the ter-
minology, yet lack a workable alternative—as scholars across the early medievalist spectrum do—
thereby illustrating the reason for the conference ‘Interrogating the Germanic’ that elicited the
present essay.
5 Philipp von Rummel, Habitus barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten im 4. und
5. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
6 See Chron. 754, 35, and the opening of the council: Anno quinto orthodoxi atque gloriosi et vera
clementiae dignitate praespicui Recesuinthi regis, cum nos omnes divinae ordinatio voluntatis euis-
dem principis serenissimo iussu in basilicam sanctorum apostolorum ad sacrum synodi coegisset ag-
gregari conventum […]. This church would become the site where kings were anointed and blessed
before going off to war, and was raised by Wamba to the status of being its own see. For an edition
of the Chronicle of 754 see José Eduardo López Pereira, Crónica mozárabe de 754: edición crítica y
traducción (Saragossa, 1980), and Chronica Minora, edited by Theodor Mommsen, MGH, AA, 10
(Berlin: Weidmann, 1894), 334–60. For an extended discussion of the Chronicle of 754 see Ann
Christys, Christians in Al-Andalus: 711–1000, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 28–51, esp.
33–35. Citations from and references directly to the collection of Spanish councils are all from, un-
less otherwise noted, the authoritative edition: La Colección Canónica Hispana, edited by Gonzalo
Martínez Díez and Félix Rodríguez. Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra. Serie 3a subsidia (Madrid:
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2002), referred to hereafter as CCH.
historical moment fueled by the literary output of Isidore of Seville.7 The LI was mar-
ginally amended by Visigothic kings—Wamba, Ervig, and Egica—until the end of the
seventh century. Its subsequent history in the Iberian Peninsula is a long one, as it
continued to be used by various communities throughout the territory. In the thir-
teenth century, the Castilian king Fernando III confirmed the contemporary legality of
the LI, and decreed that it be made more accessible to modern-day Spaniards by being
translated into Castilian. His successor, Alfonso X, used the LI to construct Las Siete
Partidas, although still the LI preserved its own separate, and often more preferred,
legal existence.8 It survived the Middle Ages and in 1788 the King of Spain, Charles III,
declared the LI a valid Spanish code of law.9
Despite the obvious Iberianness, one might say, of the Liber Iudiciorum, from
its creation by multiple-generation, local Iberians, in a Mediterranean language
and fueled by an Iberian version of a Mediterranean religion, for issues pertaining
to ‘Hispania’, the LI stands today within a ‘Germanic’ tradition. How did we get to
the point where even in Spain we could find modern scholars associating the LI
with Germans,10 and the foundation in 1943, in Madrid, of a branch of the
Deutsches Archäologisches Institut?11 At what point did the Liber Iudiciorum (which
was ethnicized as Lex Visigothorum in later manuscripts) become categorized as
‘Germanic’? From where did this categorization derive, why, and what are the his-
torical consequences? This article complements the wider project for re-imagining
Visigothic legal literature and its legacy, with the LI as the center of interrogation.
Part of that work involves the creation of a new critical edition of the LI, a project
that I am co-directing with Professor Isabel Velázquez in Madrid and which is con-
stituted by an international collection of scholars.12 The outcome will be the first
post-national(ist), or international, edition of the LI. Another part is to re-examine
and critically historicize the breadth of the manuscript traditions and editions and
7 On this point see Michael Kelly, “Writing History, Narrating Fulfillment: The ‘Isidore-Moment’ and
the Struggle for the ‘Before Now’ in Late Antique and Early Medieval Hispania” (PhD thesis, Univ. of
Leeds, 2014), esp. ch. 1.
8 For discussion on the transmission and influence of the Liber Iudiciorum before the twelfth century
see Yolanda García López, Estudios Críticos y Literarios de la ‘Lex Wisigothorum’ (Alcalá: Universidad de
Alcalá, 1996), 41–151, and for after the twelfth century, Marie R. Madden, Political Theory and Law in
Medieval Spain, 2nd ed. (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2007), 43–98.
9 Los Codigos Españoles concordados y anotados (Madrid: Imprenta de la Publicidad, 1847), I,
xlvii. The firmly Spanish context of the LI in the pre-modern period is a reason I will not discuss the
1600 Madrid edition in this essay. On this see note 38.
10 See Ramón Menendez Pidal’s (who uses Felix Dahn’s Der Könige Germanen) Historia de España
(Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1940), which, one could argue, introduces the concept of the Isidorian
Renaissance advanced by Fontaine.
11 For a discussion see Jamie Wood and Javier Martínez, “New Directions in the Study of
Visigothic Spain,” History Compass 14, no. 1 (2016): 29–38, at 30.
12 The new edition is a project of the early medievalist series Networks and Neighbours and can be
found at: www.networksandneighbours.org/dp.
their (nationalizing) historiographies. In this essay, I elicit the figure-ground of the

LI’s Germanic categorization—early modern historical rhetoric, which framed com-
peting historiographies about the text’s meaning, purpose, and origins, and estab-
lished foundations for a dialectical ‘truth’ about the LI. This is shown by exploring
some of the early transmission and impact of the first editions of the LI: those by
Pierre Pithou in 1579, André Schott in 1606, and Friedrich Lindenbrog in 1613. It is
the relationship of and interdependence between these three editions that reveals
the rhetoric behind the interpretative frameworks they each constructed for the
Liber Iudiciorum.
Pithou’s 1579 Codicis legum Wisigothorum

and Its Framing of the Liber Iudiciorum
Introduction and Manuscripts
Pithou’s edition of the Liber Iudiciorum forms the core of his Codicis legum
Wisigothorum libri XII, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi de Gothis Wandalis et Sueuis,
Historia siue Chronicon, printed in Paris by Sèbastien Nivèlle in 1579. Pithou frames
the LI with a snippet of Procopius’s Gothic Wars concerning the origin of the Goths
and with his own first printed edition of Isidore’s De Origine Gothorum, followed by a
version of the Chronica Regum Visigothorum. Before Pithou, the LI was never prefaced
by any Visigothic histories, or any historical texts by Isidore or his contemporaries.
The Spanish (and one alternative French) manuscript tradition, which Pithou knew
of (and knew of its political uses) but did not use, also prefaced the LI with Isidore’s
texts, but with different texts—the Sententiae, De Fide Catholica, and Etymologies—
which frame the LI religiously as opposed to ethnically.13 Pithou edited and re-
arranged the material of the manuscript according to his own historiographical inten-
tions, placing the LI into an alternative historical narrative, one that was Gothic and
Iberian, not Germanic.14
The oldest extant manuscripts of the Liber Iudiciorum are Vat. Reg. Lat. 1024, and
Paris Lat. 4668. Reg. Lat. 1024 was produced in the late seventh century or the first
half of the eighth century, and was made somewhere in the region around the
13 The early ninth-century MS Paris Lat. 4667, which begins with the Sententiae, the tenth-century El
Escorial D.I.1 has Isidore’s Etymologies and De Fide Catholica, and El Escorial M. III. 2, from 1188,
made in Palencia, is prefaced by the Etymologies.
14 For a general discussion of Pithou as an editor see Wade Richardson, Reading and Varient in
Petronius: Studies in the French Humanists and Their Manuscript Sources (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1993): 40–62.
Pyrenees, probably near Urgel or Cerdaña.15 In the margins of folio 1r of Reg. Lat.
1024 the text is referred to as the Liber Iudiciorum. In the ninth and tenth centuries,
the name was adjusted to reflect desired associations with the Goths, and in the
twelfth century it was referred to as the Forum Iudicum, and later re-promulgated, in
translated form, by Fernando III as the Fuero Juzgo.16 It is not possible to securely
state the original title, or to say for sure if there was one, but the earliest extant evi-
dence suggests that if there was a title it was Liber Iudiciorum.17 Pithou did not have
access to the two oldest extant manuscripts of the LI. The manuscript that Pithou pri-
marily used is what is now MS Paris 4669 (then Colbertinus 2995). From the tenth
century, it is the oldest manuscript to contain the post-Recceswinth laws. Pithou’s
ownership is seen very clearly in the manuscript, for example with Pithou’s signature
at least once and perhaps twice on the manuscript. The manuscript also contains a
note saying that it comes from the library of Pithou and that the text passed from
Pithou to his younger colleague, and family friend, Jean-Auguste de Thou.18
Pithou added a number of glosses in the 4669 manuscript, especially when
dealing with the post-Recceswinth laws. One example of this is an extended note
on LI 9.1.9 (in the manuscript as 9.1.8), a law of Ervig, found at folio 79r. He also
occasionally added the name of the law’s author when it had been left anonymous
in the manuscript. He does this, for instance, at LI 12.3.20 on f. 109r where he jotted
down Ervig as the author. This represents a general pattern in Pithou’s marginalia.
15 See García López, Lex Wisigothorum, 41. It is the only manuscript of the LI not to contain the
later versions of the text, and as such it allows a fair opportunity to see what Recceswinth and
those at the Eighth Council were doing with the text. The oldest manuscripts of the Ervig version
are MS Paris Lat. 4418 and MS Paris 4667, from the ninth and tenth centuries, respectively. On the
manuscripts see García López, Lex Wisigothorum, pp. 35–69.
16 See Fuero Juzgo en latín y castellano (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1815).
17 The council records, which preserve the promulgation of the Liber Iudiciorum, are referred to in the
Chronicle of 754 (ch. 22) as the Liber Canonum and there is evidence to support ‘Liber’ as a popular
literary category in the Visigothic Kingdom during the ‘Isidore-Moment’ (c. 600–660s). The reference
by the anonymous chronicler writing in the 750s is to a text (the LC) of the 630s, which was written
less than a generation before the LI and was part of the same literary-cultural situation (on which see
Kelly, Writing History, Narrating Fulfillment). Nevertheless, there is the problem that the proposed
‘Liber’ category may reflect the chronicler’s terminology for Visigothic texts. However, the oldest extant
manuscript of the LI, the Vat. Reg. Lat. 1024 notes the LI and was likely produced before the Chronicle
of 754, yet the note is in the margins. So, the issue of naming continues. On the naming of the text see
García López, Lex Wisigothorum, 41; Leges Visigothorum antiquiores, MGH Legum, edited by Karl
Zeumer, I (Hanover: Impenisis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1902), xix; Roger Collins, Visigothic Spain: 409–711
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 224; and Roger Collins, “Sicut lex gothorum continet: Law
and Charters in Ninth and Tenth-century León and Castile,” English Historical Review 100 (1985):
489–512.
18 On Paris 4668 and 4669 see also Augustin Millares Carlo and Manuel Diaz y Diaz, Corpus de
Códices Visigoticos, 2 vols. (Canaries: Universidad de educación a distancia centro asociado de Las
Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1999), 1:251, 315.
In analyzing this manuscript, one becomes keenly aware of the ways in which
Pithou re-arranged the textual material according to his own philosophy of history,
the method of the new historians of the French Renaissance. He re-arranged the
content of the manuscript so as to the place the LI into a historical narrative differ-
ent from that which interested the tenth-century scribe. In the manuscript, the LI is
introduced, on folio 1v, with a version of the Chronica Regum Wisigothorum that,
oddly, ends with Recceswinth as opposed to Ervig, who otherwise closes the later-
culus in the manuscript tradition of Paris 4669, reaching back to the ninth century
(MS Paris 4418). The contrasts between the manuscript and how Pithou arranges it
are evident.
Pithou also may have directly engaged with the related manuscript Paris 4418.
This was owned at some point by De Thou and could have been given to him by
Pithou. If Pithou owned it, it is unclear how he used it, or whether he did at all. The
only evident indication that Pithou may have used it is the fact that the content of
Paris 4418 is quite similar to that of the British Library’s MS Egerton 2832, the owner-
ship of which can be traced to the library of Pierre Pithou senior. It was subsequently
owned by Pierre junior and remained in the Pithou family until the mid-seventeenth
century, when it passed to François Desmarest. Desmarest was a priest, canon law-
yer, a Jansenist, and, most crucially here, the nephew of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, from
whose library derives both Paris 4418 (Colbertinus 82) and Paris 4669 (Colbertinus
2995). Colbert had an outstanding library that was directed jointly by Pierre de Carcavi
and Stephanus Baluze. One of Pithou’s 1579 LI editions was owned by Baluze, whose
personal, annotated copy has been in the Bibliothèque nationale de France since
1732.19 Through Egerton 2832 Pithou had, for the purposes of cross-reference with
Paris 4669, access to Paris 4418’s LI, an Ervig version with extraneous laws of that
king, which helps explain Pithou’s particular emphasis on adding Ervig to the
margins of Paris 4669.20
Additionally, Pithou knew about the Escurial manuscripts, although it is un-
likely that he used them. In the dedication to Roaldes, he notes Ramon
Berengar’s twelfth-century political-legal use of the Escurialensis exemplar. This
refers to one of the three Escurialensis manuscripts using the rubric Liber Iudicum
(sic). It is either the tenth-century Codex Escurialensis d.I.1, the 1188 Codex
Escurialensis M.II.3, which also contains Ervig’s laws, or, most likely, the Codex
Escurialensis Z.II.2., written in 1019, given to St. Lawrence in 1585, and which con-
tains a joint list of Gothic and Frankish kings, and a vita of Isidore of Seville.
19 Then called the ‘Royal Library’, changed to the ‘National Library’ in 1792.
20 For more on MS Paris 4418 see Rosamond McKitterick, Books, Scribes and Learning in the
Frankish Kingdoms, Sixth through Ninth Centuries (London: Variorum, 1994), 13–27.
The Early Impact of Pithou’s Codicis

and its Framing of the Liber Iudiciorum
At least twenty-six prints of the original 1579 Pithou remain.21 Most extensively to
date, I have examined the copies at the British Library. The best version of these is
catalogue number 26.g.7, the first of the two 1579 Pithou originals acquired by the
British Museum in the nineteenth century. The original cover of the book is lost.
When the original cover was replaced is uncertain, but the current one, which may
be covering the original, is from the reign of George III (1760–1820). On the cover and
inside the book there are two stamps of George III, on the privilege page and the last
page of the LI text. The stamps as well as early catalogue listings show that the book
was part of the King’s Library of George III and was donated to the British Museum
by George IV (1820–1830) in January 1823.22
Tracing the ownership back further, the signature on the title page may indicate
the first English, if not the actual original owner of the book: Thomas Wentworth, the
first Earl of Strafford (1593–1641). An opportunistic tyrant over the Irish, a royalist op-
posed to war with Spain, Wentworth was condemned to death by the Commons, and
executed in Tower Hill.23 When Wentworth received the book is uncertain, however, it
may have been in the early 1610s when he went to finish his studies in Paris. It is
unclear where the book went after Wentworth’s execution in 1641. It was purchased
by George III for the new King’s Library, indicating that it was never part of the Old
Royal Library, which had been given to the British Museum by George II in 1757. The
Old Royal Library catalogue, in one manuscript at the British Library, confirms that
the Old Royal Library only ever held one copy of the LI, the copy of Pithou’s edition in
André Schott’s 1606 Hispania Illustratae (see below).24 This suggests that the book
may have remained within the Wentworth family until the mid-1700s or even to the
1820s. How it was used and read, and where it came from still need to be traced. By
the lack of notes or comments in the margins, it appears that it was not extensively or
critically engaged with, but this does not mean that it was not read and its contents
somehow applied.
21 Tracing these, discovering potential others, and analyzing each their historical impacts to build
the basis for a ‘comprehensive’ review and international historiography of the Liber Iudiciorum is
an extended work in progress. Copies of the 1579 text can be found throughout Europe, the US, and
Argentina.
22 On the British Museum stamps see Giles Mandelbrote and Barry Taylor, eds., Libraries Within the
Library: The Origins of the British Library’s Collections (London: British Library, 2009). For the Royal
Library catalogue listing of 26.g.7 see Bibliothecae Regiae Catalogus, vol. 4 (London: Guliemus Nicol,
1828), 459.
23 On Wentworth see Ronald Ash, “Wentworth, Thomas, first earl of Strafford (1593–1641),” Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004).
24 See the Catalogue of the Old Royal Library, 1790, BL Add. Ms. 11360.
The other copy of the original 1579 edition of Pithou at the British Library is cata-
logue number 707.i.3. The ownership and readership of BL 707.i.3 is difficult, but not
impossible, to decipher. The most elementary problem for distinguishing ownership
is that the signature of the potential owner is crossed out at the top of the opening
page. A more profound issue is that it is no longer a stand-alone book—as is 26.g.7—
in its original or even sole binding. It was re-bound in a volume of Tracts in 1993, by
Cedric Chivers. Pithou’s volume is bound together with two later texts, also on
Spanish law, published by Johannes Lobkowitz in 1639 and 1643.25 Who first bound
the texts as such, when, and why?
As is evident from the consistent stamping throughout them, the three texts in
the 707.i.3 Tracts collection were acquired by the British Museum at some point
between the years 1757 and 1780, with the Lobkowitz traceable definitively to the
King’s Library. The 1824 catalogue has the texts, but not the 707.i.3 number. The
earliest mention of the 707.i.3 cataloguing identity is in the British Museum
Catalogue of Printed Books printed by William Clowes and Sons in London in
1884. In the catalogue, the texts are already bound together. This means that the
707.i.3 collection must have been created between the years 1824 and 1884. Why it
was created is still uncertain, but it is reasonable to hypothesize that it was the
result of the legacy of the relationship between Visigothic law and contemporary
Iberia, in both Portugal and Spain, as shown in the volume made for Henry Prince
of Wales (discussed in a moment). The 707.i.3 shows that as late as 1884 the LI
was still imagined as part of Iberian history, not Germanic or otherwise, by at
least some scholars and major institutions in Britain. This historiography main-
tained the narrative framework into which the LI was placed by Pithou in his 1579
edition, suggesting a lasting impact and allowing one to trace that influence for-
ward from 1884 with more secure evidence.
1606 Schott, Hispaniae Illustratae III

In 1606 André Schott published volume three of his four-volume Hispania Illustratae:
rerum in Hispania et praesertim in Aragonia gestarum Scriptores varii. It was printed in
Frankfurt by Claudium Marnium and contains a barely-altered version of Pithou’s 1579
LI. The updated year of publication is changed to 1606 and the royal privileges are re-
moved, but Pithou’s dedication to Roaldes remains, as do the snippet of Procopius,26
Isidore’s De Origine Gothorum series and the Chronica Regum Wisigothorum. Schott not
25 Joannes Caramuel Lobkowitz’s Philippus Prudens, Caroli V Imp. Filius, Lusitaniae legitimus Rex
demonstratus, published in Antwerp in 1639, and the De Iure Serenissimi Principi Caroli Secundi,
published in Paris in 1643.
26 In both Greek and Latin.
only maintains the integrity of Pithou’s historical narrative for the LI, placing it firmly
within an Iberian (or rather, ‘Hispanian’) past, but he also expands that tradition by
publishing it in a volume with other texts from greater Hispania, as well as the royal
lineage of Aragon.27
A very significant binding of Schott’s 1606 reprint of Pithou’s LI is British
Library catalogue number BL 593.i.7. As noted, Schott re-printed Pithou’s LI in his
1606 Hispania Illustratae 3, but somebody, at some point, detached only the Pithou
text from that volume, appended it to Schott’s 1608 volume 4, and published it as a
single volume. Who did this and why?
The answer is, to some extent, in the binding and cover and otherwise in the
history of the Old Royal Library. By slim luck, the book still has its original binding
and cover with the royal coat of arms of the Stuarts.28 The insignia is Jacobean, spe-
cifically that of Henry, Prince of Wales.29 It could have been part of the collection of
John, Lord Lumley, which was purchased for £8 by James I for his son Henry in
27 Pithou’s edition of the Liber Iudiciorum closes volume three of Schott’s Hispania Illustratae. The
following, and final, volume of the series contains various chronicles and histories of early medieval
Hispania, compiled in non-chronological order: Lucas de Tuy’s Chronicon, Victor of Tunnuna’s
Chronicon, John of Biclar’s Chronicon, Hydatius’s Chronographia, Eulogius’s martyris opera, and fi-
nally, Luis Nuñez’s medici Hispania sive populorum, urbium, insularum ac fluminum in ea accuratior
descriptior, published only the year before, in 1607, in Antwerp by Jerome Verdussen. Victor was
North African, but is associated with Iberian history. He was exiled for a time in Visigothic Hispania
and was placed by Isidore of Seville within his (highly politicized) list of illustrious men (De Viris
Illustribus 25. On the text’s politics see: Michael J. Kelly, “The Politics of History-Writing:
Problematizing the Historiographical Origins of Isidore of Seville in Early Medieval Hispania,” in
Isidore of Seville and his Reception in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Andrew Fear and Jamie Wood
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2016), 93–110). To some extent Isidore, but especially John of
Biclar, built their chronicles from Victor’s. Ian Wood refers to Victor as a Visigothic chronicler
(Ian N. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 27).
For Victor’s Chronicles see Victoris Tunnunensis Chronicon cum reliquiis ex Consularibus
Caesaraugustanis et Iohannis Biclarensis Chronicon, CCSL 173A, edited by Cardelle de Hartmann and
Roger Collins (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). In volume 1 of Hispania Illustratae, Schott also pub-
lished Alfonso de Cartagena’s 1456 Regum Hispaniae Anacephalosis. Published in the midst of a
neo-Gothic revival in Spain, spurred on heavily by Alfonso’s father Solomon Ha-Levi, who be-
came Pablo Santa María, Alonso’s text declared that the Goths became civilized in Spain where
they ruled as Spaniards (Hispani). The kings of Castile, down to Enrique IV, were, the narrative
goes, the direct descendants of the Visigoths, a claim made as part of a political confrontation
with the King of Denmark. Taking the Spanish argument a step further, Rodrigo Sánchez de
Arévalo (1404–1470) claimed that Enrique IV was the direct descendant of Athanaric! The text
was also part of Schott’s volume 1, demonstrating the exceptional commitment to proliferating
the Gothic-Spanish legend.
28 See Godfrey Goodman, The Court of King James I, edited by John S. Brewer (London: Richard
Bentley, 1839).
29 The author would like to thank the archivist in the Rare Book Collection at the British Library
for her help with dating the coat of arms.
1609, at which time this volume was bound for Henry.30 After Henry’s death in 1612
his collection was mainly preserved and subsequently added to the Old Royal
Library.31
The bringing of the Spanish lawcode into the court’s library was not accidental, a
result of the purchase of the Lumley collection. The texts of the 1609 volume were,
after all, only published in 1606 and 1608, and Lumley’s collection was primarily put
together earlier. Although Henry only used his library for a few years, before his un-
timely demise, he did add books to it piecemeal. The purchase of the Hispaniae
Illustratae may have been related to the Spanish Match, the attempted marriage be-
tween James’s sons—first Henry and then Charles—with Maria Anna, daughter of King
Philip III of Spain. The Old Royal Library did not have any other copy of Pithou’s LI.
The catalogue shows that Spanish law books were of especial interest to the English
monarchy around this time. In it there were three copies of Spanish law printed around
the turn of the sixteenth century. To put that in perspective, the Old Royal Library also
had three copies of general books on English law. This means that Spanish law collec-
tions and English law collections were on equal footing, at least quantitatively.32
Whatever the case, there were at least two forms of Pithou’s 1579 LI in England
in the early 1600s, one in the hands of a noble (Wentworth) and the other in the
house of the royal family. This makes for two very important circles of readership
and political influence for Pithou’s LI, both of which imagined it as a piece of
Spanish history.33
Around this time as well, and increasingly so throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury, the Visigoths found unexpected proponents in England.34 Despite pervasive
vitriol against the Spaniards in some English writing, the Visigothic state structure
provided a model for a judicial system of ‘balanced government’, the “Gothic bal-
ance,” as it was referred to by James Harrington in his 1656 utopian essay The
Commonwealth of Oceana. The idea remained part of the cultural fabric, resurfacing
poignantly during the Napoleonic wars (and among some French thinkers earlier in
the mid-eighteenth century, and later François Guizot). By then it was not only pos-
sible to find the balanced Gothic government within circles of English thinkers
30 Edward Edwards, Libraries and Founders of Libraries (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2009), 162.
31 On the Royal Library, and Henry’s collection, see ibid., Ch. 7.
32 On the Spanish and English laws held by the Old Royal Library see the catalogue (n. 20), 405
and 341, respectively.
33 The association of the Liber Iudiciorum to the history of the Iberian Peninsula, especially to the
early seventeenth-century reigns of the Philips, is a legacy that potentially influenced the nine-
teenth-century production of BL 707.i.3 with its copy of the 1579 Pithou re-bound with laws of the
Philips.
34 See Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952); William Temple, An Introduction to the
History of England (London: Richard Simpson, 1695).
(conservative ones), but the idea had been transmitted back to Spain.35 The
Visigothic laws and state traditions read, discussed, transmitted and sometimes ad-
mired by these English circles were seen as intimately associated with Spain.
1613 Lindenbrog, Codex Legum antiquarum,

in quo continentur leges Wisigothorum
In 1613 Friedrich Lindenbrog’s Codex Legum antiquarum, in quo continentur leges
Wisigothorum, published in Frankfurt by Iohannis and Andrea Marne, provided a
historical framing for the Liber Iudiciorum diametrically opposed to Pithou’s and
Schott’s respective editions. Lindenbrog’s work represents the first Germanicized
edition of the LI.
The edition is prefaced with a dedication to the new emperor Matthew, his fa-
ther, Emperor Maximillian II, and his deceased older brother and imperial prede-
cessor Rudolf II. It was written by Lindenbrog and signed by him July 1613 in
Hamburg. In it Lindenbrog ties together the Pannonians, the emperor and the
Germans, and says that publishing the Visigothic laws (along with other ancient
Germanic laws) will add splendor to the German name (sic nimirum splendor no-
minis Germanici magis ac magis augebitur). The dedication is followed by a grant
(privilegium) of publication, issued by Rudolf II to Lindenbrog. From the privile-
gium it is learned that Lindenbrog was a member of the court, and that the emper-
ors knew of the volume. In it too is the reason for the grant: to demonstrate the
glory (gloriam) of the Germans, both the ancient (veteres Germanorum) and those
descended from them (et qui […] oriundi).
Rudolf’s privilegium is followed by a previous privilegium, an authority
granted in French, by King Henry IV (of Navarre), in Paris, July 25, 1609. It allows
Lindenbrog to publish his collection of laws, which are not here referred to as
German, as they are in Rudolf’s privilegium. This indicates that this edition would
circulate around Europe. The privileges also reveal that the French monarch and
the Holy Roman Emperor saw the text as functioning in different legal and politi-
cal ways. In the grant by Henry, the usefulness of the texts for the judges, bailiffs,
35 See the writing of Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos and the letters between him and Lord Holland
between 1808 and 1811 (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nues-
tros días, Madrid 1846–88 [BAE] 86: 345–479), namely the letter by Jovellanos on May 22, 1809
(BAE 86: 377). For Jovellanos on the grandness of Visigoth law especially see his Discurso en su
recepción a la Real Academia de la Historia, sobre la necesidad de unir al estudio de la legisación el
de nuestra historia y antiguedades (BAE 46: 288–98, 455).
prevosts, justices and other officials is laid-out in the opening sentence. In con-
trast, the grant from Rudolf II highlights the text’s ideological-political function.36
Lindenbrog’s edition marks the beginning of a major historiographical schism
between the German and the French-Flemish, and certain English, traditions. It
contains a dedication to Pithou, but makes important changes to the framing of the
LI. Lindenbrog removes the LI from wider historical discourses, and places it within
an isolated and ‘secular’ legal past. He removes the histories of Isidore that intro-
duce Pithou’s edition, and which are copied by Schott and enhanced with royal
heritages of Spain. Lindenbrog does not see historical texts as relevant to law
codes. The edition starts with the LI, but then goes on to the laws, which he adds,
of the Lombards, Burgundians, Salians, etc., placing the Visigothic law code into
an alternative context and diminished overall position.
Despite a noticeable early attachment to the Pithou tradition of the LI, some
English readers were also fond of the Lindenbrog edition. There are a handful of
copies of it in England, notably via episcopal collections; the Old Royal Library
never contained the Lindenbrog edition.37
1738 Corpus Germanici Antiqui: Entrenching

the ‘Germanic’
From the eighteenth century, the situation in England becomes more ‘Germano-
centric’. From this point forward German editions begin to dominate English reader-
ship, as seen, for example, by the 1738 Heineccii and Georgisch edition used by
Francis Hargrave and bought from his family in 1813 by the British Parliament.
In German-Prussian Magdeburg, in 1738, Johannes Gottlieb Heineccii and Petrus
Georgisch published their Corpus Iuris Germanici Antiqui. Built from Lindenbrog’s co-
dicis legum antiquarum, Heinecci and Georgisch re-arranged the codes entirely. In the
36 After the two grants, there is a dedication by Isaac Casaubon to Lindenbrog, written in archaic
(Homeric) Greek. The author would like to thank Ioannis Papadopolous at the University of Leeds
for his assistance with analyzing the Greek text.
37 In the Cambridge University Library there are two copies. One of them, catalogue number J.8.43,
is from the library of John Moore, the Bishop of nearby Ely. Moore’s collection was bought by King
George I and donated, at Moore’s death in 1714, to the University, whose entire collection was then
only half the size of Moore’s. The other copy, catalogue number Q.*9–19 (C), was originally part of a
college collection. The fact that the Q edition has a number of marginalia could indicate that it, unlike
the other Cambridge copies, was used in a variety of ways, including in the classroom. The third copy
at Cambridge is in the Gonville Library of Caius College. The copies at the University Library and
Gonville are identical. They are typeset the same and have the same page numbers. It is reasonable
that the intricate square stamps of the Q and Gonville indicate that they are connected—most likely
both part of the Moore collection—but subsequently were separated.
Pithou, the LI is framed by the history of the Goths, to which was added (by Schott)
various medieval Spanish family trees in 1606. Lindenbrog cut the history of the
Goths and history of Spain, framing the LI within a number of other ‘Germanic’
codes. Heineccii and Georgisch were the first to remove the LI from its privileged ped-
estal among the early medieval laws. They placed the Salian and Ripuarian laws
first, followed by the laws of the Alemanns, Bavarians and Burgundians, Frisians,
Angles and Warni, Saxons, Lombards, and finally the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, writ-
ten in the title in small print. The Magdeburg editors tried to distance themselves and
the LI from Pithou and the earlier editing and framing of the LI, while their scholarly
contemporary in France, Montesquieu, stuck to reading Pithou, as would subsequent
generations of French scholars, such as the nineteenth-century historian Augustin
Thierry.
Conclusion
This article has presented foundational findings in the attempt to disentangle the
historiography of the Liber Iudiciorum and, moreover, to trace the impact of its edi-
tors on early medieval history.38 We find that 1613 marks a significant break in the
historiography of the LI. When Lindenbrog detached the LI from Iberian history,
from Iberian texts and editions—in opposition to the French, Flemish, and Spanish
editing—he initiated for the LI a Germanic heritage. This imagined heritage re-
mained attached to the editing and the meaning of the LI for many European schol-
ars, from Johannes Gottlieb Heineccii and Petrus Georgisch, who published an
enhanced Germanic edition in 1738, used in the nineteenth century by scholars
such as Felix Dahn, to the editions of Karl Zeumer in 1894 and 1902, which are still
those used today.
By uncovering the early readership and transmission—and the three traditions
of Spanish, French-Flemish and English/British-German—we can begin to topolo-
gize the early modern theories of history and the associated political rhetoric that
lay behind the becoming Germanic of the LI and of the Goths who produced it. By
38 I have excluded specific discussion of the first edition of the Liber Iudiciorum produced in the
Iberian Peninsula, printed in Madrid in 1600. This is because doing so would not add significantly to
the argument about the text’s Germanicization, except to show that the Spaniards also nationalized the
Liber Iudiciorum by extending an Iberian connection with the LI into a Spanish one. Moreover, the edi-
tion is not built from Pithou’s edition in the ways that Schott’s and Lindenbrog’s respective editions
are. On the general history of the Spanish tradition of the LI see Estudios Críticos y Literarios de la ‘Lex
Wisigothorum’, Yolanda Garcia Lopez (Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá, 1996); Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, The
Visigoths in History and Legend (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2009); and Carlos
Petit, Iustitia Gothica: historia social y teología del proceso en la Lex Visigothorum (Huelva: Universidad
de Huelva Press, 2001).
fully explicating the rhetorical roots of the historiographical dialectics of the LI,39
scholars are in good position to re-historicize, and to new-historicize, understand-
ing of the politics behind representations, the LI and other Visigothic literature of
the Isidore-moment.40 And I am in a better position in the co-task of directing a
new edition of the Liber Iudiciorum.
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Wells, Charlotte C., Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1995.
Veronika Egetenmeyr
Sidonius Apollinaris’s Use of the Term
Barbarus: An Introduction
Introduction: “Barbarians” as “Others”
Who (and what) is a “barbarian”? Although centuries old, the term is still used in the
modern world to describe a person, or an act, as savage, as somehow ill-fitting with
the rest of our society. Even if the word “barbarian” continues to carry its pejorative
meaning, it also triggers people’s fascination with the romantic idea of brave ancient
warriors and lost civilizations.1 To research “barbarians” in Antiquity, we have to
overcome these modern preconceptions and go back to the origins. In the light of
the recent challenge regarding the use of terms like “barbaric”, I will focus on how
Sidonius Apollinaris adopted and applied this label in order to distinguish himself
from those he identified as “others”. Specifically, I will examine the frequency with
which and under which circumstances he used it and which stereotypes were applied
to describe “barbarians”. Being aware that ancient authors created a specific con-
struct through their terminology, I nevertheless propose that we should not avoid the
concept of the barbarus in current research, but rather focus on its use and develop-
ment in contemporaneous sources.
The first written evidence can be traced to the Iliad.2 Homer categorized the
Carian people as βαρβαροφώνoι, as people whose language was not understandable
1 I am thinking here of movies like “Conan the Barbarian” or video games like the currently famous
“Clash of Clans”. It goes without saying that the perception of “barbarians” in movies or games
mostly cannot be considered historically correct.
2 In fact, the term goes back to Indian and Sumerian usage. As Rugullis proposed, this onomatopoeic
term already included the connotation that someone foreign—i. e. outside one´s own cultural circle—
is categorized by it: Sven Rugullis, Die Barbaren in den spätrömischen Gesetzen: Eine Untersuchung
des Terminus “barbarus”. Europäische Hochschulschriften: Publications Universitaires Européennes
Serie 3: Histoire et Sciences Auxiliaires (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992), 21. Overviews of the development
of the term barbarus can be found in: Josef Vogt, Kulturwelt und Barbaren: Zum Menschheitsbild der
Spätantiken Gesellschaft. Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse 1 (Mainz:
Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1967), 5–68; Arno Borst, Barbaren, Ketzer
und Artisten: Welten des Mittelalters, 2nd ed. (Munich: Nikol, 1990), 19–31; Elke Ohnacker, Die
Spätantike und Frühmittelalterliche Entwicklung des Begriffs Barbarus: Ein Interdisziplinärer Versuch
der Beschreibung Distinktiver und Integrativer Gesellschaftlicher Konzepte (Münster: LIT, 2003),
40–64; Jeroen Wijnendaele, Romeinen en Barbaren: De ondergang van het Romeinse Rijk in het
Westen (Leuven: Davidsfonds Uitgeverij, 2013), 50–52; Bruno Dumézil, ed., Les Barbares (Paris:
Presses Univ. de France, 2016), 1–116, and Roland Steinacher, Rom und die Barbaren: Völker im
Alpen- und Donauraum, 300–600 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2017), 18–23.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-008
146 Veronika Egetenmeyr
because of its barbar-sound.3 Centuries later, during the conflict of the Hellenes
with the Persian Empire, βάρβαροs—simultaneously a noun and an adjective—starts
to appear in literary texts, like in the work of Herodotus. At the beginning of his
work he announced his intention to write about the marvellous deeds of the Hellenes
and the barbarians, by whom he normally meant Persians4; however, in his view,
Greeks could also act in a barbaric way and a more stereotyped and two-folded view
of the Greek and Oriental world was only developed by Greek authors of the fourth
century B.C. who used the term to describe people that are considered as uncivilized.5
Dumézil interpreted the Persian Wars as the beginning of an ideological discourse
about barbarians and Hall argued that this process of stereotyping was part of the
Greek self-definition, for which language was an important criterion.6 This use of the
term goes back to the assumption that the “barbarian” is different from oneself and is
consequently seen as the “other”, as a person who does not share the same language
or culture and is sometimes even perceived as an enemy. Even though the use of this
label changed within time and circumstances, the preconception of the barbarian as
“the other” remained. The Hellenic dichotomy of the world was transmitted, adopted
and transformed by the Imperium Romanum. Besides the criterion of having knowl-
edge of specific languages, now Latin and Greek, the image of the barbarus was con-
nected to a mostly negative set of judgements that came with the term.7 Even though
3 Homer, Iliadis in Homeri opera, recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit, edited by David
B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen. Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1920): IL 2.867.
4 Herodotus, Herodoti Historiae Tomvs 1, ecognovit breviqve adnotatione critica instrvxit, edited by
Nigel G. Wilson. Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016), 1. A
further example would be Aeschylos with his tragedy “The Persians”; see, furthermore, Charlotte
Lerouge-Cohen, “Chapitre 1: Les Conceptions Greques,” in Les Barbares, edited by Bruno Duméziel
(Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 2016), 2–3; Alain Chauvot, Opinions Romaines Face Aux Barbares Au
IVe Siècle Ap. J.-C. Collections de l’Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg: Études
d’Archéologie et d’Histoire Acienne (Paris: Editions de Boccard, 1998), 9; Chauvot sees Herodotus as
the inventor of a “rhétorique de l’altérite”.
5 Lerouge-Cohen, “Chapitre 1,” 2.
6 Dumézil, Les Barbares, 5: Dumézil states further that this discourse was transmitted to the
Romans. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy. Oxford Classical
Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1.
7 E. g.: Titus Livius, Ab urbe condita. Liber I–V, edited by Robert S. Conway. Scriptorum Classicorum
Bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1936): Liv. 7.23.6; 38.17.3; P. Cornelius Tacitus, Libri
qui supersunt. De origine et situ Germanorum liber II.2, edited by Alf Önnerfors. Bibliotheca
Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1983): Tac. Germ. 13;
Vitruvius, Vitruvii De architectura libri decem, edited by Rose Valentin and Hermann Müller-Strübing.
Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner 1899): Vitr. 2.1.1;
Velleius Paterculus, ex Historiae Romanae libris duobus quae supersunt, edited by Kurt Stegmann von
Pritzwald. Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1933):
Vell. 2.117.3.
the fascination with “barbarians” as “noble savages” is traceable in our sources,8

the discourse on “others”, be it via images (such as those found on Trajan’s
Column) or in literary texts, increasingly became an instrument to display not
only the “barbaric” and dangerous nature of the gentes externae, but also to
shape Roman self-conception.9
Often, “barbarians” were assumed to live in barbaricum—on the other side of the
limes, outside the Roman Empire’s borders.10 Therefore, it seemed easy to define who,
in Roman times, must have been considered a barbarian and who a Roman. It would
appear that everyone in possession of Roman citizenship and/or living within the limits
of the Empire was considered to be Roman. However, scholars like Kulikowski,
Chauvot and Elton have proven that this understanding of the Roman borders is too
simplistic—especially for Late Antiquity.11 It is undeniable that the Roman Empire
actively constructed physical boundaries like the limes. Nevertheless, these borders
presented not a fixed demarcation line between Romans and non-Romans.12 The dis-
tinction of Romans from “barbarians” must instead be interpreted as a “mental” border;
it is a construction based on centuries-old traditions that created prejudices and stereo-
types.13 The image of a brute savage, without education or laws, was depicted through-
out Roman antiquity. This was a “rhetoric of barbarism”, used over time, that created
8 E. g. See above: Tac. Germ. 2.2.

9 Philipp von Rummel, Habitus barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten im 4. und
5. Jahrhundert. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde 55 (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2007), 65–66; cf. Allan A. Lund, Zum Germanenbild der Römer: Eine Einführung in die
Antike Ethnographie (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1990), 30; Liza Méry, “Chapitre 2:
Rome et les Barbares: de Origines (753 av. J.-C.) à l’Apogée de l’Empire (II2 siècle apr. J.-C.),” in Les
Barbares, edited by Bruno Duméziel (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 2016); Chauvot, Opinions
Romaines, 9, 42 and 209; Iain M. Ferris, Enemies of Rome: Barbarians through Roman Eyes (Stroud:
Sutton, 2000), 178.
10 E. g., Jean-Jacques Aillagon, “The Barbarians and Rome,” in Rome and the Barbarians: The Birth
of a New World, edited by Jean-Jacques Aillagon (Milano: Skira, 2008), 44; Aleksander Bursche,
“Trade Relations between Rome and the Barbarians,” in Aillagon, Rome and the Barbarians, 153.
11 Chauvot, Opinions Romaines, 10; Hugh Elton, “Defining Romans, Barbarians and the Roman
Frontier,” in Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity, edited by Ralph. W. Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan
(Aldershot: Variorum, 1996): 126–35; esp. 126. On borders in late Antiquity, see Michael Kulikowski,
“Ethnicity, Rulership and Early Medieval Frontiers,” in Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis:
Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by Florin Curta. Studies in the Early Middle
Ages 12 (Turnhout: Brepols 2005), 247–54.
12 Besides the fact that a border is always a space where exchange and trade takes place and that
a border exists to be crossed; cf. von Rummel, Habitus barbarus, 66.
13 For both sides! Cf. however Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), 25: “[…] stereotypy is a process which shows little con-
cern for facts even when they are available.”
specific stereotypes to describe the non-Roman “others”.14 These stereotypes were still
used in Late Antiquity, mainly to draw a contrast against the “civilized” (the “Roman”)
world.15
Scholars researching the barbarians and the Germanic in classical studies often
adopted their point of view from their sources, and thus described these groups not
only as inferior to the Romans but even as desperate to become part of the Roman
Empire.16 First, this thinking implies that during a cultural contact always an inferior
group must have existed and that this group was mostly described as savage, culture-
less and somehow “barbaric”.17 Said demonstrated in Orientalism that the Orient,
which was believed to be and depicted as if it were inferior by the Western world,
was created through a discursive strategy to strengthen Occidental self-confidence.18
Likewise, the construction of “barbarians” for Greek, or later, Roman society can be
explained, and postcolonial theory especially can help us to understand the con-
struction and perception of “others” and to deconstruct the discourses towards
them as traceable in text and images. Second, it must be stated that the barbarians
or the Germanic did not exist as cultural entities. This mode of thinking presents a
dichotomy of the world between “good” and “bad”, “West” and “Orient” or the
“self” and the “other”.19 For decades, scholars have tried to identify “others” that
14 Cf. Michael Kulikowski “The Accidental Suicide of the Roman Empire,” paper delivered at
Washington University (1st March 2012), accessible via the Washington and Lee University channel.
Available at: https://youtu.be/ltjH6HPs7vg, accessed May 2017.
15 E. g.: Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum Libri qui Supersunt, edited by Wolfgang Seyfarth.
Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1978); Vegetius
Renatus Flavius, Epitoma Rei Militaris, edited by Alf Önnerfors. Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et
Romanorum Teubneriana (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1995); Richard Burgess, “The Gallic Chronicle of 452: A
New Critical Edition with a Brief Introduction,” in Society and Culture in Late Antique Gaul: Revisiting
the Sources, edited by Ralph W. Mathisen and Danuta Shanzer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 52–84.
16 E. g., Borst, Barbaren, Ketzer und Artisten, 19–31; Patrick Amory, People and Identity in
Ostrogothic Italy, 489–554 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 1997): i: “We are the prisoners of
preconception and periodization”; further: “Despite decades of scholarship on the barbarians, we
cannot easily escape these preconceptions, themselves inherited from the literary and artistic de-
pictions of Graeco-Latin ethnography.”
17 Jean-François Staszak, “Other/Otherness,” in International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography,
edited by Nigel. J. Thrift and Rob Kitchin (Amsterdam: Elsevier 2009), 44; Adi Hastings and Paul
Manning, “Introduction: Acts of Alterity,” Language and Communication 24, no. 4 (2004): 291–309,
Tobias L. Kienlin, “Fremdheit — Perspektiven auf das Andere: Zur Einführung”, in Fremdheit —
Perspektiven auf das Andere, edited by Tobias L. Kienlin. Kölner Beiträge zu Archäologie und
Kulturwissenschaften 1, Universitätsforschungen zur Prähistorischen Archäologie 264 (Bonn:
Habelt, 2015), 1–8.
18 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1978): 3.
19 Cf. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993): xxv: “All cultures
are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily
differentiated, and unmonolithic”. This idea was further developed by Homi K. Bhaba, The
Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 38.
can be traced in Latin sources as Germani and barbari. They have gradually real-
ized that these terms were used in Antiquity as well as in the modern day to de-
scribe people who seemed to belong to a similar cultural background, but who
never existed as a “barbaric” or “Germanic” collective. Therefore, it must again be
reiterated: “barbarians” were created as a tool for Roman self-identification and
they are a construct of Roman ideology, which served as an instrument for Roman
imperialism.
Following postcolonial theory, we must recognise that Roman authors per-
ceived and described “barbarians” as an inferior group. Since we predominantly
have the Roman perspective, the “barbarians” remain without a voice. Being aware
of this problem forces us to conclude that the “barbarians” are in fact a Roman dis-
cursive construct, traceable in images and texts. It is therefore not surprising that
the question of whether or not to use such terms as “Germanic” and “barbarian”
forms part of an ongoing controversy.20 Pohl, for example, has observed that “eth-
nic terms carry their load of emotions and preconceptions and tend to evoke mis-
leading ideas” and consequently should be avoided.21 In that case, terms like
Roman or Greek should be avoided as well, since they can also be interpreted as
ethnic nomenclature. Furthermore, it must be considered that, not only but espe-
cially in Late Antiquity, terms like Romanus or Romanitas shared the same
biases as germani or barbari, since it was less and less clear who or what was
considered to be “Roman” or “barbarian”.
Sidonius and the term “barbarus” in his letters

barbaros vitas, quia mali putentur; ego etiamsi boni22
Sidonius Apollinaris, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat and later the bishop of Clermont-

Ferrand, has for decades, on the basis of the above statement, been considered to
have despised all barbarians.23 This conclusion was drawn since he presents bar-
barians in his work in a rather traditional way—the above being a fine example.
20 E. g., Jörg Jarnut, “Germanisch: Plädoyer für die Abschaffung eines obsoleten Zentralbegriffes der
Frühmittelalterforschung,” in Die Suche nach den Ursprüngen, edited by Walter Pohl. Forschungen zur
Geschichte des Mittelalters 8 (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW, 2004), 107–13.
21 Walter Pohl, “Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies,” in Debating the Middle Ages:
Issues and Readings, edited by Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Oxford: Wiley, 1998), 15.
22 Sidonius Apollinaris, Gaii Sollii Apollinaris Sidonii epistulae et carmina, edited by Christian
Luetjohann. Monumenta Germanie Historica Auctores Antiquissimi 8 (Berlin: Weidmann 1887):
Sidon. epist. 7.14.10: “You avoid barbarians because they are considered to be bad; I avoid them even
if they are considered good.”
23 Nora. K. Chadwick, Poetry and Letters in Early Christian Gaul (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1955), 321;
Helga Köhler, C. Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius: Briefe Buch 1. Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar.
However, the hypothesis which I intend to demonstrate below is that Sidonius did
not despise all barbarians despite frequently drawing upon well-known Topoi de-
rived, to a certain extent, from perceptions of barbarians common throughout the
Roman Empire. Even when Sidonius employed such traditional stereotypes and
prejudices, his view on the “barbaric other” was not entirely restricted to classical
conventions.24
The 24 poems and his 146 letters—revised and circulated by the author himself
—report, on the one hand, on the events of his time, on the other hand, about his
own life, which was of course highly influenced by these events.25 Sidonius narrates
the political transformation of his region and describes how the barbarians that
were present in Gaul, technically as federates of Rome, became increasingly power-
ful.26 We can only speculate that the letters were circulating during a period when
Bibliothek der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, Reihe 2 N.F. 96 (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag,

1995), 55.
24 For Sidonius and his work see, e. g., Courtney E. Stevens, Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); Jill Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome A.D. 407‒485
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); Joop A. van Waarden and Gavin Kelly, eds., New Approaches to
Sidonius Apollinaris (Leuven: Peeters, 2013). See also Gavin Kelly and Joop van Waarden, eds., The
Edinburgh Companion to Sidonius Apollinaris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2020). The most
recent work on Barbarians in his letters is Sara Fascione, Gli “altri” al potere: Romani e barbari nella
Gallia di Sidonio Apollinare, Biblioteca Tardoantica 12 (Bari: Edipuglia, 2019) and James M. Harland,
“Imagining the Saxons in Late Antique Gaul,” in Sächsische Leute und Länder: Bennenung und
Lokalisierung von Gruppenidentitäten im ersten Jahrtausend, edited by Melanie Augstein and Matthias
Hardt, Neue Studien zur Sachsenforschung 10 (Braunschweig: Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum,
2019), 45–56.
25 David A. Jiménez, “Sidonius Apollinaris and the fourth Punic War,” in New Perspectives on Late
Antiquity, edited by D. Hernandez de la Fuente (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011),
169; Frank Kaufmann, Studien zu Sidonius Apollinarises, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe 3,
Geschichte und ihre Hilfswissenschaften 681 (Frankfurt: 1995), 35; Joachim Küppers,
“Autobiographisches in den Briefen des Apollinaris Sidonius,” in Antike Autobiographien: Werke —
Epochen — Gattungen, edited by Michael Reichel, Europäische Geschichtsdarstellungen 5 (Cologne:
Köhlau, 1995), 254; Michaela Zelzer and Klaus Zelzer, “Retractiones: Zu Brief und Briefgenos bei
Plinius, Ambrosius und Sidonius Apollinaris,” in Alvarium: Festschrift für Christian Gnilka, edited by
Wilhelm Blümer, Rainer Henke and Markus Mülke, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum:
Ergänzungsbände 33 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2002), 393‒405; Ian N. Wood, “Continuity or Calamity?
The Constraints of Literary Models,” in Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? edited by John
Drinkwater and Hugh Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 9‒18; John Percival,
“Desperately Seeking Sidonius: The Realities of Life in Fifth-Century Gaul,” Latomus 56 (1997):
279‒92; Ralph W. Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of
Transition (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1993).
26 For an overview of Gaul in the fifth century see, for example, Guy Halsall, Barbarian
Migrations and the Roman West, 376‒568 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 257‒319;
Jean Le Guillou, “Sidoine Apollinaire. L’Auvergne et Son Temps,” Revue d’Auvergne 115, no. 4
(2001): 34‒37; Herwig Wolfram, “The Goths in Aquitaine,” GSR 2, no. 2. (1979): 153‒68; John
Drinkwater and Hugh Elton, eds., Fifth-Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity? (Cambridge: Cambridge
the Roman administration withdrew from Gaul and acknowledged Euric, the
Visigothic king, as ruler over its southern part.27 Thus, the purposes of Sidonius’s
letters are also a matter of continuous debate, since they have partly an apologetic
and partly an autobiographical character. Many scholars have suggested that
Sidonius published them to keep good Latin alive, to comment on Roman culture,
or to maintain his Gallo-Roman aristocratic way of life.28 Whatever his intention,
one thing appears clear: as a member of the elite, engaged in politics, Sidonius was
influenced by the new political situation which was, in his view, caused by
“barbarians”.29
As Kaufmann and Gerth have already observed, Sidonius rarely uses the term bar-
barus in his letters. Gerth has identified the use of the term and its derivations 26
times, and concludes that barbarians must not have played an important role in
Sidonius’s texts due to the sparse use of the term compared to the total number of let-
ters.30 This assumption led me to the idea of examining the use of the term “Roman”
and its derivatives in the letters with the aid of OCR, and this could only be demon-
strated 19 times. According to Gerth’s logic, this would mean that Romanness or the
Roman state must not have played an important role in the letters; in fact, Sidonius
does not explicitly refer to himself as a Roman at any point! It is thus clear, that the
Univ. Press, 1992); Steffen Diefenbach and Gernot M. Müller, eds., Gallien in der Spätantike und
Frühmittelalter: Kulturgeschichte einer Region (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); Christine Delaplace, La
fin de l’Empire romain d’Occident: Rome et les Wisigoths de 382 à 531 (Rennes: Presses Univ. de
Rennes, 2015), 151–256.
27 Scholars still have problems with precisely dating the letters, since they were not collected in a
chronological order. Jean Le Guillou, “Sidoine Apollinaire,” 23; Ralph W. Mathisen, “Dating the let-
ters of Sidonius,” in New Approaches to Sidonius Apollinaris, with Indices on Helga Köhler, C. Sollius
Apollinaris Sidonius, Briefe Buch 1, LAHR 7, edited by Joop van Waarden and Gavin Kelly (Leiden:
Peeters, 2013): 221–48. For the role of the Visigoths in the Auvergne and in Gaul more generally,
Delaplace, La fin de l’Empire romain d’Occident, 215–281.
28 Küppers, Autobiographisches in den Briefen des Apollinaris Sidonius, 256 and 275; Jill Harries,
“Sidonius Apollinaris, Rome and the Barbarians: A Climate of Treason?” in Drinkwater and Elton,
Fifth-Century Gaul, 299–300; see further Sigrid Mratschek, “The Letter Collection of Sidonius
Apollinaris,” in Late Antique Letter Collections: A Critical Introduction and Reference Guide, edited by
Cristiana Sogno et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2016), 309: “[…] as the invasion progressed,
Roman aristocrats, living in the secluded splendour of their estates, felt increasingly cut off from one
another. The act of letter writing became a “survival strategy”, establishing oases of Romanitas and
enabling the day-to-day maintenance of friendships and social intercourse that marked class and cul-
tural solidarity.”
29 I therefore disagree with Everschor, who states: “Letzlich spiegeln sich also Veränderungen auf
politisch-gesellschaftlicher Ebene in keiner Weise in der Briefliteratur wieder.” Britta Everschor, Die
Beziehungen zwischen Römern und Barbaren auf der Grundlage der Briefliteratur des 4. und
5. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Habelt 2007), 359.
30 Kaufmann, Studien zu Sidonius Apollinaris, 168; Michael Gerth, Bildungsvorstellungen im
5. Jahrhundert n. Chr.: Macrobius, Martianus Capella und Sidonius Apollinaris. Untersuchungen zur
Antiken Literatur und Geschichte 111 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 212, esp. n. 482.
frequency with which a term is used alone cannot, and must not, indicate content or
weighting of content. Although Sidonius never refers to himself as a Roman, but al-
ways as an Arvenian, he nevertheless sees Rome as the centre of the world (vertex
mundi) and refers to it as patria libertatis.
[…] si tamen senatorii seminis homo, qui quotidie trabeatis proavorum imaginibus ingeritur,
iuste dicere potest semet peregrinatum, si semel et in iuventa viderit domicilium legum, gymna-
sium litterarum, curiam dignitatum, verticem mundi, patriam libertatis, in qua unica totius
orbis civitate soli barbari et servi peregrinantur.31
This passage also brings us to the first observation on Sidonius’s use of the term bar-
barus. As he describes to his reader, only slaves and barbarians remain outside this
community and, even if they live within Rome—and this means the Roman Empire in
its entirety—are regarded as foreigners.32 Consequently, Sidonius used the term bar-
barus in this letter in the traditional way, as described at the beginning of the article:
to categorize gentes externae. Sidonius limits them in his depiction and consciously de-
fines them “others”.
We must consider why Sidonius obviously uses the term barbari so infre-
quently, and I propose in this paper five reasons: First, the use of gentile-names
instead; second, traditional stereotyping alone marks someone as “barbaric”; third,
the replacement of the term with haeresus; fourth, the expression of the “barbaric”
through metaphors and finally, because Sidonius focused rather on the description of
individuals than on entire groups. In the following, I want to shortly outline these as-
sumptions point by point.
First, Kaufmann has stated in his work that Sidonius describes individual gen-
tes (such as Visigoths, Burgundians and Saxons), rather than “barbarians”, per se.
In his opinion, this is due to the fact that Sidonius described in more detail those
gentes with whom he was personally familiar. In the poems of Sidonius especially,
non-Roman groups characterized as “barbarians” occupy a special position. They
appear as counterparts to the Roman population. Sidonius presents them to the
reader as foreign, hostile barbarians and thematises them in each of the three impe-
rial panegyrics. In the panegyric on Avitus, in which the personified Roma asks
Jupiter to alleviate their suffering (meant is the suffering caused by “barbarians”)
with a capable emperor, and in the one on Majorian, who is supposed to save the
Empire (and here especially North Africa) from the Vandals. In Sidonius’s panegyric
for Anthemius, the latter is asked to support Ricimer in order to defeat the
31 Sidon. epist. 1.6.2: “[…] as if a man of the senatorial house, dressed in a Trabea every day and
confronted with the images of his ancestors, could nevertheless rightly claim that he had travelled,
if he had seen in his youth the place of the laws, the grammar school of literature, the curia of the
senators, the centre of the world, the hometown of freedom, in which as the only city in the whole
world only barbarians and slaves are foreigners.”
32 Sidon. epist. 1.6.2.
“barbarians”.33 “Barbarians” offer the narrative background and counterpart to the

emperor, who is glorified.34 Likewise, in the epistles, Sidonius predominantly de-
scribes certain, non-Roman associations (primarily Visigoths and Burgundians),
some of which he explicitly refers to as “barbarian”, thereby indicating his percep-
tion of them.
This brings us to the second point: his depictions of “barbarians” in the letters
and the poems, are filled with stereotypes; they are a constructed discourse in the
classical sense of the term. This is visible through the frequent adoption of terms
like feriae, bestiae, animalia, or adjectives belonging to the family of ferox, which
are present when Sidonius writes about “barbarians”. He therefore uses already ex-
isting clichés for their depiction and follows in the basics the scheme of Cicero, who
differentiated barbarians from Romans by group affiliation (natio), language (lin-
gua), character (natura) and customs (mores).35
The stereotyping of “barbarians” is visible in his letter to Agricola, in which
Sidonius reports on the Visigothic leader Theoderic II, who (although he himself is
described rather in a civilized manner) is guarded by a group of fur-clad men: pelli-
torum turba satellitum ne absit.36 The fur-bearing pack of bodyguards are always
present and stand in contrast to Theoderic II, whose portrait is introduced in the
letter with his dignitas. The Visigothic guards are described with the habitus bar-
barus common in the literature and only this indication is sufficient to make clear
to the reader that it is ‘real’ barbarians that are described here,37 since fur clothing
is a barbaric attribute with the help of which barbarians were traditionally depicted
33 See Sidon. carm. 7.114‒18; 2.377‒386.

34 For “Barbarians” in the panegyrics see: Kaufmann, Studien zu Sidonius Apollinaris, 117–23,
140–41; 153–56; Ian Wood, “The Term ‘barbarus’ in Fifth-, Sixth-, and Seventh-Century Gaul,”
Ethnizität. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 41 no. 164 (2011): 39–50; esp. 42.
35 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Sämtliche Reden 4. Zweite Rede gegen Verres (drittes Buch, viertes Buch,
fünftes Buch), edited by Manfred Fuhrmann (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 2011): Cic. verr. 2.4.112.
36 Sidon. epist. 1.2. This letter has often been the focus of academic studies, e. g.: Helga Köhler,
“Der Geist ist offenbar im Buch wie das Antlitz im Spiegel: Zu Sidonius epist. I 2, III 13, VII 14,” in
Mousopolos Stephanos: Festschrift für H. Görgemanns, edited by Manuel Baumbach, Helga Köhler
and Adolf M. Ritter (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 1998), 333‒45; Kaufmann, Studien zu Sidonius
Apollinaris, 108–17; Marcel Reydellet, La Royauté dans la Litérature Latine de Sidoine Apollinaire à
Isidore de Séville (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1981), 49–73; Isabella Gualandri, “Figure di
Barbari in Sidonio Apollinare,” in Il Tardoantico alle Soglie del Duemila: Diritto Religione Società.
Atti del quanto convegno nazionale dell’Associazione di Studi Tardoantichi, edited by Giuliana
Lanata (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2000), 105‒29, esp. 107–14; Hagith S. Sivan, “Sidonius Apollinaris,
Theoderic II, and Gothic-Roman Politics from Avitus to Anthemius,” Hermes 117 (1989): 85‒94.
37 For a critical examination of the so-called habitus barbarus, see von Rummel, Habitus Barbarus;
Christoph Eger, “Habitus Militaris or Habitus Barbarus? Towards an Interpretation of Rich Male
Graves of the 5th Century in the Mediterranean”, in Aristocrazie e Società fra Transizione Romano-
Germanica e Alto Medioevo: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi Cimitile-Santa Maria Capua
Vetere, 14–15 giugno 2012, edited by C. Ebanista and M. Rotili (San Vitaliano: Tavolario, 2015), 214–36.
in literary discourse.38 In addition to the written sources, this characteristic is one of

the most important markers for the pictorial discourse in order to clearly classify bar-
barians as “others”. Nevertheless, von Rummel correctly emphasises that the context
must be included in both the literary and the pictorial programme in order to gain
further insights from the fur wearers.39 The guard is related to a military context;
men are described who are subordinated to a federal leader. In leaving them outside
the door, Sidonius literarily establishes a boundary between the non-Roman leader
and his “barbaric” mercenaries, with their bad behaviour (grumbling).40
Even in times of peace, Sidonius describes the appearance of “barbarians” as
frightful, like in letter 4.20, where he reports on the entrance of Sigismer: regulorum
autem sociorumque comitantum forma et in pace terribilis.41 This also corresponds to
literary conventions, where barbarians are often described as wild warriors.42
Furthermore, in the literary tradition, barbarians are often depicted as animals
rather than humans, as in the cases of depictions by Velleius Paterculus or
Ammianus Marcellinus.43 This imago can be found in Sidonius as well. For exam-
ple, in his letter to the aristocrat Probus, where Sidonius lists different barbaric
tribes and comparing them to wild animals.44
However, the greatest differences between “barbarians” and “Romans”, between
uncivilized and civilized people, are those of language and education — paideia.
Prudentius defined this differentiating marker as follows: sed tantum distant Romana
et barbara quantum quadrupeds abiuncta est bipedi et mutuae loqunti […].45
38 E. g. Tac. Germ 17.2: gerunt et ferarum pelles (they wear the skins of wild animals); furthermore,
in Sidonius carm. 5.562–63; 7.219; 7.349; 7.456; epist. 7.9.19.
39 von Rummel, Habitus barbarus, 205, 199–206.
40 Sidon. epist. 1.2.4: […] ne obstrepat, eliminatur, sicque pro foribus immurmurat exclusa velis, in-
clusa cancellis.
41 Sidon. epist. 4.20: “However, the appearances of the young leaders and their companions were
terrifying, even in peace.”; see von Rummel, Habitus Barbarus, 173–80.
42 Amm. 16.44: Sed violentia iraque incompositi, barbari in modum exarsere flammarum, nexamque
scutorum compagem, quae nostros in modum testudinis tuebatur, scindebant ictibus gladiorum assi-
duis; Tac. Germ. 4: […] truces et caerulei oculi, rutilae comae, magna corpora et tantum ad impetum
valida […].
43 Velleius Paterculus, Historiae ad M. Vinicium consulem, edited by W.S. Watt. Bibliotheca scrip-
torum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana (Leipzig: Teubner, 1988), 117.3: […] qui nihil praeter
vocem membraque haberent hominum […]; Amm. 31.15.2: Luce vero coeptante victores ut bestiae san-
guinis inritamento atrocius efferatae […].
44 Sidon. epist. 4.1.4: […] Sygambros aut ad Caucasigenas Alanos aut ad equimulgas Gelonos, besti-
alium rigidarumque nationum corda cornea fibraeque glaciales procul dubio emollirentur egelidaren-
tur neque illorum ferociam stoliditatemque, quae secundum beluas ineptit brutescit accenditur,
rideremus contemneremus pertimesceremus.
45 Aurelius Prudentius Clemes, Carmina, rec. et prolegomenis, commentario critico, indicibvs instrvxit,
edited by I. Bergman. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 61 (Vienna: Verlag ÖAW, 1926,
rep. 2013), 2.816–817: “But Roman and barbarian differ from each other in the way that animals must
be distinguished from humans and speechless from speaking people.”
Consequently, it is not a surprise that classical differentiation through language can

frequently be encountered in the letters.46 Following Sidonius, it seems that literary
knowledge was the only indicator of nobilitas, as he wrote in a letter to Johannis, a
grammar teacher in Aquitania, who continued to teach Latin under Visigothic rule:
[…] in medio sic gentis invictae, quod tamen alienae, natalium vetustorum signa retinebunt: nam
iam remotis gradibus dignitatum, per quas solebat ultimo a quoque summus quisque discerni,
solum erit posthac nobilitatis indicium litteras nosse.47
In this quotation, the antithesis of gentes invictae and obilitatis litteras nosse is clearly
visible. Additionally, it indicates again that Sidonius uses different adjectives in
order to mention “barbarians” without using the term itself. In this episode, the “bar-
barians” are characterized as an invincible people (gentis invictae), a stereotype trace-
able in Ammianus Marcellinus, who described the Goths in similar ways in his
discussion of the battle of Adrianople.48 As shown, Sidonius uses already existing
clichés for “barbarians”, with which we are already familiar from such authors as
Tacitus, Velleius or Ammianus, and in their depictions the barbarians are generally
treated more like wild beasts than human beings.
Third, the absence of the term barbarus can be explained through its close con-
nection to descriptions of heretics. Comparisons of late antique and early medieval
writing make it clear that notions of the barbaric and of the haeresus/paganus be-
came synonymous.49 Sidonius had adopted this conflation as early as the fifth cen-
tury, as it is clearly discernible in his letter to the bishop Basil of Aix-en-Provence.
The bishop was admired by Sidonius on account of his success against the Goth
Modaharius, who followed the heretical Arian faith. Modaharius was killed by Basil
with a flood of verbs and the blade of faith, proving, for Sidonius, the superiority of
the Nicaean faith:
[…] quo polleas igne sensuum, fonte verborum, qui viderim Modaharium, civem Gothum, haere-
seos Arianae iacula vibrantem quo tu spiritalium testimoniorum mucrone confoderis […].50
46 E. g. Sidon. epist. 2.10.1; 4.17.1‒2; 5.5.3.

47 Sidon. epist. 8.2.2: “[…] in the middle of this invincible but foreign people, they [contemporaries and
successors] shall keep the markers of their ancient birth status: because ranks and honors, through
which we used to distinguish the best man from the worst, are already removed, henceforth the only
indication of nobilitas will be the knowledge of literature.”
48 Amm. 31.15.2.
49 See Lieven van Acker, “Barbarus und seine Ableitungen im Mittelaltein,” in Archiv für
Kulturgeschichte 47 (1965): 125–40; esp. 137–40.
50 Sidon. epist. 7.6.2: “[…] what you have done with the fire of your thoughts, the source of your
words, I have seen; how you have pierced Modaharius, a Gothic citizen, and destroyed the spears
of Arian heresy with the sword of your spiritual testimonies.”
In this episode, Sidonius describes Modaharius twice as a barbarus without explicitly

using the term: First, the reader learns that Moaharium is a “Goth” and thereby be-
longs to an entity that was considered barbaric by ancient writers. Next, the reader
discovers that Modaharius is a haeresus, since he follows the Arian faith. Through
these attributes alone, every contemporary reader would have recognised that
Sidonius was describing a “barbarian”. Throughout the letter, the term haeresus can
be seen as synonymous with barbarus.
The letter also serves as a good example for another method through which
Sidonius references “barbarians”: by means of metaphor, which presents my fourth
point. Sidonius indirectly depicts “barbarians” and the consequences of their pres-
ence on Roman territory. In this case, the metaphor of a wolf that is endangering
sheep:
tibi defleo, qualiter ecclesiasticas caulas istius haereseos lupus, qui peccatis pereuntium sagina-
tur animarum, clandestino morsu necdum intellecti dentis arrodat.51
In this context, we know that Sidonius is referring to an old enemy (hostis anti-
quus) who goes by the name of Evarix, rex Gothorum—Euric, king of the Goths.52
He is the wolf attacking the sheep of Sidonius; the Auvergnian population. This
metaphor demonstrates simultaneously Sidonius’s Christian background and his
education, since the “wolf metaphor” is frequently encountered in biblical texts.53
Furthermore, it shows how Sidonius made use of metaphors in order to depict the
“others”. Wolves especially are a Topos in Sidonius’s work for referring to the
Goths.54 Additionally, this violent passage shows that a heretical “barbarian” was
regarded as an enemy that must be fought against.
The fifth point to consider as explanation for the absence of explicit references
to the term is the significant role played by individuals in Sidonius’s literary frame-
work. His letter to Agricola, probably the most prominent letter in the entire collec-
tion, depicts Theoderic II almost as if he were a Roman emperor. Such an alteration
in his discourse perfectly represents the dichotomy between the group and the indi-
vidual which is highlighted both in this reference to Theoderic and in another
51 Sidon. epist. 7.6.2–3: “I lament to you how this heretical wolf, fattening himself on the sins of
the lost souls, gnaws at the sheepfolds of the church with hidden bites of his yet undiscovered
tooth.” It should be noted that the reading haereseos/haeresis is controversial. For the discussion
please refer to the commentary by Waarden, Joop van, Writing to Survive: A Commentary on
Sidonius Apollinaris, Letters Book 7, 2 vols. (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 288. Since heresy is the main
descriptive feature of Modahar and the entire letter deals with the contrast between the Nicene and
Arian confessions, I follow Luetjohann’s reading.
52 Sidon. epist. 7.6.4.
53 E. g. Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland et. al., eds., Nestle-Aland. Novum Testamentum Graece. Based
on the work of Eberhard and Erwin Nestle (Stuttgart: Katholische Bibelanstalt Stuttgart, 2012): Mt
15.7.
54 Compare to: Sidon. carm. 7.363.
example55: First of all, Sidonius never uses the term barbarus to describe Theoderic
II, but only refers to him by name. Yet contemporaneous readers must surely have
known that Theoderic II was a Visigothic leader and even we, with our modern pre-
conceptions shaped by the ancient sources, would probably categorize him at first
glance as a “barbarian” and would thereby expect Sidonius to give us a “barbaric”
description. But from its very outset the letter states that Theoderic II earns even
the respect of those who do not consider him as a friend—because of his dignitas:
igitur vir est et illis dignus agnosci, qui eum minus familiariter intuentur.56
His good character, his right behaviour and his education are more important
qualities than his “barbaric” appearance or ancestry, which is only mentioned in
passing: sicut mos gentis est.57 Otherwise the letter treats the physiognomy as in har-
mony with Theoderic’s character. This letter depicts him as a true Roman, who follows
even the daily routine of an emperor, unlike his retinue of guards who, as already
mentioned, remain “barbaric”.
Another example of such an alternative view on a putatively “barbaric” individ-
ual can be found in a letter to the uncle of Sidonius, in which the Burgundian king,
Chilperic, is addressed by the Roman title magister militum, and characterized as a
victoriosissimo viro.58 Like Theoderic II, Chilperic seems more Roman than barbarian,
especially in the use of Roman nomenclature. It is noteworthy that Sidonius can de-
scribe individual “barbaric” persons in a positive way, but the collective of which
that individual forms a part will always remain barbaric. Obviously, Sidonius realized
that a difference between the collective stereotype of the barbarian, and the actual
reality which confronted him in the form of existing individuals, which can further
be seen in other epistles and is underlined by the fact that even addressees of bar-
baric origin can be found in the collection.59
This finally brings me to examples of the adoption of the term barbarus in
Sidonius’s letters. Besides its “classical” use, i. e. for the pejorative description of
externae, Sidonius reinvents the term to describe fellow aristocrats that are, in his
opinion, behaving in an “incorrect” way. He often broaches the issue of correct
aristocratic behaviour in his works60 and describes those who do not follow his
ideal of an aristocratic life as barbari. In this context, the term barbarus can be
seen in close connection to perfidus: […] perfidum barbarum ignavum.61 The
55 Sidon. epist. 1.2.

56 Sidon. epist. 1.2.1: “This man is worthy to be recognized by those who regard him less kindly.”
57 Sidon. epist. 1.2.2: “[…] as is customary with his gens […]”
58 Sidon. epist. 5.6.
59 For example, Sidon. epist. 5.6; 5.7; 7.6; 8.9.
60 Such as in his letter, epist. 5.11.2–3, to Potentinus.
61 Sidon. epist. 1.7.6: “[…] as treacherous, as barbaric and as cowardly.” Probably Sidonius fol-
lowed the example of Cicero, who declared Verres and Marcus Antonius to “barbarians” as well,
due to their behavior; Cic. Phil. 3.15 and Verr. 4.112
reason for this can be traced in the letter addressed to Thaumastus, whose brother
was unjustly brought before the court of the Burgundian king by an anonymous
group. For Sidonius, this anonymous group are even worse than the “barbarians”,
who are portrayed as more benign in this situation: hi nimirum sunt, ut idem
coram positus audisti, quos se iamdudum perpeti inter clementiores barbaros Gallia
gemit.62
From this it is clear that those acting like traitors or, at least, in an untrustwor-
thy fashion, could clearly be categorized as barbarus/barbari, whether or not they
were Roman citizens. In this instance, the reader is kept in the dark about the social
affiliation of the so-called “traitors”, but is made aware that in Sidonius’s eyes, they
were “barbarians” due to their incorrect, vulgar behaviour. Additionally, it seems
that the characteristic formerly typically applied to barbarians, perfidus, at least as
found in Sidonius’s letters to the Visigoths, could now be applied to any person
based on their actions.
A further example of how a Roman citizen can become a barbarus is well shown
in the case of Seronatus. Seronatus was a Gallic aristocrat who offered his services to
Euric, the successor of Theoderic II, with whom Sidonius was not on good terms. For
Sidonius, Seronatus was the “Catiline of his time”, due to his close relationship to
Euric and mistreatment of his own people. Sidonius describes Seronatus a dictator,
tyrant, judge, and finally calls him a “barbarian”.63 This climatic asyndeton—full of
oxymoronic terms (dominus-tyrannus, iudex-barbarus)—finds its peak with the word
barbarus. Thus, being a tyrant was clearly worse than being a “barbarian”. The asyn-
deton can further be interpreted as an internal conflict on the part of Sidonius, who
is clearly insecure in deciding in which category to place Seronatus, simultaneously
a dominus and tyrannus. It is nevertheless clear that barbarus takes the upper hand.
In Sidonius’s view, due to his wrong and non-traditional aristocratic behaviour,
Seronatus shows his true face. He receives the “title” barbarus mainly because he
was propagating war among civilized, Roman, people and was literarily active
among “barbarians”,64 which Sidonius regarded upon the basis of his own experien-
ces as, possible.65 Sidonius is playing here with the classical stereotype that “barbar-
ians” are uneducated. Since the term “barbarian” is used in contrast to possessing an
education, if Seronatus attempts to exchange literary knowledge with “barbarians”
62 Sidon. epist. 5.7.1: “Of course, those are the ones over whom Gaul sighs in your presence and
before your ears that it would have to endure them for so long and that the barbarians all around
would be gentler.”
63 Sidon. epist. 2.1.2: […] indicit ut dominus, exigit ut tyrannus, addicit ut iudex, calumniator ut
barbarus.
64 Sidon. epist. 2.1.2: […] palam et ridentibus convocatis ructat inter cives pugnas, inter barbaros
litteras; epistulas, […].
65 See Sidon. epist. 9.3.3.
and therefore, he himself becomes a barbarus. Sidonius continues with an enumera-

tion of examples of Seronatus’s incorrect behaviour:
in concilio iubet in consilio tacet, in ecclesia iocatur in convivio praedicat, in cubiculo damnat in
quaestione dormitat; implet cotidie silvas fugientibus villas hostibus, altaria reis carceres cleri-
cis; exultans Gothis insultansque Romanis, inludens praefectis conludensque numerariis, leges
Theodosianas calcans Theodoricianasque proponens […].66
Through the paralleled structure of enumeration alongside the use of opposing

verbs, Sidonius not only describes literarily what Seronatus is doing wrong, but rhe-
torically demonstrates it to the reader. In the view of Sidonius, Seronatus is doing
everything possible that could be done wrong and dishonouring Roman law. To
summarize: Seronatus is described as uneducated, uncivilized and lawless—like a
typical “barbarian”.
Conclusion
The opening examples in this paper aimed at giving a first impression on the percep-
tion of “barbarians” through the eyes of Sidonius. For Sidonius, they were omnipres-
ent. They are portrayed as invaders of his patria and destroyers of Roman culture—
but this is only one perception of the events that took place in fifth-century Gaul.67
When Sidonius’s framework is considered alongside the traditional history of the
term βάρβαροs/barbarus, it becomes clear that that Sidonius never ceased using the
term with its pejorative meaning against non-Romans, classifying them as unedu-
cated, wild, and uncivilized. He continually relies upon typical adjectives like ferox,
perfidus or bestialis in his discourse on “barbarians”, and draws upon ancient stereo-
types for his depictions of their appearance, as we saw in the letters of Theoderic II or
the letter to Domnicius.68 Yet we also saw that these attributes can only be identified
when Sidonius refers to “barbarians” in general or a collective sense, consisting of
externae gentes like Visigoths, Burgundians or Saxons. In falling back on traditional
formulae in his representation of “barbarians”, he never actually needed to make use
of the term barbarus. It can be assumed that ancient readers were sufficiently familiar
66 Sidon. epist. 2.1.3: “He gives orders in the assembly, he is silent in the council, he tells jokes in
the church and he preaches while eating, he passes judgements in the bedroom but he sleeps in
court; every day he fills the forests with refugees, the estates with enemies, the altars with rogues
and the prisons with clerics; he hails the Goths and insults the Romans; he betrays the prefects and
cooperates with their accountants; he disregards the laws of Theodosius but he honours those of
Theoderic […].”
67 The “barbarian” presence in Gaul is often compared to a storm that swarmed over the provin-
ces, as described in, e. g. Sidon. epist. 7.2; or 4,6,2; 5,6,1.
68 Sidon. epist. 1.2 and 4.20.
with these traditional Topoi and stereotypes to render the term unnecessary. In refer-
ring to specific gentes by names (Visigoths or Saxons), Sidonius not only avoided the
term barbarus, but he also demonstrated a broader learned knowledge about the
“barbarians” and thereby made himself more trustworthy as an authority.
Alongside a reliance on typical “barbarian” attributes, in late antique texts
paganus or haeresus frequently stood in for barbarus. For Sidonius, acceptance of
the creed of the First Council of Nicaea seems to have an important factor for his
judgement of peoples. Nevertheless, his primary criterion for distinguishing him-
self and his fellow aristocrats from “barbarians” remained education.69 As the let-
ter to Johannis suggests, it was the only “marker of nobilitas” which Sidonius
ultimately trusted, which rendered him incapable of accepting anyone without ed-
ucation in his circle.70 The example of Seronatus indicates that even a Roman citi-
zen could on this basis become a barbarus. In addition to his identification of
Seronatus as an illiterate person, Sidonius depicts him as someone whose bad be-
haviour rendered him unacceptable to Sidonius’s circle and their definition of an
aristocratic life.71 In answering the question of what being a “barbarian” meant
for Sidonius, we can conclude that he adopted the term to characterize those peo-
ple who did not fit his perception of the qualities that characterised the Roman
world: those who did not fit his perception of being a vir litteratus or displaying
the proper aristocratic behaviour.
This offers us an explanation for Sidonius’s positive, non-“barbaric” represen-
tations of individuals, even though they were obviously, technically speaking, non-
Roman. The increasing fluidity of such concepts as “romanitas” and barbarus be-
comes manifest, here, as shown by the examples of Theodoric II or Seronatus. In
offering positive examples of “barbarians” who behaved like Romans, Sidonius
demonstrates that “romanitas”—as he defined it—was something that could be at-
tained by “others”.
Finally, we must return to the question of whether to use terms like barbarus,
Germanus or even Romanus. To judge from the late antique sources, at least, none of
69 Ralph W. Mathisen, “Les barbares intellectuels dans l’antiquité tardive,” Dialogues d’Histoire
Ancienne 23, no. 2 (1997): 139–48; for the importance of education see, furthermore, Andreas Goltz,
“Gelehrte Barbaren? Antike Bildung und germanische Oberschicht in der Spätantike,” in Gelehrte in
der Antike: Alexander Demandt zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Andreas Goltz, Andreas Luther and
Heinrich Schlange-Schöningen (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002), 297–316.
70 Ralph W. Mathisen, “Epistolography, Literary Circles, and Family Ties in Late Roman Gaul,”
Transactions of the American Philological Society 111 (1981): 95–109.
71 Sidon. epist. 5.11.2–3. For the latest research on the constitution of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy,
see Tabea L. Meurer, Vergangenes verhandeln: Spätantike Statusdiskurse senatorischer Eliten in
Gallien und Italien, Millenium Studien 79 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 164–253; Hendrik Hess, Das
Selbstverständnis der gallo-römischen Oberschicht: Übergang, Hybridität und Latenz im historischen
Diskursraum von Sidonius Apollinaris bis Gregor von Tours, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der
germanischen Altertumskunde 111 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 27–117.
these terms offer us a satisfactory coherent definition, as each author had their
own understanding of Romanitas and what constituted a “barbarian”. Only an in-
depth comparison of the literary output of late antique authors and their use of
these terms would enable us to come to a broader conclusion concerning how
these contributed to a wider discursive narrative. Contemporary historiographical
contexts render it impossible for us to avoid premade conceptions regarding these
terms. We must always remember that the concepts behind and perceptions of
these terms were (in antiquity) and are (in the modern day) constantly changing.
A thorough investigation into these changes is necessary, in order to reach a bet-
ter understanding of the precise circumstances for when and why a person was
perceived as Germanus, barbarus or Romanus.
“Barbarians” were the constant counterpart in Roman acts of self-identification. In
suggesting that we, like Sidonius, avoid terms like barbarus, we should also consider
avoiding romanus for the same reasons: it prompts misleading ideas and preconceptions.
It has seemed until now that this term is unavoidable in historical research, since we need
a nomenclature through which to express our thoughts. One could hypothetically argue
similarly for barbarus: since our sources are argued from, and our own arguments are
therefore framed by, a Roman perspective, we should keep these terms as they are used in
the sources. For a better understanding of Roman self-perception and their perception of
“others”, I propose that it is better to focus on the use and transformation of such terms in
ancient sources than to merely avoid them.
Acknowledgements: This article stems from the beginnings of a PhD that was de-
fended in November 2018 at the University of Kiel and is currently in preparation for
publication. I would like to thank Josef Wiesehöfer, James Harland and Jonathan
Ethier for their corrections and improvement of the article as well as the participants of
the ‘Interrogating the Germanic’ conference for the helpful feedback on my paper.
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James M. Harland
A Habitus Barbarus in Sub-Roman Britain?
Introduction
The scale of migration and its effect on ethnic change on Britain in the fifth and
sixth centuries is arguably the debate of early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ archaeology.1 It has
been an especially heated one. Some call for absolute denial of the presence of eth-
nic groups in the British material record. Others protest, not without reason, that to
do so would risk destroying our ability to speak about the past. The problem lies, I
believe, not so much in one side of this debate or the other, but rather in how these
questions are framed. Below, I critically examine the frameworks within which eth-
nic identity is discussed in the material record.2 After offering a brief review of ap-
proaches since the 1980s and discussing their problems, the article outlines an
alternative approach drawing upon continental philosophy, and tests this approach
on a case study of the early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cremation cemetery, Spong Hill. The
study will propose that if we reject the entirely baseless notion that there existed in
the fifth century a mutually recognised ‘Germanic’ ideology, of which this material
culture formed a part, we are left no less capable of using this material culture to
discuss fifth-century British history.
1 For a classic example of conviction that this is the case, see, e. g., Catherine Hills, “The Anglo-
Saxon Migration: An Archaeological Case Study of Disruption,” in Migrations and Disruptions:
Toward a Unifying Theory of Ancient and Contemporary Migrations, edited by Brenda J. Baker and
Takeyuki Tsuda (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 2015), 33–51, 45. There is not the space to give
a full account of the discipline’s history here. For its antiquarian past see Sam Lucy, The Anglo-
Saxon Way of Death (Stroud: Sutton, 2002). For an earlier survey of then ongoing issues in the field
see Catherine Hills, The Origins of the English (London: Duckworth, 2003). The most recent example
of an ‘anti-migrationist’ position is Susan Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the English (London: ARC
Humanities Press, 2019). These three should give a sense of the range of recent interpretations that
are available, but for a detailed overview of the discipline’s recent history see James M. Harland,
“Deconstructing Anglo-Saxon Archaeology: A Critical Enquiry into the Study of Ethnicity in
Lowland Britain in Late Antiquity (c.350–600)” (PhD Thesis, Univ. of York, 2017), Chapter 2.
2 The historic associations of the term “Anglo-Saxon” with legacies of colonialism, white supremacy
and imperialism have recently been brought into particular focus, leading among other things to the
re-naming of scholarly societies. The term is used here solely to refer to the discipline which believed
itself to study “Anglo-Saxons”. It is not a name I would use to describe those which this discipline is
purported to study, and is not the name, I expect, that the discipline is likely to use in the future. I also
refrain from using ‘early English’ out of a desire to avoid suggesting an utterly false link between the
modern English nation and the early medieval past, at a time when ethnonationalist Englishess has
become a rallying cry for the British Islamophic far-right, exemplified by such organizations as the
English Democrats or the English Defence League.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-009
168 James M. Harland
The interpretive paradigm of Culture History posited that distribution patterns of

material cultural types could be seen as direct manifestations of given ethnic groups.3
Immense typological catalogues were used to identify and outline the specific distribu-
tions of the culture of ‘Germanic’ Anglian, Jutish and Saxon ethnē,4 following the guid-
ing frameworks laid down by Bede in his early eighth-century Ecclesiastical History of
the English People.5 The introduction of post-processual archaeology to Anglo-Saxon
studies dramatically altered this situation. Refuting that material culture was a passive
reflection of static, essentialist conceptions of personhood, it treated material culture
as an act of symbolic expression.6 Much of the early work in Anglo-Saxon archaeology
nevertheless treated this expression as ethnic, namely ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or ‘Germanic’—
the classic subjects of Culture History.7 Sam Lucy’s work was first serious challenge to
this, demonstrating the close interrelation of Anglo-Saxon archaeology with nine-
teenth-century racialism.8 Lucy cautioned against the inference of ethnicity from burial
practice, suggesting we speak instead of ‘localized’ identities.9 Lucy’s work was im-
mensely important but one may wonder if merely replacing the label ethnicity with
that of ‘local identity’ really changed much. Reactions against the denial of ethnic in-
terpretations were and continue to be quite forceful.10 Is this unreasonable? Lucy’s ar-
guments amount to denial of ethnicity’s existence in the archaeological record, for
Lucy did not merely assert that ethnic identity could not be demonstrated in the mate-
rial record, but that because it could not be demonstrated in a specifically fifth-century
British context, this therefore meant that ethnic identity was not an important category
in sub-Roman Britain.11
3 Siân Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1997).

4 Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death.
5 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, edited and translated by B. Colgrave and
R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1.15, 5.9.
6 Ian Hodder, Symbols in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982). The first to apply these
concepts to Anglo-Saxon archaeology was Ellen-Jane Pader, Symbolism, Social Relations and the
Interpretation of Mortuary Remains, BAR International Series 130 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1982).
7 E. g. Heinrich Härke, “‘Warrior Graves’? The Background of the Anglo-Saxon Weapon Burial
Rite,” Past and Present 126, no. 1 (1990): 22–43, or Julian Richards, “Anglo-Saxon Symbolism,” in
The Age of Sutton Hoo, edited by Martin Carver (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992), 131–47.
8 Sam Lucy, The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries of East Yorkshire: An Analysis and Reinterpretation, BAR
British Series 272 (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1998), 9–12.
9 Sam Lucy, “Burial Practice in Early Medieval Eastern Britain: Constructing Local Identities,
Deconstructing Ethnicity,” in Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, edited by Sam Lucy and
Andrew Reynolds (London: Council for British Archaeology, 2002), 72–87. Such arguments are also
evident in Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, e. g. 135, 171.
10 Heinrich Härke, “Archaeologists and Migrations: A Problem of Attitude?,” Current Anthropology 39,
no. 1 (1998): 19–46; Härke, “Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis,” Medieval Archaeology 55, no. 1
(2011): 1–28.
11 Lucy, “Deconstructing Ethnicity,” 86–7.
We cannot prove that it was not. That ethnic identity is constructed has been
accepted in sociology and anthropology for more than fifty years. Recent research
does not merely assert the validity of constructivist approaches to ethnicity. It re-
shapes the analytical criteria by which such social phenomena are discussed.12
Sociologists no longer think that there is any universal means by which ethnic
boundaries are delineated. The method of construction of these boundaries is highly
context dependent, and requires individual contextual analysis.13 Ethnicity’s sole
universal is that it emerges from the coding and framing of acts as ethnic.14 Thus, if
we as etic observers, use ethnicity as our go-to explanation for patterns in material
culture we reify ethnic groups, emic phenomena, without empirical basis.15 But to
simply assert that local ‘identities’ were instead constructed is tantamount to the
same thing. It is a conjoining of constructivist language with essentialist categories
without prima facie basis.16
Thus, ethnicity cannot be proven by the archaeological record alone. It is futile to
argue that it definitely did or did not exist in certain aspects of the early medieval mate-
rial record. This problem, i.e. that our core research question is one that an empirical
approach is simply ill-equipped to address in the positive or negative, I suspect, is why
challenges to the ethnic paradigm in Anglo-Saxon archaeology have been largely ig-
nored. Unfounded concern that accepting the incompatibility of our evidence with the
questions posed renders the discipline pointless has produced inconsistency in the his-
toriography. Discussion often stays focused on the nature and scale of the adventus sax-
onum, with critiques of ethnic inference made from the side-lines but grounded in the
same problematic positivist assumptions.17
>There is scope to move on. James Gerrard sees this new material culture not as
an expression of the ethnicity of its users, but as a sign of the militarization of
British elite society.18 This work could potentially form useful conversations with
12 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2004); Richard
Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, 2nd ed. (1997; repr., London: SAGE Publications, 2008); Andreas Wimmer,
Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).
13 Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making.
14 Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups.
15 Ibid.
16 I believe it to be similarly problematic to simply discuss identities as being ‘nested’, as found, e. g. in
Susanne E. Hakenbeck, “Situational Ethnicity and Nested Identities: New Approaches to an Old
Problem,” Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 14 (2007): 19–27. Though ethnicity is indeed a
multi-layered phenomenon, this approach still does not resolve our fundamental inability to empiri-
cally demonstrate the presence or absence of ethnic identity in the material record.
17 Howard Williams, “Rethinking Early Medieval Mortuary Archaeology,” Early Medieval Europe 13,
no. 2 (2005): 195–204. For more on this see Harland, “Deconstructing Anglo-Saxon Archaeology.”
18 James Gerrard, The Ruin of Roman Britain: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013).
the work alternative schools of thought largely in development at Freiburg,19 though

it has not as of yet. Another example of a recent development that offers scope to
move on, but still poses problems, is Toby Martin’s important work.20 Martin uses his
comprehensive and immense typology of the cruciform brooch, truly a masterpiece
of archaeological scholarship, to produce an analysis that argues that this brooch’s
links to a pseudo-mythical Germanic tradition formed the material basis for a core of
tradition, a Traditionskern after the Vienna School, through which Anglian identity
was actively forged towards the end of the fifth century.21 My research shows that
this argument depends upon the assumed existence of a contemporarily recognizable
pan-Germanic ethos that has no empirical basis in contemporary sources.22 The tru-
ism that material culture actively constitutes society has been taken here, incorrectly,
to be sufficient for those who wish to believe, falsely, that activities preserved in the
burial record can be empirically demonstrated to be the expression of ethnic identity.
Several newer works have expressed growing scepticism about our ability to infer
ethnic identity from material cultural sources, and this offers yet further scope for
19 Sebastian Brather, Ethnische Interpretationen in der Frühgeschichtlichen Archäologie.

2004); Philipp von Rummel, Habitus barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten
im 4. und 5. Jahrhundert. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde
55 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007). Hubert Fehr, Germanen und Romanen im Merowingerreich.
2010); Guy Halsall, “Ethnicity and Early Medieval Cemeteries,” Arquelogia y Territorio Medieval
18 (2011): 15–27. Susanne Brather-Walter, “Bow-Brooches as Ethnic Indicators? A Myth of Early
Medieval Archaeology,” in Archaeology, History and Biosciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,
edited by Susanne Brather-Walter. Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexicon der Germanischen
Altertumskunde 107 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 85–99.
20 Toby F. Martin, “Identity and the Cruciform Brooch in Early Anglo-Saxon England: An
Investigation of Style, Mortuary Context, and Use” (PhD Thesis, Univ. of Sheffield, 2010); Martin,
The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015).
21 Toby F. Martin, “Identity and the Cruciform Brooch,” 179. On the Vienna School, see the papers in
Andrew Gillett, Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). It should be mentioned that Martin has subsequently been more explicit
in acknowledging the problems with interpreting this material through a ‘Germanic’ lens. See, e.g.,
Toby F. Martin, “Barbaric Tendencies? Iron Age and early medieval art in comparison,” in Barbaric
Splendour: The use of image before and after Rome, edited by Toby F. Martin and Wendy Morrison
(Oxford: Archaeopress, 2020), 1–17, 5.
22 James M. Harland, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain: A Modern
Framework and its Problems (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, in press); Harland, “Memories of
Migration? The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Burial Costume of the 5th Century AD,” Antiquity 93, no. 370 (2019):
954–69. See also the articles by Harland and Friedrich as well as Steinacher in this volume, on the
absence of such a construct in the contemporary documentary sources.
moving on, but these works have not interrogated why others of our colleagues see
no issue with still taking such an interpretative approach.23
Differential Ontology: Rethinking Symbolic

Expression
Other productive lines of inquiry have begun to interrogate the epistemological roots of
the impetus that has been outlined above.24 The epistemological point where these prob-
lems emerge lies in the need to reconcile the constraints of structure with the agency of
the autonomous human subject. Philosophy might help, here. Differential ontology, as
found in the work of such philosophers as Jacques Derrida or Gilles Deleuze25 breaks
down the dichotomy of subject-object: it recognizes that no subject truly has individual
essence, rendering this dichotomy an artificial one. These might offer new interpretive ap-
proaches that can evade the empirical and epistemological flaws in discussion about
identity. Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s co-written masterpiece, A Thousand Plateaus, is
good to think with.26 It has been popularly cited for some time in prehistoric archaeology
and aspects of medieval studies concerned with materiality but is still notably absent in
late antique archaeological research.27
For Deleuze and Guattari, desire drives social relations. Subjectivity is endless acts
of coding and re-coding. ‘Motion towards’ an unattainable ideal drives the subject, but
a subject is never truly individual. A subject is a locus of various libidinal drives, which
23 The best examples of works to express this scepticism are Oosthuizen, The Emergence of the
English and Kate Mees, Burial, Landscape and Identity in Early Medieval Wessex (Woodbridge: Boydell
& Brewer, 2019), 99–146. An example of recent work which continues to rely on traditional ethnic
frameworks, and appears to have overlooked the considerable critiques of this approach is Nick
Stoodley, “Costume Groups and their Bearing on Jutish Settlement in the Later 5th and 6th Centuries
AD,” in The Land of the English Kin: Studies in Wessex ad Anglo-Saxon England in Honour of Professor
Barbara Yorke, edited by Alexander James Langlands and Ryan Lavelle (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 70–94.
24 See Andrew J. Welton, ‘The Spear in Anglo-Saxon England: A Social-Technological History’
(PhD Thesis, Univ. of Florida, 2018).
25 Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967); Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis and London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987).
26 Ibid.
27 Gavin Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2012); Chris Fowler, The Emergent Past (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013); Ben Jervis, Pottery and
Social Life in Medieval England: Towards a Relational Approach (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014);
Ben Jervis, “Assemblage Theory and Town Foundation in Medieval England,” Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 26, no. 3 (2016): 381–95; Yannis Hamilakis and Andrew M. Jones,
“Archaeology and Assemblage,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017): 77–84.
are acting and acted upon.28 Deleuze and Guattari propose, for this reason, that subjec-
tivity be conceived of as a ‘rhizome’. A rhizomatic plant system is always already there.
Unlike a tree, there is no starting or end point in the system, all points are connected
to and networked with all others in a complex entanglement of bundled relation-
ships.29 Radical breaks can thus be made between signs and their signifiers. Different
aspects of the system extend themselves in different ways to produce new modes of
interaction. Deleuze and Guattari call these entanglements of bundled relationships
‘assemblages’.
An assemblage is a locus or node of these bundled relationships of desire, wherein
we may identify a coherent entity—be this an institution, a subject, a being (etc). It is a
point where the intersection of various movements of subjectivity and desire come to-
gether sufficiently that we may draw some form of boundary around and define it.30
But it is never static. It is constantly in a process of ‘becoming’—of territorialization
and concurrent deterritorialization. By territorialization is meant the process by which
this set of bundled relationships takes form. There is always too a process of de-
territorialization, a dismantling. Aspects of the system constantly change, some so
much as to become unrecognisable.31
This offers a heuristic framework for describing specific structural changes and
their conditions. The Empire and the barbarian world can be conceived of as assemb-
lages. Those bundled relationships of law, costume standards, ideas of civilization and
savagery extend themselves in interlacing directions. Some aspects of Romanness ex-
tend into the barbarian world, and vice versa. Of these, some are retained, others not—
but what produces these changes is historically and structurally contingent. With this
in mind, we can turn to the archaeological evidence.
The practice of burial which produces this evidence took place in large commu-
nal cemeteries.32 Large audiences participated in the funeral ceremony, drawn from
the wider community and the buried’s family, this audience, who normally held ex-
tensive feasts at these funerals, selected the repertoire of symbols deployed in
burial.33 In order to explore the heuristic framework I have just proposed to see if it
28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 399.

29 Ibid., 24.
30 Ibid., 86.
31 Ibid. 86, 504–5.
32 Lucy, The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death.
33 Guy Halsall, “Burial Writes: Graves, ‘Texts’ and Time,” in Cemeteries and Society in Merovingian
Gaul: Selected Studies in History and Archaeology, 1992–2009 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 218–25; Howard
Williams, “A Well-Urned Rest: Cremation and Inhumation in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” in
Transformation by Fire: The Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context, edited by Ian Kuijt, Colin
P. Quinn and Gabriel Cooney (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2014), 93–118; Sebastian Brather, “Tod
und Bestattung im frühen Mittelalter: Repräsentation, Vorstellungswelten und Variabilität am
Beispiel merowingerzeitlicher Reihengräberfelder,” Ethnographisch-archäologische Zeitschrift 50
(2009): 93–115.
offers a better alternative for interpreting our evidence, the article now turns to a
case study of Spong Hill.
The Spong Hill Case Study: Site Context

and Current Interpretations
Spong Hill is the largest early medieval cremation cemetery ever excavated in Britain,
consisting of several thousand individual burials. The presence of an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cem-
etery at the site has been known since at least 1711, but it was excavated over the course
of ten summer seasons between 1971 and 1982.34 The site was published before excava-
tion was completed, and has been the foundation of numerous important studies in
early Anglo-Saxon mortuary archaeology. Its final publication was in 2013, with a full
chronology and synthesis of the data using techniques only available after considerable
advances in computer-driven statistical analysis.35
The site is located at North Elmham, c. 25km northwest of Norwich, on a ridge that
falls away on three sides, forming the valley of the Blackwater river towards its south-
ern end. There appears to have thus been general continuity of occupation at Spong
Hill, which is typical of early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cremation cemeteries.36 The site forms part
of a landscape teeming with early medieval cemeteries, which are associated with the
watercourses of Norfolk, and numerous Romano-British settlements whose occupation
extended into the fifth century.37
The authors of the final report frequently make efforts to suggest that ethnic iden-
tity cannot be readily inferred in the archaeological record,38 but a basic assumption in
discussion is nevertheless that evidence for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ activity at Spong Hill repre-
sents ‘re-use’, in the sense of the re-appropriation by new inhabitants, rather than a
reworking, of the site.39 This is despite there being good reason to believe that the es-
tablishment of the cemetery in association with prehistoric and Roman earthworks was
deliberate.40 Williams suggests that the site’s early status as a ‘central place’ may have
meant it functioned as a place of assembly, where the symbols, messages and rituals of
34 Catherine Hills and Sam Lucy, Spong Hill. Part IX: Chronology and Synthesis (Cambridge:
McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2013).
35 Ibid.
36 Mary Chester-Kadwell, “Spong Hill in Its Local Context,” in Spong Hill, Part IX: Chronology and
Synthesis, by Catherine Hills and Sam Lucy (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological
Research, 2013), 283.
37 Ibid., 272–79.
38 Hills and Lucy, Spong Hill, Part IX, 298.
39 Ibid., 283–86.
40 Chester-Kadwell, “Spong Hill in Its Local Context,” 292.
burial were tightly controlled.41 The establishment of such places of assembly has been
assumed, based upon the presence of items of northern German origin such as early
cruciform brooches, and, of course, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ style cremation urns, to be “part of a
new socio-political and sacred geography over large areas of eastern England following
the invasion and immigration of Germanic groups.”42 In the final evaluation of the site,
though it is recognised that such inferences are problematic, it is nevertheless as-
serted that large-scale multivariate analysis might provide further insight into
questions of ethnic origin. These authors’ rejection of the inference of ethnic iden-
tity through material culture is principally based upon positivist, epistemological
reasoning such as the belief that inferences made through stable isotope analysis
about geographic origin can answer questions about ethnic identity.43 The au-
thors assert that the identification of origins of certain of the artefact types in north-
ern Germania and Scandinavia, through links to sites in Schleswig-Holstein, Jutland,
and the Netherlands, suggests an importation of a cultural system identifiable as
‘Germanic’, and that it is ideologically distinct in this regard from ‘Roman’ culture pre-
ceding it.44 The authors argue, for the most part, against the identification of specific
ethnic groups via identifiable material cultural patterns, suggesting that Spong Hill em-
bodies a fluid process of ideological shifts, using multivariate symbols rather than a sin-
gle cultural ‘package’.45
Nevertheless, assertions of ethnic expression or other non-demonstrable identifi-
cation are present. It is suggested that Style I ornament may have shown commemo-
ration of ‘elite ancestral connections’ to Scandinavia.46 The authors follow Martin in
his identification of the cruciform brooch as an expression of Anglian ethnic identity
based on its putative links to the Germanic past.47 They suggest that the sixth century
may have been a time of ‘ethnogenesis’, made physically manifest in the selection of
components of an ‘identity-bearing assemblage’ developed within England. The au-
thors propose that it is therefore reasonable to identify the region’s identity as
‘Anglian’.48 They use these conclusions to suggest that large scale importation of cul-
tural material can only be explained by large-scale population movement to Norfolk
41 Howard Williams, “Cemeteries as Central Places:Place and Identity in Migration Period

Eastern England,” in Central Places in the Migration and Merovingian Periods: Papers from the
52nd Sachsensymposium, Lund, August 2001, edited by Birgitta Hårdh and Lars Larsson
(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2002), 341–362, 345–46; Gareth J. Perry, “Ceramic
Hinterlands: Establishing the Catchment Areas of Early Anglo-Saxon Cremation Cemeteries,” World
Archaeology 52, no. 1 (2020): 163–182.
42 Ibid., 345.
43 Hills and Lucy, Spong Hill, Part IX, 298–99.
44 Ibid., 299–331.
45 Ibid., 330.
46 Ibid., 314.
47 Ibid., 307.
48 Ibid., 330.
and neighbouring regions—though they note that such conclusions cannot be ex-
tended across the whole of lowland Britain. The authors state that we should expect
“a more locally varied and long-term process of adoption of Germanic culture and
burial practices”.49 A fundamental link is thus maintained between cultural transfer
and scale of migration, hinging upon an assumed cultural uniformity and affinity
based in the geographical origin of this culture. The notion that ‘Germanic’ serves as
a diagnostically useful category is very much maintained here.
Such scale of migration is possible. That there took place some form of ethnic
expression using material culture is also possible. But these processes cannot be
demonstrated by such positivist means. Let us bracket these concerns, and exam-
ine the acts of expression that are identifiable when we do not concern ourselves
with questions of the adventus saxonum.
Analysis of the Material
Some new methods of studying early medieval cremation might give us insight into
post-Roman funerary activity at the site. Gareth Perry’s use analysis of Anglo-Saxon
cremation urns suggests that they might have been used, prior to becoming mortu-
ary vessels, as vessels for various domestic functions. In at least 31% of instances
the evidence suggested use in the various stages of the manufacture, storage, and
consumption of fermented products, such as butter or beer.50 Perry has also pro-
duced a new typology for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cremation urns, first applied to the sites of
Cleatham and Elsham. Perry argues that previous typologies all ultimately hinge
upon the assertion that the potters of these cremation urns would have no concep-
tions of form, size, and relation to functional class in mind when pursuing a given
manufacturing end.51 As Perry notes, this contradicts an extensive body of ethno-
graphic data from a range of contexts suggesting the opposite,52 and Perry has de-
vised an alternative typology which focuses upon the aspects of form he argues to
be most perceptible to those using ceramic goods. This typology consists of six
groups (Table 1), divided into numerous sub-groups. His findings regarding these
subgroups are unimportant to the present discussion.
49 Ibid.
50 Gareth J. Perry, “Beer, Butter and Burial: The Pre-burial Origins of Cremation Urns from the
Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery of Cleatham, North Lincolnshire,” Medieval Ceramics 32 (2011), 9–21;
Perry, “All Form One and One Form All: The Relationship Between Pre-burial Function and the
Form of Early Anglo-Saxon Cremation Urns,” in The Chiming of Crack’d Bells: Recent Approaches to
the Study of Artefacts in Archaeology, edited by Paul Blinkhorn and Christoper Cumberpatch
(Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), 39–64.
51 Ibid., 40.
52 Ibid., 43.
Table 1: Gareth Perry’s Typology of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Cremation Urns. Perry, “Beer,

Butter and Burial.”
Type Characteristics
 Approximately equal height to width, restricted neck
 Squat wide bodies, unrestricted necks
 As group , but slightly less squat
 Approximately equal height to width, but wider mouths than Type 
 Tall, wide bodies and unrestricted necks
 Large squat bodies with slightly restricted necks
I applied this typology to the urns from Spong Hill, using the publicly available
corpus,53 and following the rationale Perry provides for the organisation of his data.54
That this typology could be meaningful in application to the site seems reasonable,
given the high likelihood that the same potter produced urns for both Cleatham and
Spong Hill.55 A new ‘Ratio 1’ was first devised because, though the final volume of
Spong Hill describes Ratio 1 as Maximum Diameter over Height, the dataset does the
reverse of this. The specific figures utilised to apply categories to the results of these
ratio calculations were determined from the quartiles (Q) calculated for the data distri-
bution for a given ratio of dimensions from every pot from the corpus.
Several other new categories were applied to the Spong Hill dataset as follows:
pots were sorted into ‘Squat’ if their Ratio 1 was greater than 1.2. All others were
deemed ‘Not Squat’. Pots were labelled ‘Roughly Equal’ if their Ratio 1 figure was be-
tween Q1 and Q3, i. e., neither squat nor tall. If the Rim Diameter/Maximum diameter
(Spong Hill Ratio 4, Perry’s Ratio 5) was less than 0.6 a pot was deemed to have a
‘Restricted Rim’. If Ratio 4 was greater than 0.6 (the median value for that ratio’s distri-
bution) it was deemed to have an ‘Open Rim’. If Ratio 1 was greater than 1.06 it was
deemed ‘not tall’, otherwise it was deemed ‘tall’.
A pot was sorted into Group 1 if it was deemed ‘Roughly Equal’ with ‘Restricted
Rim’. A pot was sorted into Group 2/3 if it was deemed ‘Squat’ with ‘Open Rim’. A
pot was sorted into Group 4 if it was deemed ‘Roughly Equal’ with ‘Open Rim’. A
pot was sorted into Group 5 if it was deemed ‘Tall’ with ‘Open Rim’. A pot was
53 Catherine Hills and Sam Lucy, “Spong Hill Dataset Collection.” Distributed by Apollo — Univ. of
Cambridge Repository, 2014. Available at: https://www.repository. cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245133,
accessed March 2017.
54 Perry, “All Form One and One Form All.”
55 Kevin Leahy, Interrupting the Pots: The Excavation of Cleatham Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, North
Lincolnshire (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2007), 128–29.
sorted into Group 6 if it was deemed ‘Squat’ with ‘Restricted Rim’. No pot was
sorted into multiple groups, which suggests the robustness of the typology despite
the relative hardness of these boundaries, which has produced 140 ‘boundary’
pots which proved difficult to typologically classify. 782 pots could be assigned a
type (Table 2).56
Table 2: The Spong Hill Corpus sorted

according to Perry’s Typology. Harland,
“Deconstructing Anglo-Saxon Archaeology.”
Group No. of pots
 
/ 
 
 
 
Types 1, 4, 5 and 6 are those Perry suggests are most apt for consumption functions
and Types 2/3 those for production.
Possible sex or gender characteristics have been linked to pot form and shape
in all previous studies of the site data,57 so this was examined to see if any correla-
tions emerged from similar investigations using the new typology. These types were
therefore compared with the limited osteoarchaeological data available from the
Spong Hill corpus (Table 3).58
There is a strong association of osteoarchaeologically female bones with Group 2/
3 urns (80% compared with 62.2% of sexed cremations overall), and this was also
higher than the total of female sexed cremations that could be sorted into Perry’s
groups (61%, p = 0.027). The remaining groups conform to the average sexing distri-
bution of the cemetery (approximately 60% female to 40% male), suggesting that
56 The results of this process can be found with the database associated with James M. Harland,
57 Julian Richards, The Significance of Form and Decoration of Anglo-Saxon Cremation Urns, BAR
British Series 166 (Oxford, 1987); Hills and Lucy, Spong Hill, Part IX, 235–40.
58 This entailed using three classes of sexing: unquestioned, probable (?), and possible (??).
Jacqueline I. McKinley, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham, Part VIII: The
Cremations (Dereham: Field Archaeology Division, Norfolk Museums Service, 1994), 19–21. I follow
Hills and Lucy in Spong Hill Volume IX in treating all three of these as a single category for the
purpose of analysing associations. Hills and Lucy, Spong Hill, Part IX, 235.
Table 3: The osteoarchaeological sex of the

human remains from the Spong Hill Corpus,
sorted according to Perry’s Typology. Harland,
Group Male Female
  
/  
  
  
  
Total  
these did not have strong gender associations. However, urns classed by Hills and
Lucy as ‘high-shouldered jars’ (which broadly conform to Perry’s types 1, 4 and 5, i. e.
those with less ‘squat’ forms) have a strong association with adult males in their
analysis.59
This receives even further clarification when some of these findings are further
interrogated. There is reason to believe that the sex demographics of Spong Hill are
broadly correct.60 As expected, then, when only older burials are examined the
overall distribution of sexing of grouped urns remains broadly, the same, at 58%
female to 42% male, but when the study of distribution of biological sex in produc-
tion-type urns relative to consumption-type urns is restricted to older adults only,
the distribution of female bones in type 2/3 urns increases to 86%, and this remains
statistically significant ( p = 0.043). When this study of distribution is restricted to
younger adults only, the pattern conforms with the wider burial population (60% to
40%). For type 1 and type 3 urns (i. e., ‘consumption types’), the proportion of
male to female marginally increases (43% male to 57% female). Because younger
bones are generally more at risk of over-identification as female,61 we can tenta-
tively suggest that osteoarchaeological bias slightly suppresses the degree of repre-
sentation of male burials in consumption urns compared to production urns. In any
case, the presence of a gendered rite primarily emphasising femininity is very in-
teresting. Gendering in the early fifth century was generally based upon deviation
59 Ibid., 242.
60 McKinley, Spong Hill, Part VIII, 68–69.
61 Ibid., 68; Kirsty E. Squires, “Populating the Pots: The Demography of the Early Anglo-Saxon
Cemeteries at Elsham and Cleatham, North Lincolnshire,” The Archaeological Journal 169, no. 1
(2012): 312–42, 335.
from an idealised, normative form of masculinity,62 but it seems that by the early fifth
century in Britain new forms of gendered expression had begun in opposition to this
normative framework.
Discussion
What might this mean? There is considerable, well-established evidence on the fu-
nerary activities which took place prior to the burial of the deceased in post-
imperial lowland Britain, and a well-known association of feasting with funerary
activity in post-Imperial Europe more widely. Such feasting is known to have taken
place at the graveside.63 Such funerary ritual has been held to have served a variety
of purposes, but the most common is that it functioned as a means of displaying
status and position in, as Halsall puts it “competitive discourse between fami-
lies”.64 Halsall is describing furnished inhumation, where such competitive display
served to smooth over tensions at times when the deaths of certain key family mem-
bers would throw the social order into doubt, but lavish cremation ceremonies fea-
turing grave-goods and feasting activity surely also performed similar processes,65
something that is surely underlined by Gareth Perry’s recent demonstration via ce-
ramic petrology of the tight, localised catchment areas that were served by particu-
lar cemeteries.66
It is perhaps useful to return to Perry’s discussion of urn function. Perry notes that
un-hopped beer, the sort likely to have been brewed in Britain in the fifth and sixth
centuries, would require consuming within a few days,67 and would have been pro-
duced in relatively small quantities, roughly the capacity of the earlier cremation
urns.68 The case may be made that many of these vessels would not simply have served
domestic functions in the households of the buried prior to their death,69 but quite
62 Guy Halsall, “Gender and the End of Empire,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Modern
Studies 34, no. 1 (2004): 17–39.
63 For specific discussion of Anglo-Saxon cremation contexts, including Spong Hill, see Christina
Lee, Feasting the Dead: Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Burial (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007),
55–61. More widely, Bonnie Effros, Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Halsall, “Burial Writes,” 218.
64 Ibid., 221.
65 For a dismantling of the problematic assumptions which lead scholars to believe otherwise, see
Femke E. Lippok, “The Pyre and the Grave: early medieval cremation burials in the Netherlands, the
German Rhineland and Belgium,” World Archaeology 52, no. 1 (2020), 147–162.
66 Perry, “Ceramic Hinterlands.”
67 Perry, “All Form One and One Form All,” 52–53.
68 Ibid., 55.
69 Perry notes that many on which use analysis have been performed show signs of frequent re-
use. Perry, “Beer, Butter and Burial.”
possibly were selected from a repertoire deemed appropriate to the deceased’s social
identity and then used in their appropriate function at the funeral itself. Such an asso-
ciation is even further supported when we recall that the inclusion of animal bones is
more frequent in tall pots, which generally overlaps with the ‘consumption’ type
group.70 Though many of the animals found in cremations were not necessarily con-
sumed, some were.71 This is not to suggest that the bones from meat products were
necessarily consumed from these vessels. The simple inclusion of the leftover bones in
the cremation urn with the ashes of the cremated individual after the meat’s consump-
tion would be a more than sufficiently potent expression of this symbolic meaning. It is
perhaps significant, in this regard, that the incidence of inclusion of animal offerings
was much higher in burials of individuals over thirteen years of age, which Squires
shows to be, at Cleatham and Elsham at least, a social rather than practical choice.72
Howard Williams proposes that cremation burial functioned as the creation of a
new social identity for the deceased, through mnemonic imagery and selective acts
of remembering and forgetting, including the creation of a new ‘costume’, ‘skin’
(or, indeed, ‘habitus’) for its occupant.73 The more supernatural aspects of this cos-
mological proposition, derived principally from ethnographic analogy, are well be-
yond the ability of our material to empirically demonstrate, but the basic principle
that aspects of the deceased’s social habitus, old and new, were expressed in the
cremation urn is entirely plausible.
When we factor in the possibility that urns were displayed for extended periods
prior to their deposition in the ground,74 it becomes clear that those handling such
vessels would be well acquainted with their semiotic characteristics. An important
such characteristic appears to have related to gendered expressions of feasting or
consumption, with female burial appearing to generally take place in the pots pro-
ducing beverages for consumption at such feasting events. The significance of this
cannot be overstated. Changes in attitude to the collection, distribution and use of
food are a notable aspect of the transition from the late Roman to the early medieval
West. A key marker of phase alteration in, for example, Roman urban sites, nor-
mally held as indicative of a breakdown in these sites’ integrity, is the presence of
conspicuous food consumption.75 Though it is often seen principally as evidence of
70 Richards, Anglo-Saxon Cremation Urns, 200.

71 Lee, Feasting the Dead, 57–58.
72 Kirsty E. Squires, “Piecing Together Identity: A Social Investigation of Early Anglo-Saxon
Cremation Practices,” The Archaeological Journal 170, no. 1 (2013): 186–87.
73 Howard Williams, “Material Culture as Memory: Combs and Cremation in Early Medieval Britain,”
Early Medieval Europe 12, no. 2 (2003): 89–128; Williams, “A Well-Urned Rest,” 104–5.
74 Williams, “A Well-Urned Rest,” 105.
75 Such as the so-called ‘small pig horizon’ for the principia of the Roman fortress beneath York
Minster. D. Rackham, “Animal Bone from Post-Roman Contexts,” in Excavations at York Minster
Volume 1: From Roman Fortress to Norman Cathedral, edited by D. Phillips and B. Heywood
(London: Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, 1995), 533–73.
the barbarism of the site’s new inhabitants, it is often indicative of conspicuous

consumption, and is perhaps better interpreted as an alteration of use, pertaining
to the increased militarisation of post-Roman British society, occurring alongside
changes in the depiction of gender in funerary ritual.76
Conclusion: A habitus barbarus in sub-Roman

Britain
An alternative approach to early medieval mortuary archaeology may help us to
weave these fragmented pieces together. Philipp Von Rummel’s innovative doctoral
thesis, Habitus Barbarus, argues that by the fifth century actual dress behaviour in
the Roman Empire, especially that of an increasingly militarized provincial aristoc-
racy, had become dislocated from the expected norms still maintained in ideologi-
cal discourse. As he puts it:
The antique tradition had disappeared by the second half of the sixth century. The senatorial
class, as the bearers of Roman tradition par excellence, had been unable to sustain the conflict
[over the definitions and social expectations of costume and behaviour] in which they had been
engaged around 400 […] but at the same time, a new form of rulership, based on military power,
had asserted itself. ‘Romanness’ had to be reconceptualized.77
As one aspect of imperial ideology (‘the toga’) shifted and reshaped itself in flux, it
simultaneously instituted another in its stead: the habitus barbarus, a burial cos-
tume of Roman military origin, which embodied the ideology of the late antique
military elite. This was barbarous in because it deviated from classical ideals, not
because it originated with any actual barbarian group.78
In Britain, this becomes complicated. A migration from northern Germany demon-
strably took place, and much of the material culture we find in our burial evidence,
like that at Spong Hill, probably arrived during that migration. But material arriving
during a migration cannot prove that the aforesaid material was used to construct eth-
nic identities whose existence in the fifth century is entirely without foundation.79
There is every reason to believe that even after imperial collapse, the ideological
frameworks of power still operated by association with Roman authority in
76 James Gerrard, “Rethinking the ‘Small Pig Horizon’ at York Minster,” Oxford Journal of
Archaeology 26, no. 3 (2007): 303–7; Gerrard, The Ruin of Roman Britain, 62.
77 Philipp von Rummel, “The Fading Power of Images: Romans, Barbarians, and the Uses of a
Dichotomy in Early Medieval Archaeology,” in Transformations of Romanness: Early Medieval Regions
and Identities, edited by Walter Pohl and Gerda Heydemann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 365–406, 395.
78 Von Rummel, Habitus barbarus.
79 Harland, “Memories of Migration?”.
Britain.80 What little we know about ideas of power in the parts of Barbaricum
whence these newcomers would have arrived suggests that they, too, operated by
and played with Roman ideological frameworks.81 The empirical evidence—docu-
mentary and artistic—exists for such Roman frameworks, but even this was in a
constant state of flux. Much of the evidence that von Rummel draws upon to make
this argument is the same as that normally used to assert, without empirical basis,
that early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ material culture had its clear origins in a Germanic cul-
tural ethos.82 Von Rummel dismantles claims that such costume items as paired
shoulder brooches or certain types of belt buckle or weaponry in any form repre-
sented a clear pattern of cultural expression that suggested ‘Germanic’ expression,
highlighting instead the emergence of this burial practice from a cultural context
forged in the provincial Roman military frontier, before its spread into barbaricum.83
Guy Halsall has suggested that Style I and other forms of zoomorphic art which we see
appear on items such as cruciform brooches in the 470s signified the transformation of
stable motifs of centre and periphery into those of ‘undecideability’—a response to the
curious twilight zone of the later fifth century, in which the Roman Empire’s political
failure was complete, but the Empire’s dominance persisted in the symbolico-ideo-
logical realm.84 The referencing of a descendent of late Roman techniques on
these brooches may represent a precursor to this process. The earliest precursors
to cruciform brooches (Nydam brooches, Armbrust brooches, etc) were often
found in cemeteries whose contexts suggest the desire on the part of the burying
community to demonstrate their affiliation with Roman authority—associated
with crossbow brooches, distinct military belt buckles, and the like—often when
the genuine products of Roman fabricae were not available.85 The earliest
80 Gerrard, The Ruin of Roman Britain, 253.

81 Von Rummel, Habitus barbarus, 181; Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West,
376–568 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 381–90.
82 E. g. the Zweeloo ‘princess’. Von Rummel, Habitus barbarus, 388.
83 Von Rummel, Habitus barbarus, 269–375. Hubert Fehr, “Germanische Einwanderung oder kul-
turelle Neuorientierung? Zu den Anfängen des Reihengräberhorizontes,” in Zwischen Spätantike
und Frühmittelalter: Archäologie des 4. bis 7. Jahrhunderts im Westen, edited by Sebastian Brather
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 67–102.
84 Guy Halsall, “The Space Between: The ‘Undead’ Roman Empire and the Aesthetics of Salin’s
Style I” (UCL: The Sir David Wilson Lecture in Medieval Studies, October 15, 2014); See also
Harland, “Memories of Migration.”
85 Jan Bemmann, “Die Nydamfibeln: Eine Fibelform der Stufe C3?” Germania 71, no. 1 (1993): 152,
Abb. 8; 158–59, for association of Nydam brooches with Roman military belts and crossbow brooches.
Sebastian Brather, “Acculturation and Ethnogenesis Along the Frontier: Rome and the Ancient
Germans in an Archaeological Perspective,” in Borders, Barriers and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late
Antiquity and the Middle Ages, edited by Florin Curta (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 52–53, for these as
alternatives to the products of fabricae.
example of a Nydam brooch in Britain, at Dorchester-on-Thames, is found in just

such a context.86
Changes in burial costume do not represent the simplistic replacement of a
Roman by a ‘Germanic’ ideology.87 All that can be proven is that there existed a
multiplicity of forms of Romanness, some of which were mediated via barbaricum.
But through a Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, we can deal with the multiplicity of
identity categories, such as Roman—or what is often described, without empirical
foundation, as Germanic88—without treating these as homogenous. A regime of
signs can detach from its object, and function in new, uncertain, but contingent
ways. We can thus overcome an approach which deems it sufficient to identify sym-
bolic features which may be identified simply as ‘Roman’ or ‘Germanic’, and treat
the construction of these features and their association with a given ethnic category
as satisfactory historical interpretation. Instead, analysis can trace the references
that symbolic actions make, without using these to make what are ultimately essen-
tialist assumptions about their users’ identities.
I wish to propose, therefore, that this funerary activity was a regional variant, a rhi-
zomatic offshoot, of a wider, post-Imperial symbolic grammar, expressing a military,
and thus ‘barbarous’, habitus, at the expense of civic identity. This does not mean that
those burying their dead in stamped cremation urns or with cruciform brooches did not
do so to express their ethnic identity, or that these people thought of themselves as
Anglian or Roman, and selected the items they buried people with for that reason. The
point is that the evidence available does not allow us to know this. It at least allows for
the possibility of the hypothesis that I have just proposed.
To conclude, I offer the example of Renato Bialetti, the Italian entrepreneur
famed for making popular the ‘Moka pot’ coffee maker. Bialetti was buried,
in February 2016, in a cremation urn in the form of a Moka pot (Fig. 1). Let us imag-
ine archaeologists excavating this urn, in the 3600s. They might state the following:
‘We know there was a large migration of Italians to the United States in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We have excavated many pots like this in
both the USA and Italy. Does this mean, therefore, that Italian ethnic identity was
86 Paul Booth, “A Late Roman Military Burial from the Dyke Hills, Dorchester on Thames,
Oxfordshire,” Britannia 45 (2014): 243–73.
87 Guy Halsall, “The Origins of the Reihengräberzivilisation: Forty Years On,” in Fifth-Century Gaul:
A Crisis of Identity?, edited by John F. Drinkwater and Hugh Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1992), 205; Frans Theuws, “Grave Goods, Ethnicity, and the Rhetoric of Burial Rites in Late
Antique Northern Gaul,” in Ethnic Constructs in Late Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition,
edited by Ton Derks and Nico Roymans (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2009); Harland,
“Memories of Migration.”
88 Neither the evidence for such a concept nor the social infrastructure which would produce it
exists to justify the sort of coherence, self-awareness, and ideological power that is often attributed
to it in opposition to Romanness. Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, 22–25; Walter Goffart, Barbarian
Tides (Philadelphia: Univ. of Philadelphia Press, 2010), 187–229.
being actively created by this burial practice?’ Hopefully, the archaeologists of the
future will have learned to ask better questions.
Fig. 1: Evidence for the construction of a new Italian ethnic identity? (Image from Flickr/Mayastar,
CC BY-SA 2.0).
Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the DFG Center for Advanced Studies 2496,

‘Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’, at the
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, as well as the same university’s Collaborative
Research Center 923 “Bedrohte Ordnungen”, both of whom have hosted me as a fel-
low during the finalisation of this manuscript. This work was also supported by the
UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number 1362784]. I also wish to
express gratitude to Guy Halsall, who supervised the doctoral thesis at the
University of York upon which this research is based, and who has been a helpful
and encouraging source of guidance throughout.
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Steve Walker
A Farewell to Arms: Germanic Identity
in Fifth-Century Britain
Introduction
The use of the term ‘Germanic’ in the context of fifth-century Britain is largely inter-
changeable with the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’. The appropriateness of the term ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ has, in recent years, been challenged by those who feel that it carries with it
the baggage of unconscious privilege, cultural exceptionalism or worse. It is for this
reason here largely eschewed. It has been used both as an ethnonym to describe
peoples who migrated to Britain throughout (and perhaps a little before) the fifth-
century and also as a descriptive term for a number of observable phenomena in
the archaeological record from a wide swathe of southern and eastern England, in-
cluding grave goods, funereal practices and settlements. The people who are
thought to have introduced these phenomena to Britain crossed the North Sea in a
migration event often termed the ‘adventus Saxonum’ (the coming of the Saxons’).
The nature of the adventus has been a much debated topic for decades. The tradi-
tional view envisaged a mass invasion by various groups of Angles, Saxons and
Jutes, who carved out new kingdoms for themselves and displaced the Britons in
the process.1 This view was challenged in the 1980s by more minimalist interpreta-
tions, which envisaged small scale migration by elite groups who took control of a
larger, subject population of Britons.2 The pendulum has since swung back to a de-
gree, with modern interpretations balancing relatively large scale migration with
large scale British survival.3
Notwithstanding differences in opinion as to the precise nature of the adventus,
the prevailing models tend to agree (explicitly or implicitly) in one important re-
spect; Germanic migration was characterised by hostility and warfare.4 The Britons
were the passive victims of a vigorous martial culture. They might have been killed,
driven away or enslaved. They might have been subjected to a strictly enforced
1 See, for example, Edward A. Freeman, Old English History for Children (London: Macmillan, 1869):
27–29. See also John Morris, The Age of Arthur, (London: Macmillan, 1998). The notion of binary eth-
nocentric conflict is one of the central themes of Morris’ work.
2 See, for example, Nicholas Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (London: Searby, 1992).
3 See, for example, Helena Hamerow, “The Earliest Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms” in The New Cambridge
Medieval History, edited by Paul Fouracre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 267–69.
4 Although see James Gerrard, The Ruin of Roman Britain: An Archaeological Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016), for a more nuanced perspective.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-010
190 Steve Walker
cultural apartheid which perpetuated their inferior social status.5 At best, they were
obliged to assimilate—to become ‘Anglo-Saxons’—as a means of ensuring their sur-
vival in the face of a culture which was incursive, aggressive and unwanted. But what-
ever fate awaited them (and there is a general acceptance that one model will not do
for the whole country), they were conquered and subjected by the newcomers.6 As
such, Germanic artefacts in the archaeological record imply linguistic, political and
social change, mediated through violence and/or expedience.
These militaristic explanations are heavily conditioned by the scanty written re-
cords for the post-Roman period. For the sixth-century British cleric, Gildas, the ad-
ventus was divine punishment for the sinfulness of the Britons.7 The Saxons were
invited to Britain by short-sighted leaders who hoped to use them to stem the tide
of Pictish and Irish raids. After some initial successes, the Saxon mercenaries bol-
stered their numbers and rebelled, destroying towns and slaughtering the Britons
in a wave of destruction which spread from coast to coast.8 Defeat was followed by
a British rally, a drawn-out war and ultimate British victory at the unlocated battle
of Badon Hill. However, victory only contained the Saxons and Gildas bemoaned
the ‘lugubri divortio barbarorum’ with ‘the barbarians’ which persisted in his day.
This phrase is usually translated as ‘unhappy partition with the barbarians’, sug-
gesting that in Gildas’ time there was a fixed boundary between Briton and
German.9 However, an alternative translation interprets the same phrase as mean-
ing ‘grievous divorce from the barbarians’, suggesting a broken past treaty rather
5 See Mark Thomas, Michael Stumpf and Heinrich Härke, “Evidence for an Apartheid-like Social
Structure in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” Proceedings Royal Society B: Biological Science 273 (2006),
2651–57. The paper argued that apartheid might provide a model for differing reproductive rates and
thus explain the proportion of Germanic genetic material in the modern British population. See also
Alex Woolf, “Apartheid and economics in Anglo-Saxon England,” in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England,
edited by Nicholas J Higham (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 127–29. Before allowing ourselves to get too
carried away with this idea, we should bear in mind that the one piece of insular evidence for apartheid
is the late seventh-century law code of Ine of Wessex, who distinguished between his English and
Welsh subjects in terms of compensation payable for their deaths. Even leaving aside the possibility
that these laws may have been designed to encourage assimilation rather than to perpetuate division
(John Pattinson, “Is It Necessary to Assume an Apartheid-like Social Structure in Anglo-Saxon
England?” Proceedings Royal Society B: Biological Science 275 (2008): 2423–29), taking this piece of evi-
dence out of its temporal and geographic context in order to argue that it demonstrates the existence of
a nationwide policy of segregation that had been in place since the fifth century is unwise, to say the
least.
6 See, for example, Alfred Smyth, Warlords and Holy Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1984),
26; 30–31 in which the Anglian Northumbrians ‘push northwards […] relentlessly’, ‘overrun’ territory and
erect crosses to celebrate the ‘triumph of Northumbrian arms […] over the Britons’.
7 Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and other works, edited by Michael Winterbottom (Chichester:
Phillimore, 1978), chapter 22.
8 Ibid., chapter 24.
9 Ibid., chapter 10.
than a contemporary boundary.10 Both translations fit the Latin, but that such dif-
fering interpretations are possible underlines the serious limitations both of the
written sources and of the shaky narratives erected upon them.
Gildas’ account looms large in the later English sources. By the eighth cen-
tury, the Anglo-Saxons had a clear idea of their origins, notwithstanding that
those ideas were largely inaccurate. The eighth-century monk, Bede (who for the
most part copied Gildas’ account)11 and the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(‘ASC’) recorded how boatloads of warriors came as conquerors and cleared the
land to make way for their dynastic kingdoms. The origin stories of the kingdoms
of Kent, Sussex and Wessex in the ASC borrow extensively from one another12 as
well as sharing a reliance on common literary motifs such as telescoping the
past,13 the arrival of the founding father to a new land,14 the divine brothers15 and
a frequent reliance on things happening in threes. However, stripped of these mo-
tifs, it quickly becomes apparent that medieval chroniclers had no clear idea on
what had really happened in the mid-fifth century and were simply recording
what they thought had happened (or what they thought should have happened).
Whether they even believed what they wrote is open to doubt—Bede‘s account of
the Kentish founding fathers Hengest and Horsa is introduced with the word per-
hibentur (‘they are said’ […]), a caveat which may indicate that he was not at all
persuaded of the veracity of the story.16
The problems with the written records have, over the last two decades or so, per-
suaded many archaeologists to disconnect the documentary from other forms of evi-
dence and to abandon the ‘culture history’ approach which, for so long, left
archaeology in thrall to the frameworks developed by historians.17 However, even if
archaeology has moved on, Sam Lucy‘s warnings about how the making of simplistic
connections between ethnicity and material culture has perpetuated the use of
10 Michael Garcia, “Gildas and the ‘grievous divorce from the barbarians’,” Early Medieval Europe
21 (2013), 243–53.
11 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, edited and translated by B. Colgrave and
R. A. B. Mynors. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 1.15.
12 Anne Savage, The Anglo Saxon Chronicles (London: Heinemann, 1982), 29 and 35. The Kentish
story is entered under the year 449, Sussex under 477 and Wessex under 514. There are two variants
of the Wessex story under the years 495 and 519.
13 David P. Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1974), 34–36.
14 Maori origin myths talk of the “Great Fleet.” Despite the name, the fleet typically comprises a
small number of boats in which the founding father and his followers arrive. Henige, Chimera, 86,
100–103. The parallels with the Anglo-Saxon origin myths are not difficult to spot.
15 Barbara Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London: Routledge, 1997), 3.
16 Ibid., 3.
17 For a useful summary of the issues, see John F. Moreland, “Ethnicity Power and the English,” in
Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain, edited by William O. Frazer and Andrew Tyrell (London:
Leicester Univ. Press, 2000), 23–52.
192 Steve Walker
models based on invasion and/or migration to construct histories of post-Roman

Britain still ring true for other disciplines.18 There is arguably therefore scope to ques-
tion these militaristic models and instead to see ‘Germanic’ culture in the south and
east of post-Roman Britain as representing a hybridised, shared identity in which the
Britons, far from being the defeated victims of an all-conquering ‘other’, were active
participants and contributors.
Migration
The first issue we need to consider is the likely scale of fifth-century migration from
Germania to Britain. Although there is too little evidence to say with any certainty
how many people crossed the North Sea, a migration of 100,000 to 200,000 individu-
als over about a century provides a reasonable benchmark.19 Although annual levels
of migration would inevitably vary as a result of social, political or environmental in-
fluences, this figure represents an average incursion of up to two thousand people
per annum. Even allowing for very conservative assumptions about the size of the in-
digenous population in the post-Roman period (perhaps as low as 1,000,000 in the
areas of the earliest Germanic settlement),20 this still gives a population ratio at the
conclusion of this century-long migration process of at least 5:1 in favour of the Britons
of the south and east.21
Migration of this order presents a number of problems for the ‘violent invasion’
hypothesis. Firstly, the lack of any evidence for large boats capable of carrying signif-
icant numbers of people (the newcomers probably came in small groups of ten to
twenty at a time)22 means that the North Sea and the English Channel presented insur-
mountable barriers to large, single ‘folk movement’ events of the type that appear to
have characterised at least some population movements in the late Roman (albeit per-
haps not the post-Roman) western Empire.23 The migrants can only have come in mod-
est numbers—at most a steady stream rather than a great wave—and they were always
heavily outnumbered by the Britons. Secondly, having arrived, they chose to settle in
18 Sam Lucy, “Burial Practice in Early Medieval Eastern Britain: Constructing Local Identities,
Deconstructing Ethnicity,” in Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, edited by Sam Lucy and
Andrew Reynolds (London: The Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2002), 72–73, 75–76.
19 Heinrich Härke, “Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis,” Medieval Archaeology 55 (2011):
7–9.
20 Ibid., 8.
21 Bryan Ward-Perkins proposes a ratio of at least 4:1 in favour of the Britons. Ward-Perkins, “Why Did
the Anglo-Saxons Not Become More British?” English Historical Review (June 2000): 522–23.
22 Härke, “Ethnogenesis,” 9.
23 Guy Halsall, “Two Worlds Become One: A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and
‘Germanic’ Migration,” German History 32 (2014): 528–31.
small, undefended communities of no more than a dozen or so family groups.24 Even

the very largest early ‘Germanic’ cemeteries, such as Spong Hill in Norfolk, probably
only catered for scattered communities with an aggregate population of no more than
four to five hundred individuals.25 Thirdly, with the possible exception of east Kent,
the occupants of fifth-century Anglo-Saxon graves do not look first and foremost to
be warriors. Unlike in Gaul, where well-appointed graves are more common (not-
withstanding that even these are increasingly no longer referred to as ‘warrior
graves’), early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ graves show little evidence of martial culture. Where
weapons appear, spears, rather than swords, predominate and even if the spears
should be interpreted as denoting martial prowess rather than simply the tools of hunt-
ing or self-defence for those living in disparate agrarian communities, it may be that
such burials were at least partially symbolic—designed to denote status within commu-
nities rather than shining a light on a ‘professional’ warrior caste.26 Finally, although
there is some suggestion that some Continental ‘Germanic’ groups like the Saxons or
the Franks elected kings in times of war, there is no persuasive evidence for any overall
guiding ‘hand’ in fifth-century Britain.27 Settlement morphology does not suggest signif-
icant social differentiation on rural secular sites until the late sixth or even the seventh
century, although this might just be the consequence of a differing attitude towards the
expression of power in post-Roman England.28 That said, it remains the case that until
the middle of the sixth century at the earliest, there is little or no ordering of communi-
ties, no ostentatious graves and no high status buildings indicative of regional elites, all
of which we might expect if the ‘Germanic’ migrants came as conquerors. To the con-
trary, status in fifth-century Anglo-Saxon communities appears to have been expressed
within kin groups rather than between them.29
24 Helena Hamerow, “Communities of the Living and Dead: The Relationship Between Anglo-Saxon
Settlements and Cemeteries c. 450–c. 850,” in Intersections: The Archaeology and History of
Christianity in England: 400–1200, edited by Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay (Oxford: Archaeopress,
2010), 72.
25 Yorke, Kings and Kingdoms, 7.
26 Hamerow suggests that some of these assemblages were never meant to be used or were in
graves of males who would not have been of fighting age or ability. Hamerow, Earliest Anglo-Saxon
Kingdoms, 272.
27 Barbara Yorke, “Anglo-Saxon Gentes and Regna,” in Regna and Gentes: The Relationship
Between Late Antique and Early Medieval Peoples and Kingdoms in the Transformation of the Roman
World, edited by Hans-Werner Goetz, Jörg Jarnut and Walter Pohl (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 400 and
406. For the Franks see especially the comments made by Gregory of Tours, who was only able to
detect war-leaders rather than kings in his early sources. Lewis Thorpe, Gregory of Tours: The
History of the Franks (London: Penguin Books, 1974), Chapter II, Book 9.
28 Christopher Loveluck, Northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages, c. AD 600–1150 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), 105–13.
29 Hamerow, Earliest Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 273. See also Christopher Scull, “Social Archaeology and
Anglo-Saxon Kingdom Origins,” in Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 10, edited by Tania
Dickinson and David Griffiths, (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Committee for Archaeology, 1999), 21–22.
194 Steve Walker
When taken together, this all raises the possibility that at least some migrant
groups remained in a subservient positon to local British authorities for most, if not all,
of the fifth-century. This appears to be the case for Lincolnshire (of which more below)
and also in Sussex, where the Roman town of Chichester appears to have controlled
settlement in the area around the Ouse and Cuckmere rivers.30 In this regard, it may
well be significant that a number of later Anglo-Saxon polities had British names (in-
cluding Kent and Lindsey),31 suggesting British origins for these polities. Others have a
scattering of British names in the upper reaches of their king lists, suggesting at least
an acknowledgment of British ancestry.32
Cultural Divides
The extent of early ‘Germanic’ settlement also raises issues. What we think of as
‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture appears to have spread quickly across a large swathe of
southern and eastern England. Fifth-century ‘Germanic’ cemeteries are dotted
across the south and east of Britain, yet by the start of the eighth century, the
edge of those cemeteries was only about fifty miles further west from where it had
been in the mid-fifth century.33 This requires an explanation, and militaristic ones
do not suffice. There is no evidence of any system of fortifications which might
have acted as a physical barrier to western expansion of settlements and the di-
viding line between the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and British areas does not follow the line of
any known road.34 Furthermore, even if we were minded to throw caution to the
wind and accept that the accounts of settlement given in documentary sources such
as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle might contain a grain of truth, we still have a problem.
Those sources envisage a slow, grinding advance from south coast beachheads
and not a lightning advance by Germanic warbands across half of England fol-
lowed by a three hundred year stalemate, which is what the distribution of the

31 Deira and Bernicia, the two component parts of later Northumbria, both also have British
names.
32 The founders of Wessex, Cerdic, Cynric and Ceawlin, may all have British names. The Coedbad
of the Lindsey king list also has a British name. Even the great pagan Penda of Mercia has the
British element *pen” (‘head’) in his name.
33 Guy Halsall, Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages (Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press,
2013), 232. See also Guy Halsall, “Northern Britain and the Fall of the Roman Empire,” The Medieval
Journal 2, no. 2 (2012): 10–13.
34 Starting from the south, the dividing line runs fairly close to the line of the Fosse Way (the
Roman road from Exeter to Lincoln), but diverges in the Midlands and thereafter takes a much
steeper trajectory north and east.
early graves would suggest if they really were the resting places of bellicose incur-
sive groups.
What is notable, however, is that the line which demarcated the westward ex-
tent of early Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain for the best part of three hundred
years matches very closely the geological divide known as the Tees/Exe line.35 This
line runs roughly from Hartlepool in Cleveland to Exmouth in Devon and marks the
divide between the poorer pastoral uplands of the north and west and the richer
arable lowlands of the south and east (fig. 1).36
The Tees/Exe line has a long pedigree as a cultural boundary between those
parts of the country which had traditionally been open to Continental influences and
those which had not. In the pre-Roman Iron Age, the line demarcated the extent of
the use of both coinage37 and the use of Latin in Britain.38 Throughout the Roman
period, it marked the divide between the ‘villa’ region and the ‘military’ regions of the
diocese39 and also the divide between the use of different funereal rites.40 Perhaps
more importantly for the purposes of the present argument, it also marked the late
fourth century and early fifth century divide between both the areas where late
Roman chip-carved military belt sets are or are not found41 and the areas where
Roman bracelets were refashioned into finger rings.42 The areas south and east of this
line have also produced practically all of the Roman coinage found in Britain which
was struck after 388.43
It would be a remarkable coincidence if an Anglo-Saxon invasion really had
stopped for three centuries at the same invisible line which, for many hundreds of
years previously, had marked clear cultural divisions within Britain. Perhaps the
35 As noted by Tom Williamson, Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England: Time
and Topography (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), 36.
36 There are some exceptions (such as the fertile lowlands of the Cheshire Plain or Lancashire’s
Fylde coast), but in general terms the rule holds.
37 John Creighton, Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2000), 223.
38 Jonathan Williams, “New Light on Latin in Pre-Conquest Britain,” Britannia 38 (2007): 1–11.
39 Andrew Sargent, “The North-South Divide Revisited: Thoughts on the Character of Roman
Britain,” Britannia 33 (2002): 219–26.
40 Elizabeth O’Brien, Post-Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England: Burial Practices Reviewed
(Oxford: Hedges, 1999): 4, 9–29.
41 Halsall, Worlds of Arthur, 216–19.
42 Ellen Swift, “Object Biography, Re-use and Recycling in the Late to Post-Roman Transition
Period and Beyond: Rings Made from Romano-British Bracelets,” Britannia, 43 (2012), 176, 186–88.
For balance, it should, be noted that there is a light scattering of this material west of the line (nota-
bly in Wroxeter), notwithstanding that the distribution generally respects the line.
43 Sam Moorhead and Philippa Walton, “Coinage at the End of Roman Britain,” in AD 410: The
History and Archaeology of Late and Post-Roman Britain, edited by F. K. Haarer et al., (London:
Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 2014), 105–11.
196 Steve Walker
Fig. 1: Key: In each map, the solid line marks the Tees/Exe Line.
The broken line marks:
(1) Western extent of villa zone the during Roman period
(2) Western extent of finds of late Roman military metalwork
(3) Western extent of fourth-century sites with above average coin-loss
(4) Western extent of ‘Anglo Saxon’ cemeteries
reason the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ‘advance’ respected that same invisible cultural dividing
line was because it too was primarily a cultural, rather than a military, phenome-
non? For the avoidance of doubt, it is not here proposed that the emergence of the
cemeteries was solely the result of the spread of ideas in the post-Roman years.44
It cannot reasonably be disputed that there was migration—and perhaps reason-
ably significant migration—into Britain from Germania from the fifth century.
What can be advanced is the proposal that the migration of ‘Germanic’ groups
need not always have resulted in the imposition of a migrant culture over an in-
digenous one.
If a significant pre-existing cultural divide such as the Tees/Exe line could be
perpetuated in the post-Roman period, we might also expect to see the perpetuation
of more localised cultural divides within the early ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settlement areas.
And indeed we do. For example, in the Pre-Roman Iron Age, modern day East
Yorkshire was a small enclave occupied by the Parisii, an apparently wealthy and
sophisticated people who differed markedly from their Brigantian neighbours, not
least in their early funereal rites (the so-called ‘Arras’ style).45 During the Roman
period, this same area was unusual in the north for its dense concentration of villas.
In the fifth-century, East Yorkshire shows a particularly high concentration of so-
called ‘early pagan Germanic’ cemeteries and is likely to have been the core of the
later kingdom of Deira, which despite plentiful evidence of ‘early Germanic’ settle-
ment, retained a British name.46 We see something similar in early Wessex, where
the areas of earliest settled are those same areas which boasted villas in the Roman
period. By contrast, areas with little or no evidence for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ activity also
had few or no villas in the Roman period.47 The picture which emerges from these
examples is hazy, but does at least support the observation that the territorial ex-
tent of the early kingdoms of the south and east observable by the later sixth cen-
tury matches reasonably closely the late Roman civitates, which formed the basis of
civilian administration.48
Material Culture and the Evolution of Identity

If there is reason to doubt a steady westward spread of incursive and violent ‘Germanic’
groups, we might also reconsider the extent to which ‘Germanic’ material culture
44 Williamson, Time and Topography, 61–71.

45 O’Brien, Burial Practices Reviewed, 2 and 5.
46 David Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003): 47. See also Nicholas J. Higham, The Kingdom of Northumbria (Stroud:
Sutton, 1993): 80–81.
47 Helena Hamerow “The Origins of Wessex Pilot Project,” Oxonensia 78 (2013): 61.
48 Yorke, “Anglo-Saxon Gentes,” 395–98.
198 Steve Walker
should properly be regarded as ‘Germanic’. One feature which has traditionally been
seen as diagnostically Anglo-Saxon is furnished inhumation—burial with grave goods.
Yet it is no such thing. The dominant funerary rite in the North Sea homelands was
cremation. Furnished inhumation sprang up in the immediate post-Roman period
across a vast area stretching from Yorkshire to the Danube and only begins to appear
in the North Sea homelands at roughly the same time as it appears in both Britain
and Northern Gaul.49 If furnished inhumation was specifically a rite that arose in
Germania, we would not expect to see it in Northern Gaul, as the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ did
not settle there in any numbers. Yet we do see it in that region, and this suggests very
strongly that furnished inhumation may have been the result of a wider shift in both
Continental and insular fashion which was perhaps prompted by a desire (or a per-
ceived need) to express status and/or identity through public ritual.50 The later fifth
century also saw the emergence of artistic styles in Scandinavia and Northern
Germany (including both wrist-clasps and the decorated style known as Salin’s
Style I) which spread to Britain by 500 and are suggestive of a population recep-
tive to Continental influence.51
The fifth century also saw the widespread emergence of sunken floored build-
ings. These typically small structures were usually built without hearths or win-
dows and were probably designed for a variety of agricultural uses. Although this
architectural style has been regarded as diagnostically Anglo-Saxon, it also ap-
pears to be a hybrid form (albeit one with strong influences from Germania).52
Like furnished inhumation, sunken floored buildings did not previously exist in
the North Sea homelands (where the longhouse predominated) but begin to ap-
pear there at the same time as they start to appear in Gaul and Britain. At Horcott
in Oxfordshire, late Roman burials coincided with the building of both a sunken-
floored building and ostensibly Anglo-Saxon timber buildings, suggesting a pre-
existing group in cultural transition rather than replacement of one (British)
group by another (Anglo-Saxon) one.53 Further evidence comes from the Dyke
Hills site at Dorchester-on-Thames (Oxfordshire) where two early fifth-century fe-
male burials displayed a mix of Romano-British and Germanic dress forms.54 Four
male burials from Dyke Hills and the south of the town itself included late Roman
belt buckles of Hawkes and Dunning type IB and these may also indicate a group in
49 T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 46.
50 Halsall, Worlds of Arthur, 223–29. See also Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007): 28–29
51 Gerrard, Ruin of Roman Britain, 202.
52 Ibid., 225–26 and 295–96, and Hamerow, Earliest Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, 266–67.
53 Hamerow, “Origins of Wessex,” 60–61.
54 Ibid., 59–60.
transition.55 If Horcott indicates the emergence of new modes of cultural expression

which Britain shared with the near Continent, Dorchester-on-Thames has been pro-
posed as suggestive of a population which was receptive to mixing both old and new
influences, partially at least as a result of an accord between militarised and mixed
gender group of incomers from Germania and local Romano-British landowners.56
The regional variation observable in the material record of post-Roman eastern
England further supports the notion of the active creation of new identities at the
local level.57
The Lindsey area of Lincolnshire provides an excellent example of both cul-
tural admixing and the emergence of new modes of expression. The relatively
dense concentration of cremation cemeteries along the road and river systems
which feed the Humber and Wash provide sound evidence for the existence of mi-
grant groups from Germania in fifth-century Lincolnshire. There is a close correla-
tion between the sites of these earliest fifth-century ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cremation
cemeteries and finds of fifth- and sixth-century British Class I and Type G penan-
nular brooches (fig. 2).58
The current explanation for this correlation is that brooch-wearing Britons and
cremating migrants formed two culturally distinct groups who lived side by
side.59 But this explicit correlation between material culture and ethnicity is prob-
lematic and, not least as a result of the conference at which the subject matter of
this paper was first presented, is now rightly being reconsidered.60 But even if the
brooches do represent ‘British’ groups and the cemeteries ‘Germanic’ groups, we
need to explain why the area around Lincoln itself has offered up neither brooches
55 Gerrard, Ruin of Roman Britain, 199. For the typology of the brooches, see S. C. Hawkes and
G. C. Dunning, “Soldiers and Settlers in Britain, Fourth to Fifth Century: With a Catalogue of
Animal-Ornamented Buckles and Related Belt-Fittings,” Medieval Archaeology 5, no. 1 (1961): 1–70.
56 Helena Hamerow, “The Origins of Wessex: Re-shaping Identities in the Post-Roman World,”
Lecture delivered at Medieval Midlands Postgraduate Conference 2017, Trinity House Chapel,
Leicester, 28th April 2017.
57 Lucy, “Burial Practice,” 78–87.
58 For a comprehensive typology of this artefact type, see Elizabeth Fowler, “Celtic Metalwork of
the Fifth and Sixth Centuries A.D.,” The Archaeological Journal 120 (1963), 98–160. Class I brooches
are Fowler’s types F and F1. For a summary of the refinements to Fowler’s original classifications
see, for example, Tania M. Dickinson, “Fowler’s Type G Penannular Brooches Reconsidered,”
Medieval Archaeology 26, no. 1 (1982): 41–68 and Rob Collins, “Brooch Use in the 4th- to 5th-
Century Frontier,” in Finds From the Frontier: Material Culture in the 4th to 5th Centuries, edited by Rob
Collins and Lindsay Allason-Jones (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2010), 64–77.
59 Caitlin Green, “The British Kingdom of Lindsey,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 56 (2008): 27 and
30. The idea is not a new one. See, for example, Thomas C. Lethbridge, “The Anglo-Saxon Settlement
in Eastern England,” in Dark-Age Britain: Studies Presented to E. T. Leeds, with a Bibliography of his
Works, edited Donald B. Harden (London: Methuen, 1956), 118.
Century AD,” Antiquity 93, no. 370 (2019), 954–69.
200 Steve Walker
Fig. 2: Distribution of Anglo-Saxon graves and British brooches in post-Roman Lincolnshire

(map URL: https://d-maps.com/carte.php?num_car=97572).
nor cremation cemeteries. The cremation cemeteries form a rough ring around (but at
least seventeen miles away from) Lincoln and this has plausibly been interpreted as
evidence of a strong fifth-century British polity based on the old provincial capital,
which was able to actively control Germanic settlement.61 However, if Lincoln was in
British hands, we might reasonably ask where Lincoln’s British brooches are?62 One
possibility is that the brooch-using groups further out from the centre of the polity
felt under some form of pressure which led them to display their ‘Britishness’ in a
more ostentatious way than did their neighbours nearer Lincoln.63 However, such an
explanation requires us to accept longstanding ethnic tension between two culturally
distinct peoples which persisted unchanged throughout the fifth century and into the
sixth. In addition, if such tension existed, one might ask why it was that the domi-
nant British group at Lincoln was happy to settle potentially unreliable or threatening
migrant groups on all of the major routes out of the city in the first place, thereby
encircling themselves with potential enemies. A simpler (and perhaps more satisfy-
ing) explanation might be that the brooches and cremation cemeteries indicate a
single group deliberately displaying both British and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ characteris-
tics, rather than two distinct ethnic groups living alongside one another. This
group included parvenu migrant communities who sought to negotiate their iden-
tity and their relationship to their hosts and/or neighbours in a time of profound
social and cultural change.
With this possibility in mind, we might also re-examine the wider phenomenon
of British grave goods appearing in supposedly Anglo-Saxon contexts. Such finds
are most common in graves of fifth-century date, where diagnostically British mate-
rial include Roman bracelets reworked as finger rings, coins and jewellery. These
artefacts have been interpreted as the scavenging of old Roman sites by Germanic
newcomers,64 but they would perhaps be better read as the deliberate deposition of
heirlooms or once-treasured possessions by a society undergoing change, rather than
the burying of the dead with grubbed-up trinkets with no cultural, familial or other
link to the deceased. The arguments against such an interpretation appear to be based
61 Peter Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee, 1998), 44.
For more detail, see Caitlin Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons: Lincolnshire AD 400–600 (Lincoln:
History of Lincolnshire Committee, 2012), 56–86.
62 The existence of an apparently early Christian church within the forum at St Paul’s-in-the-Bail
certainly supports the idea of British control of the city, as does the survival of the British name of
the polity.
63 Green, “Lindsey,” 28–31.
64 Ellen Swift, “Identifying Migrant Communities: A Contextual Analysis of Grave Assemblages from
Continental Late Roman Cemeteries,” Britannia 41 (2010): 201–2. See also Hella Eckardt and Howard
Williams, “Objects Without a Past?” in Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past
Societies, edited by Howard Williams (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2003),
141–70.
202 Steve Walker
largely on Roger White’s conclusion that the lack of a relative glut of late Roman mate-
rial in the earliest Germanic graves when compared to later ones militates against the
idea of deposition by an indigenous population in cultural transition.65 However, such
a conclusion is inherently at odds with observed practice in the pre-Roman Iron Age,
where particularly valued objects could be hundreds or even thousands of years old
when they were deposited.66 It also presents problems if we accept that the choice of
grave goods was not a simple case of ‘any Roman object would do’, but instead was a
far more complicated process in which specific objects and specific styles functioned in
very specific ways in the funereal ritual.67
To return to Lincoln, by the end of the fifth century, the large cremation ceme-
teries began to give way to much smaller inhumation cemeteries which appear both
close to Lincoln and also in the areas previously dominated by the cremation ceme-
teries. At the same time, we also begin to see the end of the British brooches (al-
though ‘Celtic’ hanging bowls, of which Lincolnshire has a greater concentration
than anywhere else in the country, appear widely, often in supposedly ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ inhumation graves).68 The privileging of militaristic explanations might
cause us to see this change as representing the point where the once-dominant
British group at Lincoln finally lost power to the Germanic invaders,69 but in the
context of the arguments set out in this paper, we might be better to view the end of
the fifth century as a point where the earlier cultural distinctions between the two
areas finally disappeared, to be replaced by a new, shared identity which drew on
wider Continental influences as well as on both local and migrant culture.
Science: A New Hope?

A number of DNA surveys of modern British populations have been carried out in
recent years. Taken together, one might conclude that the genetic contribution to the
modern British population from early medieval migration from the North Sea littoral
65 Ibid., 155–57, summarising Roger White, Roman and Celtic Objects from Anglo-Saxon Graves: A
Catalogue and an Interpretation of their Use (Oxford: BAR, 1988).
66 Ibid., 142.
67 Lotte Hedeager, “Migration Period Europe,” in Rituals of Power: From Late Antiquity to the Early
Middle Ages, edited by Frans Theuws and Janet L. Nelson (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 15–58. Hedeager
arguably goes too far in seeing such processes as being directly linked to the creation of new ideol-
ogies for warrior-elites and the dynasties which followed them, but the basic point is well made.
68 Green, Britons and Anglo-Saxons, 71–75.
69 Ibid., 87–106. In all fairness, Green is open to the notion that the transfer of power from Briton
to Anglo-Saxon may have been partly peaceful, although the underlying argument is one of ongo-
ing ethnic competition.
is of the order of about 40%.70 However, notwithstanding that these studies have re-
ceived significant attention in the media, modelling modern DNA to draw conclu-
sions about the genetic make-up of ancient populations necessitates the making
of large assumptions which may well not be valid. In particular, the assumption
that all genetic material in the modern British population which originates from
Germania derives from migration events of the fifth to seventh centuries (thereby
implying that the ongoing social mobility of the subsequent millennium and a
half have played little or no part in defining our genetic make-up) is, to say the
least, problematic.
Studies of ancient DNA will, in time—funding permitting—give us rather better
information about the geographical origins of those buried in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ceme-
teries, but at present, we are largely reliant on the results of isotope analyses of
ancient populations. The water drunk in childhood leaves ‘signatures’ in tooth
enamel which can be used to draw conclusions about the geology of the area in
which that individual grew up. Analyses of both strontium and oxygen isotopes from
skeletons uncovered at the fifth- to seventh-century cemetery at West Heslerton
(Yorkshire) show that, despite the overwhelmingly ‘Germanic’ character of the
cemetery, very few of the subjects grew up in Continental Europe.71 The largest
migrant group (around half of the total) appeared to consist of individuals who
had been born in Britain, but somewhere west of the Pennines.72 These results
hint at substantial inward migration from the North West England and the subse-
quent adoption by both locals and migrants of a material culture with distinctly
German characteristics. In other words, there may well have been a post-Roman
continuation of the cultural mobility which is such a well-recognised feature of
the Roman period.73 We see the same thing at Oakington in Cambridgeshire,
where in the early post-Roman period there is evidence for a genetically mixed
community displaying a shared culture.74
70 See in particular Cristian Capelli et al., “A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles,” Current
Biology 13 (2003): 979–84; Stephen Leslie et al., “The Fine-Scale Genetic Structure of the British
Population,” Nature 519 (2015): 309–14 and Stephan Schiffels et al., “Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon
Genomes from East England Reveal British Migration History,” Nature Communications 7 (2016): 1–9.
71 Paul Budd et al., “Investigating Population Movement by Stable Isotope Analysis: A Report from
Britain,” Antiquity 78, no. 299 (2004): 135.
72 Ibid., 135–36. See also Janet Montgomery et al., “Continuity or Colonization in Anglo-Saxon
England? Isotope Evidence for Mobility, Subsistence Practice, and Status at West Heslerton,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 126 (2005): 22–23, 39–40 and 123–38.
73 Hella Eckardt et al., “Oxygen and Strontium Isotope Evidence for Mobility in Roman
Winchester,” Journal of Archaeological Science 36 (2009): 2816–25. See also Jane Evans et al., “A
Strontium and Oxygen Isotope Assessment of a Possible Fourth Century Immigrant Population in a
Hampshire Cemetery, Southern England,” Journal of Archaeological Science 33 (2006): 265–72.
74 Schiffels et al., “Anglo-Saxon Genomes,” 6. As at West Heslerton, the wealthiest graves be-
longed to ‘locals’, not migrants.
204 Steve Walker
However, this potentially promising evidence must be treated with caution. The
studies cannot differentiate between Britons and second-generation descendants of
migrants from Germania (both of whom would be categorised as ‘locals’)75 and the
extant data is, at present, too limited to allow more general conclusions to be
drawn.76 Worse still, it seems likely that oxygen isotope signatures may be affected
by cooking processes such as boiling and stewing, meaning that the use of this evi-
dence to draw conclusions about where an individual lived in early childhood may
be oversimplifying far more complicated issues.77
Language
Language is, perhaps, the main stumbling block for the hypothesis outlined in this
paper. At some point in the early medieval period, Old English supplanted both
Latin and British Celtic across most of what is now England. There are a number of
features of Old English which suggest influence from both a Latin and a British
‘substrate’ language(s) and,78 on phonological grounds, it seems that at some point
large numbers of speakers of either British or British Latin switched to an emergent
single form of English which replaced the medley of Germanic languages and dia-
lects which would have been spoken by the earliest Germanic settlers.79 The lin-
guistic changes observable in British Celtic which also affected Old English resulted
in Old English being in many ways quite different to the languages of the North Sea
homelands.80 The dominance of Old English is usually seen as indicative of politi-
cal takeover by Germanic groups and it is also generally assumed that this domi-
nance occurred early in the history of Anglo-British contact, presumably because
the political takeover by migrant groups is also assumed to be early, at least in the
south and east of what is now England.

76 Susanne Hakenbeck, “Potentials and Limitations of Isotope Analysis in Early Medieval
Archaeology,” Post-Classical Archaeologies 3 (2013): 120.
77 Rhea Brettell, Janet Montgomery and Jane Evans, “Brewing and Stewing: The Effects of
Culturally Mediated Behaviour on the Oxygen Isotope Composition of Ingested Fluids and the
Implications for Human Provenance Studies,” Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry 27 (2012):
778–85.
78 Angelika Lutz, “Celtic Influence on Old English and West Germanic,” English Language and
Linguistics 13 (2009): 231–35. For ‘to do’ and the loss of nominal inflexions, see Hildegard Tristram,
“Why Don’t the English Speak Welsh?” in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, edited by N. J. Higham
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007): 207–14.
79 Peter Schrijver, “Celtic Influence on Old English: Phonological and Phonetic Evidence,” English
Language and Linguistics 13 (2009): 197–200.
80 Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 84–89.
However, in reality we know very little about post-Roman language contact in

Britain and there is little positive evidence to conclude that language shift was nec-
essarily a fifth-century phenomenon. Neither should we assume that Old English
was imposed on the indigenes by the newcomers from Germania. Throughout the
Roman period, British Celtic had been in an inferior, ‘substrate’ relationship to
Latin. Latin, not British, was the language of power; it was the language of the
Romano-British elite, the government and the army and it may have been spoken
widely (or even exclusively) in large parts of the south and east.81 Yet Latin did not
survive as the language of the new elites in the post-Roman period. In western
Britain, where there was no ‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultural penetration until the seventh
century, Latin was replaced by a new form of British,82 possibly as a result of pro-
cesses which started in the north in the middle of the sixth-century and which had
spread to the south west no later than the early eighth century.83 Gildas was still
able to speak of Latin as ‘our language’ in the first half of the sixth century, but if
the handful of elegiac poems attributed to the shadowy sixth-century British
Aneirin and Taliesin really are contemporaneous with the northern events they pur-
port to describe, the switch to Brittonic had taken place (in the north, at least) by the
end of the sixth century.84
In the south and east, Latin may have been replaced by Old English at about the
same time.85 As such, there may have been a universal abandonment of Latin in the
sixth century, both in areas settled by Germanic migrants and areas where no such
settlement had taken place. If this is correct, then a violent takeover is not a valid
explanation for language change, as if it were the sole or even the principal driver,
there would have been no reason for Latin to have died out in the north and west
too. It may therefore be that the major socio-political changes in the mid sixth cen-
tury (which saw the rise of the dynastic elites which are so elusive in the material
81 Peter Schrijver, “The Rise and Fall of British Latin,” in The Celtic Roots of English, edited by
Markku Filppula, Juhana Klemola and Heli Pitkäinen (Joensuu; Univ. of Joensuu, 2002), 87–110.
82 John T. Koch, The Gododdin of Aneirin: Text and Context from Dark-Age North Britain (Cardiff:
Univ. of Wales Press, 1997): lxvi and lxxii. See also John T. Koch, “The Cynfeirdd Poetry and the
Language of the Sixth-Century,” in Early Welsh Poetry: Studies in the Book of Aneirin, edited by
Brynley Roberts (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1988): 17–19.
83 Alex Woolf, “The Britons: From Romans to Barbarians,” in Goetz, Jarnut and Pohl, Regna and
Gentes, 19–20.
84 The authorship and date of the poems in question—the battle elegies collectively known as Y
Gododdin and twelve panegyric poems to four British leaders—remains a hotly debated subject.
Theories about the date of the poems have usually been based on linguistic evidence. Debates be-
tween those who argue for an early date of composition and those who argue for a late date remain
inconclusive, although much of the evidence for the ‘late’ case is not as strong as is usually be-
lieved (Patrick Sims-Williams, “Dating the Poems of Aneirin and Taliesin,” Zeitschrift für celtische
Philologie 63 (2016): 163–234). The present author argues in his PhD thesis that on the basis of liter-
ary criticism, some parts of at least some of the poems are likely to be very early.
85 Woolf, “The Britons,” 20.
206 Steve Walker
record of the fifth century) were also the catalyst for language change in both
‘British’ and ‘Germanic’ areas of Britain. The choice of Old English in the south and
east may have been influenced as much (or even more) by post-Roman realities
across the English Channel, where Germanic-speaking groups were politically domi-
nant and had been for well over a century, than by the influence of migrant groups
within Britain itself. For those living in the south and east, prestigious Old English
was available to replace Latin as the new language of power and elite discourse.
Conclusions
We have for too long sought to explain fifth-century British history by reference to
problematic written sources. If we are prepared to reconsider the evidence, it does
not appear that ‘Germanic’ culture, language or political control was imposed at
sword point, kept from Britons by ‘apartheid’ or accepted by culturally weaker
British groups for reasons of expedience and/or self-preservation. This is not to dis-
pute that fifth-century Germanic influence could never be violent or unwanted—it
evidently could—and neither is it to dispute that, once dynastic kingdoms arose
from the middle of the sixth century, there followed a long period of hostility be-
tween what we have until now thought of as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and British groups (not-
withstanding that such groups fought amongst themselves as often as they fought
one another). But it is to argue that the major drivers for the emergence of ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ culture in the fifth century and into the first half of the sixth need not have
been dictated by British expedience, British fear or British defeat.
Instead, what we have thought of as Germanic identity in fifth-century Britain
should be seen as a response to wider continental changes following the collapse of
the Roman infrastructure north of the Loire. Germanic identity in Britain was pro-
foundly affected by contact with groups from Germania both within Britain and across
the North Sea, but in terms of material culture and perhaps even language, the picture
is one of a new, hybrid identity which borrowed continental ideas such as furnished
inhumation, but which also included elements of both native and migrant culture.86
The close correlation between this new identity and those parts of Britain which had
been most connected to imperial and continental Europe both before and during the
Roman period is no coincidence. Those same areas which had always been most recep-
tive to influence from across the Channel are precisely the same areas that show stron-
gest evidence of this new culture. The adoption of a linguistic and material culture
86 The notion that fifth-century Britons and migrants from Germania may, religious and linguistic
differences aside, not have been culturally that dissimilar to one another was raised in the 1960s by
Elizabeth Fowler, but has rarely been argued since. Fowler, “Celtic Metalwork”, 134.
with clear ‘Germanic’ influences may have as much to do with these longstanding con-
tinental influences as with direct Germanic migration into Britain.
This new model may seem counter-intuitive, but this is only because we have
for too long been seduced by the documentary sources, which present simplistic
and highly attractive images of ‘heroic ages’ in which martial valour and personal
bravery counted for all. In Britain, as Bryan Ward-Perkins observed, such images
have played well to nationalist sentiment across the home nations.87 Each ‘side’
is able to characterise their respective early histories in binary and simplistic
terms of ‘good guys and bad guys’ and this reluctance to consider our shared her-
itage is perhaps another reason why we have been collectively slow to challenge
our traditional models. It is time to consider new narratives and, with them, new
terminologies.
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Sebastian Brather
Germanic or Slavic? Reconstructing
the Transition from Late Antiquity to the
Early Middle Ages in East Central Europe
Historical Situation, Fifth to Seventh Centuries
Between late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the cultural and political situa-
tion in East Central Europe (a term used after 1945 only to characterise the then
new political situation) changed fundamentally. Before this transition period, up to
the late fifth century, the regions between the Rhine in the West and the ‘Gothic
peoples’ in the East were categorised by Romans as ‘Germanic’. Textual sources
refer to several names of ‘tribes’, changing from period to period and according to
their geographical setting. But during the fifth and sixth centuries information be-
came scarce.1 From the seventh century onwards, ‘Slavic’ peoples appeared in the
same part of the continent with a different material culture. As new political struc-
tures were established and the Frankish Empire became interested in its eastern
neighbours, first relations were established between the Western Slavs and the
Carolingians.
The disappearance of ‘Germans’ from the region is usually explained by the mi-
gration of peoples. The master narrative of massive movements of tribal groups is still
assumed to be valid when it comes to late Antiquity. But the written account suggests
that things are more complex,2 and large-scale mobility is a common phenomenon in
late Antiquity, not one restricted to contexts of so-called Völkerwanderung. A further
question rarely answered is: where should all the people have gone?3 Do we have suf-
ficient information for their complete movement into the former Roman Empire, and
should we therefore expect to find East Central Europe empty and depopulated for a
whole century? Nevertheless archaeology has looked for indications of migration.
Volker Bierbrauer, and others like Andrzej Kokowski, have argued that the Wielbark
Culture was a specifically ‘Gothic’ one (at least in its ‘nucleus’), and that its shift to
1 Kazimierz Godłowski, Frühe Slawen in Mitteleuropa, edited by Jan Bemmann and Michał
Parczewski (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2005), 23–41.
2 Michael Kulikowski, “Nation versus Army: A Necessary Contrast?,” in On Barbarian Identity:
Critical Approaches to Ethnicity in the Early Middle Ages, edited by Andrew Gillett. (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2002), 69–84.
3 That the population density significantly decreased, is suggested by the archaeological record
(unless its chronological problems) and by palynological analysis.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-011
212 Sebastian Brather
the southeast would reflect the ‘Gothic’ migration leading to the Black Sea.4 Both in-
terpretations are controversial, and they overlook similar southeast shifts e. g. for the
contemporary Przeworsk Culture which is suggested to represent the Vandals and
others.5 Perhaps just intensifying relations to the southeast become visible archaeo-
logically (Fig. 1).
In contrast, no written source mentions any Slavic migration. The ‘Slavs’ simply
appeared north of the Danube in the sixth century, and similarly, the Frankish king-
dom discovered the Slavs as their neighbours after the seventh century. But modern
research following a national perspective, has been unable to imagine any other ex-
planation than migration. The Slavs, it is presumed, must have appeared from some-
where. This is simply a modern explanation of the cultural and linguistic changes that
apparently occurred. Archaeology thus currently relies on ‘new’ ways to study the pu-
tative Slavic migration. The main argument relies on cremation graves with urns and
sunken featured buildings with ovens or hearths (called the Prague-Korčak Culture);
such features can be documented from the Ukraine to Eastern Central Europe, al-
though a precise chronology is difficult to achieve because of the lack of datable finds.
Therefore the shift to the west has not thus far been precisely documented.
Both terms—those describing ancient ‘Germans’ and ‘Slavs’—are classifica-
tions derived from Mediterranean observers. In the mid-first century BC, Caesar
‘discovered’ the Germans, as distinct from the Celts. He claimed that the Rhine
river functioned as the borderline between the ‘half civilised’ Celts in the west,
and wild Germanic barbarians in the east. His political aim in this distinction was
apparently a request to clearly limit the conquest of Gaul—integrating the Celts
and excluding the Germans.6 600 years later, Jordanes described Sclavenes—and be-
yond them the Antes—along the northern banks of the lower Danube.7 Both authors
primarily created an order for a complex world beyond the borders of their empires.
4 Volker Bierbrauer, “Archäologie und Geschichte der Goten vom 1.–7. Jahrhundert: Versuch einer
Bilanz,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 28 (1994): 51–171; Andrzej Kokowski, Grupa masłmęcka: Z badań nad
przemianami kultury gotów w młodszym okresie rzymskim (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curi-
Skłodowskiej, 1995); Kokowski, “Die Masłomęcz-Gruppe: Ihre Chronologie und Beziehungen innerhalb
des gotischen Kulturkreises. Ein Beispiel für den Wandel der Goten im Verlauf ihrer Wanderungen,”
Bericht der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission 78 (1997 [1998]): 641–833.
5 Andrzej Kokowski, “Die Przeworsk-Kultur: Ein Völkerverband zwischen 200 vor Chr. und 375 nach
Chr.,” in Die Vandalen: Die Könige, die Eliten, die Krieger, die Handwerker, edited by Andrzej Kokowski
and Christian Leiber (Nordstemmen: Trigena, 2003), 77–183; Magdalena Mączyńska, “Das Ende der
Przeworsk-Kultur,” in Kokowski and Leiber, eds., Vandalen, 185–201.
6 See Steinacher, this volume.
7 Recently, Michel Kazanski, “The Land of the Antes According to Jordanes and Procopius,” in The
Steppe Lands and the World Beyond Them: Studies in Honor of Victor Spinei, edited by Florin Curta
and Bogdan-Petru Maleon (Iaşi: Editura Univ. “Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, 2013), 35–42.
Germanic or Slavic? Reconstructing the Transition 213
Fig. 1: Suggested archaeological ‘cultures’ and ‘migrations’ in East Central and Eastern Europe
during the transition period from late antiquity to the early middle ages. Red: Przeworsk, Wielbark
and Sântana-de Mureş-Černjachov cultures of the fourth and early fifth century. Green: Koločin,
Prague-Korčak and Pen’kovka cultures of the sixth and seventh century.
The arrows indicate suggested shifts and ‘migrations’ (arranged after several sources).
Their views represent much more an indication of a new form of external perception8
than any real interior change.9 People had lived in the regions in question long before,
but it was only with their classification in the first century BC and the sixth century AD
that ancient Germans and Slavs became new subjects of history.
What really happened during the fifth to seventh centuries AD is not yet fully
understood by modern research. What can be compared are the cultural character-
istics before and after the transformation, but the detailed development in-between
remains an open question. This situation has methodological reasons ranging from
chronology to interpretation, but modern politics has also played an important role.
8 Florin Curta, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region,
c. 500–700 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).
9 Contrary to Godłowski, Frühe Slawen in Mitteleuropa, 41, who insists that the first naming of the
Slavs indicate that they had come from somewhere beyond the upper Danube regions.
The image of the past was often relevant for the modern present, and could be used
for certain political aims. Even today the study of this period is not always free from
national sentiments.
History of Research, Nineteenth and Twentieth

Centuries
During the late eighteenth century it became a matter of interest to ascertain
which archaeological remains should be labelled ‘Germanic’, and which ‘Slavic’. By
what criteria could the material be plausibly interpreted? For these debates, burials
were of general importance, because they remained the only recognised source to
that point (settlement features would only be identified a hundred years later). The
emphasis of these debates was methodologically produced by their (unrecog-
nised) complexity. Four fields of analysis and interpretation were woven into each
other, and every solution had to take all four into account (Fig. 2):
1. Whose dead were buried in inhumation burials, and whose in cremation
graves? Some argued for Germanic cremations and Slavic inhumations, but
contradictions soon became apparent. Such general statements were not very
conclusive, and additionally remains which are now known to be from very dif-
ferent periods were often taken into consideration, such as Bronze Age burials
or medieval graves.
2. How old were the graves? Long before the establishment of a detailed archaeo-
logical chronology and decades before Thomsen’s three-period-system, it re-
mained unclear how the graves could be dated. Roman coins were already used
to date the cremation graves in which they had been found to the Roman period.
But most burials remained of uncertain chronology because other information
was not available.
3. Where were the burials situated? Similarities had been detected in other parts of
Europe, so that arguments for both Germans and Slavs (and even Celts) could be
justified when considering East Central Europe. Parallels from west and east were
suggested, but again with unclear and contradicting results because of different
arguments and different objects and contexts.
4. Were the dead pagans, or Christians? This question is still important, because a
general expectation links graves and religion—suggesting that cremation and
grave goods are typically pagan, inhumation without grave goods typically
Christian. But did all inhumation graves really belong to the Christian Middle
Ages, and all cremation burials to pagan antiquity, as was expected?
(archaeological record as historical source)

antiquarian classification
chronological spatial
order classification
Germans
or
Slavs?
cremation or Pagans or
inhumation Christians
culture historical interpretation

(political relevance of historical studies)
Fig. 2: Central aspects of the debate of the Germanic or Slavic character of grave finds in the early
nineteenth c. Every aspect was controversial, because reliable methods had not been developed
yet, and therefore no doubtless result could be achieved (changed after Brather, “Urnen-Begr
äbnisse,” Fig. 1).
Of course, the presence of national perspectives eventually became obvious.

Research was not, after all, independent from the place where it was done.10 In the first
decades of the nineteenth century the debate was primarily a German one, undertaken
in regions with Slavic populations during the Middle Ages as confirmed by written sour-
ces—from Mecklenburg to Saxony, from Silesia to Bohemia. The antiquarians of that
time experienced the acceptance of the archaeological record as a reliable historical
source, and they tried to encourage public appreciation of their work—which led them
to emphasise the political and national relevance of archaeological studies for a wider
public, as they freely admitted.11
10 Sebastian Brather, “‘Sind die Urnen-Begräbnisse […] slavischen oder deutschen Ursprungs?’
Vaterländische Altertumskunde im Bereich der Germania Slavica,” in Archäologie und Nation: Kontexte
der Erforschung „vaterlaendischen Alterthums“. Zur Geschichte der Archäologie in Deutschland, Österreich
und der Schweiz 1800–1860, edited by Ingo Wiwjorra and Dietrich Hakelberg (Nürnberg: Germanisches
Nationalmuseum, in prep.) with several references to publications of that time.
11 In the late nineteenth century there had been some collectors who gave archaeological artefacts
to state collections—in order to become decorated rather than because of any interest in prehistory;
cf. Clemens Lichter, “Von Jägern und Sammlern – oder – Das kleine Spiel,” Archäologische
Informationen 38 (2015): 263–316.
During the twentieth century much cultural and ethnic continuity was suggested
and postulated. Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1931) reconstructed a Germanic expansion
which he proposed had taken place since the Bronze Age, starting from Scandinavia
and northern Germany southwards.12 In Poland Józef Kostrzewski (1885–1969) and
Konrad Jażdżewski (1908–1985) became famous for their autochthonous approach,
claiming Poland as the origin of the Slavs, again since the later Bronze Age.
Archaeological arguments were seemingly used to legitimate modern national state
territories, referring to the settlement areas of putative ancestors more than 3000
years in the past. The dichotomy between ancient Germans and Slavs stems from this
modern situation—but when the Slavs appeared on the historical scene the Germans
had already disappeared, because the texts refer after the fourth century to specific
‘Germanic’ groups (as later happened to the Slavs). Similarly, the Celts had not been
‘opponents’ of ancient ‘Germans’ half a millennium earlier, but were transformed
into the provincial, ‘Gallo-Roman’ population once the ‘Germans’ were made to rep-
resent barbarians outside the Empire.
The discussion was confronted with fundamental methodological problems con-
cerning how to determine the period and distribution of the archaeological record.
Only a precise chronology could lead to a situation in which material culture and po-
litical ascription could be compared. And only a plausible spatial classification could
answer the questions of where events happened, and which regions were interre-
lated. However, different perspectives were combined without hesitation: texts, mate-
rial culture and language—but instead of confirming each other, the sources present
diverse, but complementing aspects. The perception of observers, the cultural prac-
tice of local populations and their language are hard to combine with any certainty.13
Recent Archaeological Perspectives

The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe opened new opportunities
for archaeological research. Primarily, discussion broadened and became more inter-
national, seeking comparanda and methodological improvements. The series of inter-
national congresses focused on ‘Slavic archaeology’ which had been held since 1965
ended in the 1990s,14 which indirectly indicates the integration of early medieval ar-
chaeology of East Central Europe into wider contexts. At the turn of the millennium,
12 The map is still reprinted in: Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, dtv-Atlas zur
Weltgeschichte 1: Von den Anfängen bis zur Französischen Revolution, 41st ed. (Munich: dtv,
2014), 108.
13 Cf. for Eastern Europe: Carsten Goehrke, Frühzeit des Ostslaventums (Darmstadt: WBG, 1992).
14 Sebastian Brather, Archäologie der westlichen Slawen: Siedlung, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im
früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Ostmitteleuropa. 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 27.
three monographs were published which tried to summarize the state of research in
East Central, South Eastern and Eastern Europe and to open new perspectives.15
Nevertheless, the 1990s especially saw the revival of nationalist attitudes and a na-
tional emphasis. Methodologically, research became broader in interest, and new
methods began to challenge traditional concepts.
Chronological progress was of major importance. When did the last Germans dis-
appear and when did the first Slavs arrive? Although this question followed the
traditional migration perspective, the implementation of dendrochronology led to
fundamental revisions. This showed clearly that the earliest exactly datable medi-
eval structures belong to the (later) seventh century (Fig. 3).16 The data are still
valid for some regions only, for some regions no wood seems to be preserved to
achieve further progress, and for some excavations it remains possible that not the ear-
liest wooden constructions are uncovered. But the general impression is that some im-
portant developments—especially hillforts—took place later than thought before, and
so indicating a much more dynamic progress of political structures. On the other hand
the precise beginning of early medieval culture in East Central Europe remains an
open question (which perhaps cannot be solved at all).
Looking for the latest antique ‘imports’,17 chronology is based on few objects.
Because the number of Mediterranean objects is small, coins represent a suitable
category. Especially Byzantine gold and copper alloy coinage is known from East
Central Europe. The distribution shows that the inflow ended in the sixth century
south of the Baltic Sea, while some later coins reached Bohemia; nevertheless,
some coins have been found in Pomerania as well as Central Poland (Fig. 3).18 Do
these finds represent the latest ‘Germanic’ phase of settlement, or do they belong to
the medieval ‘Slavic’ population? This question has to be raised, because the con-
text of all these finds remains quite unclear, at least it cannot be deduced from the
finds and their situation. Therefore, the question has been debated for a time
mainly on the basis of chronology, but it seems that the ‘antique’ interpretation has
many more supporters than the opposite one. Though it can be debated how long
these coins circulated—should we expect years or decades in societies which had
no function for them except their material value?
15 Paul Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (London:
British Museum Press, 2001); Curta, Making of the Slavs; Brather, Archäologie der westlichen Slawen.
16 Marek Dulinicz, Frühe Slawen im Gebiet zwischen unterer Weichsel und Elbe: Eine archäologische
Studie (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 2006), 39–51; Felix Biermann, “Kommentar zum Aufsatz von Florin
Curta: Utváření Slovanů (se zvláštním zřetelem k Čechám a Moravě) – The making of the Slavs (with a
special emphasis on Bohemia and Moravia), Archeologické rozhledy 60,” Archeologické rozhledy 61
(2009): 337–49, here 349; Marek Krąpiec, “Dendrochronologiczne datowanie zwęglonych prób drewna z
wczesnośredniowiecznej półziemianki z Krakowa-Nowej-Huty Wyciąża (stanowisko 5B),” Materiały
Archeologiczne Nowej Huty 19 (1996): 129–35.
17 Godłowski, Frühe Slawen in Mitteleuropa, 99–119, 141–48, 177–96.
18 Ibid., 223–45.
ca. 750
ca. 730
ca. 730
after 729
684/757
705/715
707/751
711/716
700/739
731/749
ca. 723/743
ca. 702
after 625
after 676
491‒518 518‒565 after 565

gold
copper alloy
dendrochronological data
660’s
Fig. 3: East Central Europe, distribution of Byzantine coins as suggested latest antique finds
(bigger signs indicate deposits)—and earliest dendrochronological data of the early middle ages.
Apparently a gap exists between fifth c. coins and late seventh c. tree ring data (rearranged after
Godłowski, Frühe Slawen in Mitteleuropa, 108 Fig. 4; 147 Fig. 13; Dulinicz, Frühe Slawen, 48–49
Fig. 5–6; supplemented after Biermann, “Kommentar zum Aufsatz von Florin Curta”, 346; Krąpiec,
“Dendrochronologiczne datowanie zwęglonych prób drewna”).
The gap between the coins of the sixth century and the dendrochronological
data of the seventh century is hard to bridge at the moment. All ‘import’ finds
which are dated somewhere else and could provide some chronological informa-
tion from outside are lacking—because of the collapsed contacts to the south and
west. And there no wood is preserved and documented of this crucial century,
whether there has been no wooden construction or whether a dry period has de-
stroyed it (but then one should expect deep wells with very good chances to be
preserved which have not been detected so far). Other methods like radiocarbon
dating present results which are methodologically not precise enough to make
progress possible.19 This situation leaves enough space for some hypothesis.
Therefore all interpretation depends on the classification of contexts and ‘cultures’.
How this is done, determines the way in which networks and relations are recon-
structed. Typological characteristics of objects (mainly hand-made pottery, ‘Prague
type’) and features (sunken huts or Grubenhäuser with ovens or hearths)20 are of spe-
cial interest.21 Their simple forms are primarily distinctive in terms of function rather
than culturally significant. In this perspective W. Pohl’s statement remains plausible:
the main characteristic of the material culture is due to societies which exist under
modest living conditions and autarkic agriculture, different from late antique popula-
tions with a more hierarchic social structure and with wide-ranging contacts to the
Mediterranean and Western world. In the transformation period societies had no other
chance than adapting to the new situation.22
The attempts to reconstruct early medieval immigrating groups from the ar-
chaeological record have failed so far. J. Herrmann suggested five groups, defined
by pottery mainly invading the regions east of the Oder and Neiße rivers.
Additionally he argued for grave forms, house types and fortifications.23 But re-
cent research, especially new chronological methods but also the analysis of the
finds, has shown that all of the characteristics represent developments within
these regions and nothing brought there from an external source. The initial
phase of early medieval settlement is not referred to by these characteristics.24
This may be a general observation: change and development themselves cannot
be observed by archaeology; only comparing the situation before and after allows
the reconstruction of transformation processes.
19 Dulinicz, Frühe Slawen, 51–64, with a list of all relevant 14C data from today Eastern Germany
and Poland.
20 But there is a sufficient number of sunken featured buildings, which have no fire place; cf.
Sebastian Brather, “Grubenhäuser zwischen Ost und West: Kennzeichen, Verbreitung und
Funktion,” in Archäologie, Mittelalter, Neuzeit, Zukunft: Festschrift Ingolf Ericsson, edited by Rainer
Atzbach et al. (in print). Peter Milo, Frühmittelalterliche Siedlungen in Mitteleuropa: Eine verglei-
chende Strukturanalyse durch Archäologie und Geophysik (Bonn: Habelt, 2014).
21 Godłowski, Frühe Slawen in Mitteleuropa, 85–121; recently, Nad’a Profantová, “Kultura
s keramikou pražského typu a problem šíření slavinity do střední Evropy: K članku Florina Curty,”
Archeologické rozhledy 61 (2009): 303–30.
22 Walter Pohl, Die Awaren: Ein Steppenvolk in Mitteleuropa 567–822 n. Chr. (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1988), 94–98.
23 Joachim Herrmann, “Wanderungen und Landnahme im westslawischen Gebiet,” in Gli Slavi oc-
cidentali e meridionali nell’alto medioevo 1 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di studi nell’alto medioevo,
1983), 75–101.
24 Sebastian Brather, “The Western Slavs of the Seventh to the Eleventh Century: An
Archaeological Perspective,” History Compass 9, no. 6 (2011): 454–73.
‘Germanic’ or ‘Slavic’?
Until today the discussion has focused on the distinction between ‘Germanic’ and
‘Slavic’ remains. The difference between both is defined mainly linguistically—i. e.
in terms of Germanic- or Slavic-speaking populations. Therefore a geographic origin
or Urheimat is often suggested by the distribution of ‘early’ names for water sources
and toponyms,25 which very much depends upon the written record of names
(many of which may be considerably older than their written first mention—or
could as easily have been replaced by new names long ago). How language (ana-
lysed by linguistics), perception (historiography) and material culture (archaeology)
are interrelated remains a complex question—and this complexity makes it impossi-
ble to date names and language developments precisely enough to present a histori-
cal argument. The idea of the modern nation state argues for the general accordance
of space, language, culture, race and people, but this expectation is clearly mistaken,
as even the heterogeneous situation of modern nation states demonstrates.
Antique perceptions of Germans and of Slavs were not based on language. In
the first century BC as well as in the sixth century AD, Roman ethnography intro-
duced a new term to describe all barbarians on the other side of the Rhine and
Danube rivers. This ‘umbrella term’ emerged from the administrative need to bring
order into the confusing barbarian world and to separate it from Mediterranean civ-
ilisation. Even the barbarian habitus and its material culture can be understood
much more as a general impression than a detailed perception, or even as an ana-
lytical concept.26 Understood this way, the Romans can be said to have ‘invented’
Germans as well as Slavs—as terms for a general barbarian ‘other’. Populations had
lived in these regions previously, but their external classification was an important
innovation because it created new historical subjects.
The archaeological record shows an apparent cultural change at the beginning
of the Middle Ages. Whether this turn also coincides directly with linguistic and eth-
nic developments remains a difficult question, to say the least.27 We lack reliable
arguments which could underline closer connections between habitus, language
and identity. What archaeology can demonstrate is the cultural practices of these
25 Jürgen Udolph, Studien zu slawischen Gewässernamen und Gewässerbezeichnungen: Ein Beitrag zur
Frage nach der Urheimat der Slaven (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979); Jürgen Udolph, Namenkundliche Studien
zum Germanenproblem, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 9
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994).
26 Philipp von Rummel, Habitus barbarus: Kleidung und Repräsentation spätantiker Eliten im 4.
und 5. Jahrhundert, Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde 55
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007).
27 Florin Curta, “Utváření Slovanů (se zvláštním zřetelem k Čechám a Moravě)/The Making of the
Slavs (with a special emphasis on Bohemia and Moravia),” Archeologické rozhledy 60 (2008):
643–94.
‘new’ early medieval societies. They had almost no (visible) contact with the
Mediterranean, and they lived in small rural settlements with an ‘unpretentious’
material culture. Large social hierarchies cannot be asserted. The difference to the
earlier situation in the fifth century is apparent. What are the reasons for this?
The main explanation still relied upon today is migration—of Germans out of
East Central Europe and of Slavs into that part of the continent. But this dichotomy
of west versus east is tricky. First of all, it is not a contemporary interpretation, but
a suggestion made only by modern research, trying to explain the appearance of
new names and the drastic change in material culture. Secondly, this view is com-
bined with general expectations regarding the postulated different social character-
istics of two ‘peoples’, e. g. notions of ‘Germanic hierarchy’ versus ‘Slavic equality’.
Thirdly, this explanation is connected with modern national identities and Europe’s
political history over the last few centuries. Such a perspective neglects more com-
plex developments: the change of social structures instead of their simple replace-
ment, the complex interrelationships between migration and transformation, and
the probable non-relation of material culture and language.
How the ‘Slavification’ of East Central Europe, i. e. the process of becoming
Slavic, took place, remains an interesting and still open question. Every answer
should declare which questions more specifically are addressed—the perception of
contemporaries and involved identities, or the spread of Slavic languages, or the
development of material culture, or the settlement of specific regions? These fields
are only loosely interrelated, and we have to expect very complex and regionally
different developments. This presumed, the difficulties of actual research can be ex-
plained. In general, the reconstruction and transformation periods are character-
ised by principal methodological problems—we can describe the initial situation as
well as the final situation archaeologically, but the process of change itself becomes
apparent only through the comparison of both.
The terms ‘Germanic’ and ‘Slavic’ are not very helpful for interpretation, they
rather obstruct our view. They suggest a dichotomy of two large groups, establish-
ing a framework of ‘either/or’—which is problematic already for the transition from
the ‘Germanic’ Černjachov Culture of the fourth century to the ‘Slavic’ Pen’kovka
Culture of the fifth century (Fig. 4). These terms suggest two homogeneous groups,
and lead us to debates on competitive identities (which these ‘groups’ certainly did
not have, as they never existed simultaneously), long-term continuity and ‘origins’
(a pursuit which believed to end in Nirvana), and highlight the prevalence of recent
national attitudes.28 To take such a general view obscures the complex situation in-
stead of analysing it plausibly—the ‘names’ remain without any analytical value.
They suggest that Germans as well as Slavs had simply existed naturally over a
long period—instead of being established in specific instances, triggered by outside
28 Kazanski, “Land of the Antes,” offers parallel names and archaeological cultures.
Koločin Pen’kovka Prague

5th/6h c.
culture culture culture
Kiev Černiakhov Carpathian 3rd/4th c.

culture culture kurgans
late Volhynian Wielbark Skythian

Zarubincy Podolian Sarmatian 2nd c.
culture culture culture culture
Lipec
culture
Zarubincy Przeworsk Poieneşti

Lukaševka 1st c. AD
culture culture culture
Jukhnov Latène Jastorf Geto-

Milogrady Skythian Podklešev Dacian 2nd c. BC
culture culture culture culture culture culture culture
Fig. 4: Archaeological ‘cultures’ and the ‘Slavification’ of East Central Europe. Relations between
defined regional ‘cultures’ are shown schematically. Suggested ‘Slavic’ (grey) and ‘Germanic’
(black) groups are marked (re-arranged after Irina P. Rusanova, “Zaključenie”. In Slavyane i ikh
sosedi v konce I tysjačeletiya do n. ė. – pervoi polovine I tysjačeletiya n. ė., edited by Irina
P. Rusanova and Ėrast A. Symonovič. Arkheologiya SSSR 13 [Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1993],
192–197, here 193, Fig. 7).
reception and self-understanding on a very general level. Most of people the terms
describe saw themselves as existing in much smaller ethnic groups.
Research should focus on cultural changes in a more unbiased fashion, and
should expect more complex explanations: taking into consideration mobility and
migration as well as processes of transformation, decline and advancement, ac-
culturation and assimilation, transfer and communication—and separating mate-
rial culture from language development as well as from identity.29 Additionally
different spatial levels should be analysed: e. g. local, regional and supra-
regional, in order to understand these developments more precisely. Only then
does it become possible to ask the ‘right’ questions—i. e., adequate for the method-
ological challenges posed by the archaeological record—and to overcome modern
29 Slavic self-consciousness has not been expressed by the so-called ‘Slavic bow fibulae’, which
show wide-ranging contacts between the Baltic and Greece, the Ukraine and Crimea (and with the
Merovingian West)—as well as regional differences. To claim them as ‘identity markers’ leaves un-
clear which identity may be meant; cf. recently Florin Curta, “Slavic’ Bow Fibulae: Twenty Years of
Research,” Bericht der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission 93 (2012 [2015]): 235–342.
national concepts. Only then will the probable integration of parts of the ‘native’
Germanic population into the early medieval Slavic world no longer be seen as a politi-
cal claim for territory or as a dismissal of East Central Europe’s own medieval culture.
Furthermore, only then will western and eastern archaeological perspectives be finally
brought into unison.
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Ludwig Rübekeil
Linguistic Labels and Ethnic Identity
Languages: Reception and Verdicts
Language, in its primary function, is a social tool of communication, organisation
and cooperation within a society or its subgroups. As a medium of social relations,
it serves as a marker of social identity on the inside, but also as a signal of foreign-
ness and distance on the outside, especially for those not capable of speaking the
language concerned.
However, analysing a language, and particularly an early historical language
stage, needs another approach than speaking a language. The linguistic perspective
evaluates languages by those features and structures, which make a language rec-
ognizable and amenable to classification. Linguists thus assign identity to a lan-
guage on the basis of more or less objective data, and, therefore, the linguistic
identity of a language and its items depends on the quantity of linguistic data,
which in the case of extinct corpus languages are mostly incomplete at best. To
gain additional data is thus an important task when dealing with early language
stages.
As languages have an areal or geographical reach and dimension, the point of
origin of linguistic data is an important piece of information, if we know which lan-
guage was spoken at a certain place in a given time. In most cases, however, this
criterion becomes quite slippery and leads to circular reasoning, as we know the lan-
guage of a certain region mainly by means of the linguistics data gained there.
Diachronic conclusions are delimited, too, particularly for protohistorical stages: in
order to examine whether a certain population at a given time spoke Germanic, we
should not rely too much on younger evidence, e. g. make conclusions about the
Germanic dialect spoken in Denmark in the year AD 50 from the textual evidence
from Denmark, let’s say, in the year 1300. Given the numerous periods which witness
migration and mobility, this is obviously problematic. For these early stages the main
approach, besides reconstruction, is to look for contemporary words—names and ap-
pellatives in Classical texts.
So, while looking for Germanic words in Classical texts, there are three main
indications:
(1) Classical authors claim a word to be of Germanic origin or, less specifically, its
cultural context to be Germanic;
(2) The attested material is located in a region where Germanic might have been
spoken;
(3) The attested material shows linguistic characteristics that can only, or most
probably, be explained as Germanic.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-012
226 Ludwig Rübekeil
Roman authors had quite rigid ideas as to what Germanic was, and their verdict
about something being Germanic (or Gaulic, Iberian etc.) seems rather confident. It
has often been proved, on the other hand, that this verdict fails. But what is even
more momentous is the fact that such literary categories refer to rather diverse cul-
tural dimensions. Classifying a group as ‘Germanic’ could be motivated by the lan-
guage as well as by religion, law, other cultural aspects or even the political
behaviour towards Rome. The Roman authors generally did not distinguish be-
tween these dimensions and rather saw different cultural dimensions as elements
of a consistent cultural unity. If a word is referred to as Germanic, it might therefore
originate in a corresponding ethnical or political constellation without being lin-
guistically Germanic.
The linguistic reality of ‘Germanic’ at the time of the early Roman empire could
best be described as a close group of dialects. These dialects shared common features
on different levels of language, such as phonology, morphology, syntax or lexicon,
which set them apart from neighbouring languages. Common Gmc.1 was, e. g., charac-
terized by a word stress that lay on the first syllable, it had some sounds which most
neighbouring languages did not (especially the fricatives f, þ, χ with their voiced coun-
terparts ƀ, đ, ǥ), it had a strongly reduced verbal system with only two tenses and
three moods. Many of these characteristics never show up in classical attestations.
Syntactical features, for example, are not reflected in single words, and a large part of
the morphology remains hidden or at least covered, as the words are usually adapted
to Latin or Greek inflection and stem formation. Besides, the Roman writers were
hardly aware of most of these features; at the best they had an intuitive impression of
some sounds and words.
It is well known that multilingual skills on all levels existed especially in the
subjected provinces, along the borders and within the Roman military.2 Many sol-
diers in the Roman army could discern people speaking Gaulic and Germanic as
well as they could those speaking Thracian and Greek. Even for them, however,
language was mostly one of several aspects of culture, as were other customs in
the area of religion, law, clothing or food. Another question is in how far the edu-
cated people in Rome and other central cities of the empire were interested in, or
even capable of, judging foreign languages, usually classified as “barbarian”.
Speaking a barbarian language was in general not regarded as a competence of
the vir doctus.
The question therefore is: which of these factors would a Roman author take
into account? Which of these features would a speaker of Latin, Greek or Celtic,
probably ignorant of Germanic, recognize and judge as typically Germanic? What
1 In contrast to Proto Gmc., I regard Common Gmc. as less of a language stage and more of an
areal linguistic reality at a given time.
2 Cf. James Noel Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2003).
degree of linguistic competence did he (or his informants) need in order to distin-
guish Germanic from other barbarian languages? What would be the crucial point
that made him decide that a language is Germanic and not Britannic, Venetian or
Illyrian? And would a judgement by language have any chance against the knowl-
edge of the ethnical or geographical background?
Vocabula peregrina
The principal authority for the Latin language was M. Terentius Varro, with De lingua
Latina being one of his most influential works until late Antiquity. Just as for many of
his contemporaries and successors, for Varro too, reflection on language involved not
so much grammar, but mainly words. In his crucial fifth chapter of De lingua Latina,
Varro essentially distinguishes three groups of words (vocabula or verba): “our own,
foreign ones and obsolete ones”. Another group in Varro’s classification, even if he
does not mention it explicitly at this point, are the “hybrid nouns”.3 Greek names play
a special role, as they supply the largest amount of the verba peregrina as well as verba
notha, but on the other hand, for cultural reasons, are not on the same level of “for-
eignness”, because Varro—like any Roman—felt too close to Greek culture. As Müller
has pointed out, Varro avoids the category verba barbara as confronted to the verba
nostra, because Greek words would not have fit into this scheme. Furthermore, loans
from most Italic languages and from Etruscan did not even count as vocabula pere-
grina.4 This point of view is, of course, solely motivated by cultural and political rather
than linguistic categories.
The Concept of Barbarian

Being able to speak correctly or in an elaborated way seems to have always and every-
where been a criterion for belonging to a higher social class or even a society as a
whole. The Greek and Roman concept of “barbarian” is basically used as an ethnic
3 Varro, ling. Lat. 5.10: […] aut nostra aut aliena aut oblivia; 10,70: verba notha.
4 Roman Müller, “Verba peregrina,” Journal of Latin Linguistics 9, no. 1 (2005): 372–73.
5 Similar terms do exist in other languages, e. g. Sanskrit barbara- ‘stammering’ and balbalā-kṛ- ‘to
stammer’, Sumerian barbar, Babylonian barbaru ‘foreigner’; Manfred Mayrhofer, Kurzgefaßtes etymolo-
gisches Wörterbuch II, (Heidelberg: Winter, 1963), 411–12, 421; Hjalmar Frisk, Griechisches etymolo-
gisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Winter, 1960), 219–20. Furthermore, Herodotus confirms that the
Egyptians, too, called all those barbarians who did not have the same language (Hist. 2,158: Βαρβάρους
δὲ πάντας οἱ Αἰγύπτιοι καλέουσι τοὺς μὲ σφίσι ὁμογλώσσους).
label, however, language is always one, if not the most, important criterion here.5 This
holds for the oldest testimony, too, which appears in Homer‘s Iliad, where the Carians
are called “barbarophone”.6 Herodotus however, some centuries after Homer, confirms
that the Carians spoke a foreign language, but he doesn’t tag either the language or
the people as Barbarian. Moreover, he ranks the people itself among the Greek.7 Here,
the changed political relations between Greeks and Carians might have led to a reeval-
uation of the Carian language, too. The general division of the world into Greek vs.
Non-Greek, i. e. barbarians, remained the same though.
The hellenocentric view finds its counterpart in Rome, where the centralist orga-
nization of the state gave romanocentrism quite some authority. The view of Strabo, a
Greek author of a geography from a Roman perspective, might be regarded as a kind
of Greek romanocentrism. Concerning the Carians, Strabo comes to a more refined
analysis. He examines the term barbarian making reference to the first testimony by
Homer and why he did not call them Barbarians, but “barbarophones”. Strabo rejects
the opinion that the language of the Carians was harsh and, hence, reasons that the
term Barbarian was first used “onomatopoetically for people articulating words only
with difficulty” (κατ’ ὀνοματοπιίαν ἐπὶ τῶν δυσεκφόρως […] λαλούντων). According
to him, the term must have been coined when the Carians began to learn Greek and
could not pronounce it properly; the ethnic meaning of this term is therefore the re-
sult of misuse.8
While describing the Iberian provinces, however, and at least depicting some
ethnographic details,9 Strabo simultaneously gives voice to his indifference con-
cerning Barbarian languages, as he hesitates to “give too many names, avoiding
the unpleasant task of writing them down—unless anyone gets pleased by reading
Pleutauroi, Bardyetai, Allotrigai and other names even less pleasant and less signifi-
cant than these”.10 This attitude represents the rule rather than the exception.
Pliny, quite similarly, presents selected names from a list of 120 tributary cities in
Spain based on whether they are worthy of being remembered or can be pro-
nounced easily in Latin.11 Such approaches towards the outside world find their
counterpart in Pliny’s description of the inside world, Italy, and its role in the uni-
verse, because Pliny considers Italy as “chosen by the prevision of the Gods to
6 Homer, Iliad 2.867: Νάστης αὖ Καρῶν ἡγήσατο βαρβαροφώνων (Nastes led the barbarically
speaking Carians).
7 Herodotus, Hist. 1.174.
8 Strabo, Geogr. 14.2.28.
9 Most of which, however, are explicitly derived from those of better-known peoples as the Greek,
the Celts or the Egyptians.
10 Strabo, Geogr. 3.3.7: ὀκνῶ δὲ τοῖς ὀνόμασι πλεονάζειν φεύγων τὸ ἀηδὲς τῆς γραφῆς, εἰ μή τινι
πρὸς ἡδονῆς ἐστιν ἀκούειν Πλευταύρους καὶ Βαρδυήτας καὶ Ἀλλότριγας καὶ ἄλλα χείρω καὶ
ἀσημότερα τούτων ὀνόματα.
11 Pliny, Nat. 3.7: digna memoratu aut Latio sermone dictu facilia.
make the heaven itself more glorious, to unite scattered empires, to make man-
ners gentle, to unite the incoherent and uncouth languages of so many nations
by the commitment of speech to a common language and to give civilization to
mankind”.12
Notwithstanding claims like the above, Pliny is still more interested and atten-
tive regarding linguistic differences than many other classical authors; this is rele-
vant since his work is one of the most important sources for early Germanic
words. Linguistic diversity is, within certain limits, an accepted reality and not
only seen as a refuge of ignorant and raffish barbarism: Pliny’s praise about “so
many tribal languages and dialects and varieties of speech, so numerous that to
the alien a foreigner hardly seems a human being” contains something like a laus
diversitatis: confronting the foreigner with the alien (externus alieno) reveals a
somewhat relativistic view, since it implies that of two parties either might be re-
garded as alien, depending on the perspective.13 A positive view on multilingual-
ism can be justified with other reasons, too, as e. g. an indicator of a well trained
memoria which is a most valuable asset. Mithridates serves as a prominent exam-
ple here, since he, as a king of 22 peoples, was able to administer justice in as
many languages and could address each nation without an interpreter (Nat. 7,88).
Pliny also uses language as a means of historical investigation and sometimes goes
off the beaten tracks of classical interpretation. Again with reference to Spain, Pliny
assumes a relationship between Celtici and Celtiberi because of the names of their
cities, among other arguments (Nat. 3,13). In the same book, he proves at least scepti-
cal against the common explanation of the name Lepontii from Greek λείπειν ‘leave
behind’ and thus the Lepontians as remnants from the retinue of Herakles. He in-
stead refers to Cato’s misfit view that the Lepontians are related to the Tauriscians
which, at least in a linguistic perspective, is much closer to reality, as both spoke
Celtic languages.
Outlook on the Middle Ages

During the late Roman Empire, the influence of the Germanic languages on the varie-
ties of Latin grew continuously with the number of Germanic soldiers increasing even
in higher positions. It is therefore hardly surprising that the character of the influence
12 Pliny, Nat. 3.39: […] numine deum electa, quae caelum ipsum clarius faceret, sparsa congregaret
imperia ritusque molliret et tot populorum discordes ferasque linguas sermonis commercio
contraheret ad conloquia et humanitatem homini daret.
13 Pliny, Nat. 7.1.7: tot gentium sermones, tot linguae, tanta loquendi varietas, ut externus alieno
paene non sit hominis vice.
of Germanic on Latin changed during that time.14 As Germanic languages came into
closer and constant contact with Latin (that is to say, Vulgar Latin), the words re-
corded lost their function as indicators of exotic languages and cultures; rather, they
seem to have been borrowed and integrated into the pre-Romance vocabulary in-
stead. However, this apparently didn’t result in a fundamentally new approach to
other languages. The migration period was in many respects a time of contact and
increased knowledge about other peoples. Yet the attitude of superiority towards
foreign languages remained similar, even if we can’t always be sure if this was
still a Roman attitude or rather, e. g., a Gothic one.15 This sometimes means that
linguistic reality and scholarly reflection on language diverged even more than in
the times of Varro.
The most prominent grammarian in the transition period between Antiquity and
the Middle Ages was Isidore of Seville, who, in this role, in some measure continues
the Varronian tradition. Isidore’s etymologies, however, are also influenced by the tel-
eological order of his Christian perspective. Expression and meaning of words are to
mirror an existential entity, therefore, the name of the Galli ‘Gauls’ is deduced from
the Greek word γάλα for ‘milk’ (because of their milk-white skin) or that of the
Germani from the adjective immanis ‘immense’ (because of their immense bodies).
Isidore’s view on history, the state, and the value of linguistic diversity is quite clear:
before the Tower of Babel was built, there was one language for all nations. This
proto-language, as we would call it today, might have been Hebrew, although Isidore
remains somewhat unclear on this point. After Babel, however, there were as many
languages as there were nations. Three of these languages were sacred, i. e. Hebrew,
Greek and Latin. Isidore here equates nations and languages and points out that na-
tions arise from languages, and not languages from nations.16 Varieties within lan-
guages are rated in a moral way: Latin, for example, had four varieties, wherein the
last and latest, characterized as mixta, emerged along with new customs and peoples
and spoiled the integrity of the words with solecisms and barbarisms.17
Despite approaching from a fairly non-analytic standpoint, Isidore neverthe-
less draws attention to some phonetic characteristics of the languages. Eastern
languages like Syrian or Hebrew, he says, “crunch together their speech and
words in their throats”, while the languages of Greece and Asia minor have a more
palatalized kind of speech. The western languages like Italian or Spanish, in turn,
14 Josef Brüch, Der Einfluss der germanischen Sprachen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1913), 89–127; Dennis
H. Green, Language and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 182–200.
15 Jordanes’s (Get. 24.122) statement that the Huns have no human language, but only something
resembling a language, could as well reflect the Ostrogothic perspective (i. e. the view of the former
allies of the Huns) as the view of his literary sources (e. g. Orosius or Priscus).
16 Isidor, Etym. 9.1.
17 Isidor, Etym. 9.6: quae post imperium latius promotum simul cum moribus et hominibus in
Romanam civitatem inrupit, integritatem verbi per soloecismos et barbarismos corrumpens.
“gnash their words against their teeth”.18 What Isidore describes here, looks like areas
with corresponding linguistic features or, to follow Trubetzkoy, the phenomenon of a
“Sprachbund”.19 Concerning the specific features, however, it is dubious how far
Isidore’s descriptions would withstand closer inspection. For Italian and Spanish,
Isidore might of course be referring to phonetic features that arose through Romance
palatalization. For Hebrew and Syrian, laryngeal features of the Semitic languages
might come into question. But overall, his statement seems much too general to be
true, especially because he only applies simple geographic criteria. The descriptions of
other languages are even more adventurous, as he judges them by the assumed ety-
mology of their tribal names. As a whole, Isidore’s etymologies represent, in several
respects, a step back behind the literature of the early Roman empire, which at least
sometimes permitted some agnostic positions.
Three Examples of Latin-Germanic Words

Obviously, the Roman attitude against foreign or barbarian languages was not con-
ducive to an even-handed analysis of Germanic words in the Latin or Greek lan-
guages. Therefore we cannot expect instructions about the lexical state of a word.
There is no explicit information, whether a word was a loanword or not and if, as a
loan, it entered the Latin of Rome and therefore that of the whole empire, or if it
was limited to a certain region or, perhaps, to a certain specialised area of the vo-
cabulary. Such details appear between the lines at best. In the Epitoma rei militaris
of Vegetius, for example, it is obvious that quite a number of Germanic words has
been borrowed, which become part of the military terminology of late Antiquity.
Here, it is the literary genre that helps.
Nevertheless, several of the earlier classical authors leave us at least some con-
textual information. Below, I will look at three examples and search mainly for
hints on their etymological structures and, perhaps, even their region of the ori-
gin.20 I will focus on phonology and morphology, which, in a Vulgar Latin context,
is not without problems.
18 Isidor, Etym. 9.1.8: Orientis gentes in gutture linguam et verba conlidunt […] mediterraneae gentes
in palato sermones feriunt […] occidentis gentes verba in dentibus frangunt.
19 See Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy, “Proposition 16,” in Actes du premier Congrès international de lin-
guistes à La Haye, du 10–15 avril 1928 (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1930), 17–18.
20 See Friedrich Kluge, “Vorgeschichte der altgermanischen Dialekte,” in Grundriss der germanischen
Philologie, edited by Hermann Paul, 2nd ed. (Strassburg: Trübner, 1901), 328, with an overview on
p. 332; Josef Brüch, Der Einfluss der germanischen Sprachen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1913), 16; Dennis
H. Green, Language and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 182.
framea
The Germania of Tacitus, alongside Pliny‘s Natural History, belongs to the early
works with the largest number of lexical items asserted as Germanic, and within
these items, framea has the most occurrences. The word is also attested in other
authors and works, one of whom, Iuvenal, is even a contemporary of Tacitus’s.21 At
the first mention, Tacitus introduces the word explicitly as Germanic, and describes
it as a javelin with slim and short iron blade and hasta as the Latin equivalent.22
There are five additional instances of this word. The framea seems to play a role in
the assembly, as a kind of suffrage symbol, and allegedly as the husband’s wedding
present to his wife (although the latter might be mistaken by Tacitus or his sour-
ces).23 Furthermore, it is a ceremonial symbol during the initiation of the adoles-
cents, and the warriors expect to be rewarded with a “warhorse and a bloody and
victorious framea” by their chief.24 Last but not least, it is used as part of a weapon
dance, which Tacitus holds to be the most popular game for young men.25 The sub-
sequent transmission of this word suggests that it became a loanword into Latin.
The attestation is quite dense during and shortly after the time of Tacitus, i. e. from
±100 to the beginning of the third century. However, the word survives into the
early Middle Ages, yet its meaning has changed to ‘sword’. Besides Gregory of
Tours,26 the work of Isidore is important in this context and might also be interme-
diary for later authors. Isidore sees framea as a synonym of spata and describes it
as a “sword sharpened on both edges”. With the etymological connection to ferrum,
he deduces that every sword could be called framea.27 The semantic change from
‘spear’ to ‘sword’ seems purely Latin and, therefore, makes it plausible that framea
has become part of the Latin lexicon, probably unconnected to the usage in the
Germanic corpus languages, where the noun is apparently extinct, if it ever existed
as an ordinary appellative.
The Germanic etymology is hardly controversial. Framea is usually explained
as a nomen agentis to the weak verb *framja- which shows up in several medieval
21 For an overview, see Roland Schuhmann, “Geographischer Raum und Lebensform,” (Dr. phil.
diss., Univ. Jena,, 2006 [2009]), 176, who does not mention some of the medieval attestations,
though.
22 Tacitus, Germ. 6.1 hastas, vel ipsorum vocabulo frameas gerunt angusto et brevi ferro.
23 Germ. 11.2; 18.1.
24 Germ. 14.1: bellatorem equum, illam cruentam victricemque frameam.
25 Germ. 24.1.
26 Gregor, Hist. 3.15 and 7.46; even if framea means ‘sword’ here, the sentence scutum eius ac fra-
meam in 3.15 reminds of Tacitus Germ. 18.1 scutum cum framea (gladioque). Gregor therefore might
have taken this formula rather from the Latin literature than from vernacular use.
27 Isidor, Etym. 18,5,3: framea vero gladius ex utraque parte acutus, quam vulgo spatam vocant
[…] framea autem dicta quia ferrea est […] ac proinde omnis gladius framea.
Gmc. languages like ON fremja, OE fremman, OFr fremma, OS fremmian, OHG

fremmen, most of which have the meaning ‘to accomplish, perform, promote’. The
verb is obviously based on the preposition frama ‘forward’; an analysis by means
of the later language stages suggests a derivation with -ji/ja- (IE i ̯e/i ̯o), that also
serves for the formation of denominal verbs. For the weapon name, most scholars
reconstruct a Gmc. fem. jō-stem *framjō, according to Lat. framea.28 As the
Germanic suffix in this etymology has only one syllable instead of two (-ja/ō in-
stead of -ija/ō), Latin †framia would be the expected rendering; therefore, the end-
ing -ea- in the Latin word needs an explanation. Plain analogy with nouns like ālea
‘die’29 does not offer a real solution, as it lacks a motive—all the more so since the
origin of ālea itself is unclear.30 The motive, however, might be that the Germanic
noun had three syllables, as had Latin ālea, or rather a disyllabic suffix -ija- instead
of monosyllabic -ja-. The ending -ea- was more likely to be noticed as disyllabic than
-ia-, which is more ambiguous in this respect.31 If this is the case, the etymology of
framea needs to be revisited.
On the semantic side, there are some comparanda in form of runic inscriptions.
Especially three inscriptions on spear heads show potentially similar meaning and,
in part, even comparable word formation, all of them dating in a time scale from the
late second and the early third century and thus roughly one century after Tacitus.
These are Øvre Stabu raunija(z) ‘prover’, Dahmsdorf ran(n)ja ‘runner’ and Kowel tilar-
ids ‘goal-rider’. These three inscriptions are written in different dialectal varieties,
namely North or Northwest Germanic (Øvre Stabu) and East Germanic (Kowel and per-
haps Dahmsdorf), respectively.32 The inscriptions show that the naming type must
have been rather common throughout the Germanic languages and hence in quite dif-
ferent regions. If we now take the trisyllabic rendering in framea seriously, the equiva-
lent in Germanic would rather be an agent noun based on a verbal compound *fram-
ijan-, wherein -ijan continues the IE verb *h₁ei- ‘to go’ (as in Lat. īre). The meaning of
such a compound would fit even better into the semantic range of the runic inscrip-
tions listed above. As a consequence, even the verb *framja- itself might originally
have been a compound *fram-ija- ‘go forward’ that was adapted to the first class of
weak verbs as soon as the simplex *ija- ‘to go’ was lost.33 Indeed, the question remains
28 See Schuhmann, “Geographischer Raum und Lebensform,” 193 with additional references.
29 Norbert Wagner, “Tagibertus, Arbeo und ähnliches,” Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 59
(1999): 170.
30 Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 33.
31 Manu Leumann, Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre (Munich: Beck, 1977), 46; 286–302.
32 For details, see Friedrich E. Grünzweig, Runeninschriften auf Waffen (Vienna: Praesens, 2004),
28, 33 and 45.
33 The cognate to IE *h₁ei- is only attested in some derivates and isolated preterites like Goth. iddja,
iddjedun or OE eode, and even in these instances, the inflection forms are heavily transformed; cf.
Elmar Seebold, Vergleichendes und etymologisches Wörterbuch (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 174–76.
if Tacitus or his sources actually witnessed an Gmc. appellative noun framea.

Considering the runic corpus, it is also imaginable that Tacitus instead provides
another testimony for the naming scheme that was used for inscribing spear
blades. Tacitus’s sources perhaps did not provide an answer to the question “What is
the usual noun for this kind of weapon?”, but rather “Which names do you give to
your spears?”. The appellative framea might then be a Latin achievement.
alcis
In his chapter about the Hercynia silva, Caesar reports on several strange animals.
One of them is called alcis, the shape and the colour of goats, but bigger in size,
with blunt horns. Their legs have no joints and ligatures, therefore they don’t lie
down to rest, nor can they raise or lift themselves up, if they have been thrown
down by any accident. As they sleep leaning against trees, they can be hunted by
undermining or cutting the trees and they can be caught, after the trees have tum-
bled down from their weight.34
As Caesar mainly deals with the region around the Rhine, alcis might at first
sight be an animal from Germania. But if we keep in mind that some of Caesar’s
opponents came from Scandinavia or at least Jutland, we can’t exclude that this
story originates in more remote areas of the Germanic speaking world. This is rele-
vant as Pliny, about 100 years after Caesar, mentions two different animals with
very similar names, the first one living somewhere in Germania, the second one,
however, in Scandinavia. The first one, called alce [acc. alcen] resembles a steer,
except for the length of the ears and of the neck. The second one, called achlis [acc.
achlin], is somewhat similar to the alcis, but has no joints in the hind leg and hence
never lies down, but reclines against a tree while it sleeps. As expected, the only
possible hunting method is the same as above, because otherwise, it would escape
through its swiftness. Moreover, according to Pliny, the upper lip of the achlis is
extremely large, therefore it has to move backwards when grazing; otherwise, the
lip would get tangled up.35
The most puzzling aspect in Pliny’s description is the fact that he clearly and
explicitly distinguishes two different animals with very similar names. While the
first description remains a bit vague—some aspects remind us of the fallow deer
(dama dama)—, the second one fits much better the northern elk (alces alces). Both
forms, alcen and achlin, seem to have gone though a Greek filter, as their inflec-
tional forms are Greek. The former is even identical to the Greek name ἄλκη which
Pausanias refers to. Pausanias describes the animal as a mixture between a stag and a
34 Caesar, b. Gall. 6.27.

35 Pliny, Nat. 8.39.
camel, living in the land of the Celts.36 Although his account also offers some details
about the hunting technique, it completely lacks the bizarre trapping scene. In any
case, as Pausanias lived one century after Pliny, he cannot be the source for Pliny’s
alce, which in reverse can be seen as evidence of a longer tradition of this word form in
Greek. To sum up, we can distinguish two animals with three different names or name
variants: (1) Pliny’s alce = Pausianas’s ἄλκη and (2) Caesar’s alcis = Pliny’s achlis. Not
only do both parts coincide in their description, they also fit together in their grammat-
ical behaviour. The only difference concerns the phonology of alcis vs. achlis.
In Germanic two main cognates are traceable, namely Proto Gmc. *alǥiz, which
is continued in Old Norse elgr ‘elk’, and *elha(n)-, which is continued in Old
English eolh and Old High German elah, elahho.37 Only the first one can be linked
to our word family, although the voiceless c normally does not stand for the
Germanic voiced fricative. So, I consider it possible, that Pliny’s form achlis is an
attempt to rectify Caesar’s word form alcis in line with the Germanic model and at
the same time to separate this word from a Greek or Latin loanword ἄλκη (alca,
alce), which was also semantically different.
gl(a)esum
Now to the last and most famous word in my list, which, like framea, is found in
Tacitus’s Germania. In chapter 45, Tacitus turns to the Baltic sea, that “washes
the peoples of the Aestii, whose customs and appearance are those of the Suebi,
while their language is closer to British”.38 The relevant quote follows after some
digressions about the people’s customs, as “they also scour the sea and are the
only ones out of all the Germanic peoples who gather amber, which they them-
selves call glesum. Being barbarians, they have never enquired or discovered what
substance or process produces it. In fact, for a long time it just lay among the
other jetsam of the sea, until our luxury gave it a reputation”.
By making a distinction between the rites and customs on the one hand and
the language on the other, Tacitus takes a rather differentiated view. What is strik-
ing, however, is the comparison of their language to Britannic, as there is no evi-
dence for Britannic dialects by the Baltic sea. The name of the Aestii is probably a
precursor of that of the Estonians, who speak a non-Indo-European language today.
If at the time of Tacitus it designated speakers of an Indo-European language at all,
36 Pausanias, Graec. 9.21.3: Ἔστι δὲ ἄλκη καλούμενον ϑερίον, εἶδος μὲν ἐλάφου καὶ καμήλου
μεταξύ, γίνεται δὲ ἐν τῇ Κελτικῶν γῇ; cf. Graec. 5.12.1.
37 For further information see Albert Lloyd et. al., Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen II
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 1029–32.
38 Tacitus, Germ. 45.2: dextro Suebici maris litore Aestiorum gentes adluuntur, quibus ritus habitus-
que Sueborum, lingua Britannicae propior.
that would more likely be Baltic.39 The simplest solution is to assume that Tacitus’s
informants couldn’t discern Baltic from British and judged the languages only by
their similar sound. We can’t really verify this. But if the name could be transferred
from Baltic to Estonian Finnish, it could as well have been transferred from a neigh-
boring Germanic language like Gothic. The tribal name Aestii might be Germanic
and connected to the Gothic verb aistan, which means ‘to fear, respect’, but that, of
course, is only one of several proposed explanations.40
The most interesting part is that the Aestii are said to call amber glesum. Tacitus
stresses here that this is a word used by the Aestii themselves (ipsi), and as he men-
tioned before, the Aestii are Germanic in all respects, except for their language.
Glesum, however, is a Germanic word, as I will show below.
The story by Tacitus is not the earliest reference to the ‘amber’ word. It is Pliny,
who reports this word for the first time. According to Pliny, amber is a product of the
islands of the Northern Ocean, and it is called glaesum by the Germanic peoples. The
word seems to have been used on the North Sea shore, where it came to the attention
of the Roman soldiers, who “when Germanicus commanded the fleet in those parts,
gave to one of these islands the name of Glaesaria, which by the barbarians was
known as Austeravia”.41 After that, Pliny explains what amber is and how it is pro-
duced. A few sentences later, however, he reveals that the origin of amber lies about
900 kilometers north of Carnuntum in Pannonia and that the main trading route for
amber crosses Pannonia, where the Germani pass it on to the Venetians. Thus, the ori-
gin of amber would also fit the South Eastern Baltic, and hence the home of the Aestii
of Tacitus. Interestingly enough, in an earlier book, Pliny mentions a group of islands
named Glaesiae, which the Greek called Electrides because of the amber. Pliny doesn’t
make any connection between these islands and Glaesaria, so it is unclear, if they are
(partly) the same.
glēsum has two cognates in Germanic, one is based on the root vowel a, the
other one on the root vowel ē. Both show the alternation of voiceless and voiced
fricative s, caused by Verner’s Law.42 Additionally, there are two semantic cores
‘glass’ and ‘amber’. The meaning ‘glass’ is concentrated around the stem with a
short a (OHG OS glas, OE glæs, ON gler ‘glass’ < Gmc. *glasan/glazan), while the
meaning ‘amber’ is rather found in the nouns in ē (OE glǣr ‘amber’, OS glār, glēr
‘resin’ < Gmc. *glē₁zan). Now, the vowel ē₁ was affected by a dialectal divergence in
Germanic, as it became an open vowel ǣ and soon ā in West Gmc.; in East Gmc.,
39 Cf. for example Marianina Demetri Olcott, “Ancient Amber-Gatherers,” Journal of Baltic Studies
16, no. 3 (1985): 305 and passim.
40 Friedrich Grünzweig and Alexander Sitzmann, Die altgermanischen Ethnonyme (Vienna:
Praesens, 2008), 22–23.
41 Pliny, Nat. 37.42.
42 Robert D. Fulk, A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 2018), 107–10.
however, it remained ē and later on was even raised to ī. The Gothic Bible retains
no cognate word for ‘glass’ or ‘amber’, although such a word probably existed. If,
however, the Latvian dialect word for ‘amber’, glīsis, really is a loanword from a
Germanic language, the donor language must have been East Germanic as the one
that lead to Tacitus’s glēsum.
Pliny wrote about four decades before Tacitus, therefore Pliny’s works were
probably part of Tacitus’s sources. This, however, seems doubtful for the glēsum
chapter. Tacitus definitely attaches this word to the Aestii and the Baltic and
doesn’t provide the slightest reference to the North Sea islands, which he also knew
about. This adds to a picture, where Tacitus must have preferred sources of infor-
mation other than Pliny. Now, it is important to put on record, regarding transmis-
sion, that Tacitus writes ‹e› while the Pliny manuscripts predominantly write ‹ae›.
The more peripheral Pliny manuscripts offer the versions glassum and glessum, all
of which are written with a double ‹s›. I take these forms as spelling mistakes from
an original form with a diphthong and a single ‹s›. The alternation between ‹ē› and
‹ae› is partly a problem of Roman literacy. The Latin phoneme /ae/ became a mon-
ophthong /ɛ:/ in Vulgar Latin quite early, and since then, the writings of e and ae
were often confused.43 Yet, this confusion normally replaces ae with e rather than
the other way round; moreover, there was no phonological merger of ae and ē, but
of ae and ĕ instead. The process itself was not yet finished during the first
century AD, and as the traditions of Pliny and Tacitus show almost no intermixture
of variants,44 it is justified to look for an alternative explanation. It seems plausible,
that the two manifestations of the word for amber by Pliny and by Tacitus are
caused by dialectal variation of Proto Gmc. ē₁, where glaesum (~ *glǣzan) is West
Gmc. and glesum (*glēzan) is East Gmc.
Conclusion
As Romans had a rather disturbed relationship with foreign languages in general, and
the vocabula peregrina in particular, the informative value of these words is estimably
low. A fundamental scepticism and resignation, however, seems inappropriate. Some
of the encyclopedical works (e. g. historiography, geography, ethnography) seem to
43 For an overview of the processes involved see Robert Coleman, “The Monophthongization of /
ae/,” Transactions of the Philological Society 70 (1971): 175–91, esp. 185–87; Manu Leumann,
Lateinische Laut- und Formenlehre (Munich: Beck, 1977): 67–69; Veikko Väänänen, Introduction au
latin vulgaire. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981), 38; Peter Stotz, Lautlehre (Munich: Beck, 1996), 81–86.
44 An exception is the island name Glaesaria Nat. 37,42 (acc. sg.) which, among several instances
of glessariam (see above), in F also shows glesariam.
have attached plenty of importance to transcribing barbarian names and words “cor-
rectly”. This becomes clear considering the numerous compounded proper names.
Notwithstanding if they are place names like Asciburgium, Austeravia, Boiohaemum,
personal names like Chariovalda, Segimerus, Ariogaesus or tribal names like
Marcomanni, Langobardi, Angrivarii—most of them reflect the intricate laws of noun
compounding in Germanic quite well, although (or because?) this type of word for-
mation was not productive in Latin. The ways in which Latin phonology and mor-
phology interfered with the transcribing of Gmc. words, on the other hand, are not
completely obscure.45 It therefore seems worthwhile to pay attention even to smaller
linguistic signals. I have attempted to do this on the basis of three examples: The first
one was alcis, where Pliny possibly attempted to adjust older traditions and to put
the Latin reception closer the “correct” Germanic phonology. The second one, fra-
mea, prefers a marked derivation type instead of unmarked †framia, which might
point to a three-syllable structure and therefore to a so far unknown verbal com-
pound. The last one (or better two), glaesum : glesum, seem to reflect different dialect
variants of the Gmc. amber word. This, in turn, confirms the historiographical infor-
mation which implies different regions of (language) contact.
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Nelson Goering
(Proto-)Germanic Alliterative Verse:
Linguistic Limits on a Cultural Phenomenon
In several of the older Germanic languages we find poetic texts composed in very
similar metres, not quite like anything else we know: this is the metre of Beowulf
and the rest of Old English verse, which is very similar to Eddic poetry from Old
Norse and the biblical epic Heliand in Old Saxon, as well as a couple of other conti-
nental fragments and some bits and pieces in Runic inscriptions.1 This type of po-
etry has often been termed ‘Germanic alliterative metre’. The ‘alliterative’ part of
this is clear enough, since all of these poems use alliteration—the repetition of
sounds at the beginnings of words—as a structural device to mark out poetic lines.
More interesting is the label ‘Germanic’, which has often been the most basic way
of referring to this poetic tradition. The title of Eduard Sievers’s 1893 book, the clas-
sic work on the subject, is Altgermanische Metrik, and more than a century later
Geoffrey Russom gave the title Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre to his important
reconsideration of the topic. ‘Germanic’ is very well established in this metrical use;
the question is to what extent the implied link to other senses of ‘Germanic’ is
justified.
First of all, by way of definition, I take the linguistic sense of ‘Germanic’ to be the
primary one, rather than any of the contested archaeological or cultural senses dis-
cussed in many of the contributions to this volume. This approach at least has the
advantage that ‘Germanic’ is reasonably precisely defined from a linguistic perspec-
tive, referring to the languages that derive from Proto-Germanic: a well-agreed-
upon set of languages and dialects. The initial question can be framed fairly
1 Since this volume is explicitly interdisciplinary, I have not taken the basic facts of Germanic allitera-
tive metrics for granted. The classic work on comparative Germanic metrics remains Eduard Sievers,
Altgermanische Metrik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893), and also valuable is Andreas Heusler, Deutsche
Versgeschichte: Mit Einschluss des altenglischen und altnordischen Stabreimverses (Berlin: De Gruyter,
1925). Important relatively recent monographs taking a generally comparative approach include
Geoffrey Russom, Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987);
Geoffrey Russom, Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998); Seiichi
Suzuki, The Metrical Organization of Beowulf: Prototype and Isomorphism (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
1996); Suzuki, The Metre of Old Saxon Poetry: The Remaking of Alliterative Tradition (Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 2004); and Suzuki, The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: Common Germanic Inheritance
and North Germanic Innovation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). There is of course very much more written
on the metres found in one or another specific language; for further references and discussion see
Nelson Goering, “The Linguistic Elements of Old Germanic Metre: Phonology, Metrical Theory, and the
Development of Alliterative Verse” (DPhil diss., Univ. of Oxford, 2016). Perhaps the best introduction
to the basics of any single alliterative metre is Jun Terasawa, Old English Metre: An Introduction
(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2011).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-013
242 Nelson Goering
precisely as the extent to which the metrical use of ‘Germanic’ overlaps with—or,
more strongly, is necessarily connected with— Germanic languages.
As it happens, the overlap between the metrical and linguistic uses of ‘Germanic’
is extensive but partial: ‘Germanic alliterative verse’ is preserved only in Germanic
languages, and all of the recorded older Germanic languages except for Old Frisian
and Gothic have at least a little surviving alliterative poetry in them.2 That Old
Frisian has no attested alliterative verse is not a terribly significant fact, since the lan-
guage is only attested from the later Middle Ages, after the ascendance of rhyme in
the poetic cultures of Europe.3 Gothic, however, is potentially more interesting.
Gothic is by far the oldest Germanic language recorded in literary form, and is the
only well-attested member of East Germanic, one of the three major linguistic divi-
sions of the language group.4
To be sure, the absence of any recorded alliterative verse in Gothic might not be
terribly meaningful. Most of the Gothic corpus consists of a fairly literal translation of
Greek biblical texts, and the scribal contexts were not favourable for writing down
vernacular poetry.5 Still, in a recent article Rafael Pascual made the interesting argu-
ment that Gothic not only did not, but could not have had the same type of verse as
the other Germanic languages because, he claims, it lacked certain linguistic struc-
tures that play an important role in the metrical system.6 This is an intriguing claim
in a couple of ways. On the one hand, it implies a very close relationship between
‘Germanic’ alliterative verse and the linguistic features of the (Germanic) languages it
is composed in. On the other hand, if Pascual is right, it would mean that these lin-
guistic preconditions for this specific type of alliterative metre only arose later on in
the histories of certain Germanic languages, which could at least complicate the use
of the term ‘Germanic’ (in its linguistic sense) as a broad label for this metre.
The specific feature of ‘Germanic’ alliterative verse most directly addressed by
Pascual is called resolution, the equivalence of two syllables (the first of which is
light) with a single heavy syllable.7 This can be illustrated from Beowulf:
2 Sievers, Altgermanische Metrik, 51–52, 120–122, 150–151, 165–171.

3 Rolf Bremmer, An Introduction to Old Frisian (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), 6–15.
4 Robert D. Fulk, A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 2018), 19–21.
5 D. Gary Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019), 6–13.
6 Rafael J. Pascual, “Old English Metrical History and the Composition of Widsið,” Neophilologus 100
(2016): 289–302.
7 For further discussions of resolution, see Eduard Sievers, “Zur Rhythmik des germanischen
Alliterationverses. I,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 10 (1885): 217ff.; Alan
J. Bliss, The Metre of Beowulf (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 27; Thomas M. Cable, The Meter and Melody of
Beowulf (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974), 7–8; Thomas M. Cable, The English Alliterative Tradition
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 16–21; Russom, Old English Meter and Linguistics
Theory, 11–12; Russom, Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre, 15–17; Robert D. Fulk, A History of Old
English Meter (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 26–27; Seiichi Suzuki, “In Defense of
(Proto-)Germanic Alliterative Verse: Linguistic Limits on a Cultural Phenomenon 243
– æfter sǣ̄-sīðe ‘after the sea-journey’ (1149a)

– geond þæt sæld swǣfun ‘all through the hall, not a creature was stirring’ (1280a)
– oððe atol yldo ‘or terrible age’ (1766a)
These three examples are all of more or less the same metrical type (C, in Sievers’s
widely-used labelling system), and the underlined elements—the two syllables of
atol, and the single syllables of sǣ and sæld—all count as ‘the same’ with the struc-
ture of the verse: the disyllabic sequence atol is said to be resolved to count as a
single, heavier unit.
This seems to have a linguistic basis in what we might call the heaviness requirement
(or more formally, the bimoraic principle), a general requirement of at least some
Germanic languages for stressed elements to be sufficiently ‘heavy’.8 Both sǣ̄ and sæld
are linguistically ‘heavy’ syllables, either with a long vowel (sǣ̄), or closed off by one or
more consonants (sæld). By contrast, the first syllable of atol is just a-, a short vowel on
its own. It does not meet the heaviness requirement, so it has to ‘recruit’ the next syllable,
-tol, to help make it prominent enough to stand on its own: they combine together to
make a single unit equivalent to a heavy monosyllable.9
Resolution in itself has been much discussed,10 and is well understood.
Pascual’s new argument is that he claims the ‘heaviness requirement’ did not yet
exist in Proto-Germanic, and only developed relatively late in the prehistories of
the North and West Germanic languages—and not at all in Gothic. In support of
this argument, he points to the process sometimes called Northwest Germanic
Resolution as a Metrical Principle in the Meter of Beowulf,” English Studies 76, no. 1 (1995): 20–33;
Michael Getty, The Metre of Beowulf: A Constraint-Based Approach (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002),
24, 231–37; Nicolay Yakovlev, “The Development of Alliterative Metre from Old to Middle English”
(DPhil diss., Univ. of Oxford, 2008), 62; and Goering, “The Linguistic Elements of Old Germanic Metre,”
17–19.
8 Robert W. Murray and Theo Vennemann, “Sound Change and Syllabic Structure in Germanic
Phonology,” Language 59, no. 3 (1983): 514, 525; Tomas Riad, “Structures in Germanic Prosody” (PhD
thesis, Stockholm Univ.; Department of Scandinavian Languages, 1992), 45–47; Goering, “The
Linguistic Elements of Old Germanic Metre,” 280ff.
9 S. J. Keyser and Wayne O’Neil, Rule Generalization and Optionality in Language Change, Studies
in Generative Grammar 23 (Dortrecht: Foris Publications, 1985), 6; John Hutton, “The Development
of Secondary Stress in Old English,” in Historical Linguistics 1995, edited by Richard M. Hogg and Linda
van Bergen, vol. 2: Germanic Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), 118–22; Ricardo
Bermúdez-Otero and Richard M. Hogg, “The Actuation Problem in Optimality Theory: Phonologization,
Rule Inversion, and Rule Loss,” in Optimality Theory and Language Change, edited by D. Eric Holt
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 111; Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, “A-Stem Nouns in West Saxon: Synchrony”
(Univ. of Newcastle upon Tyne: Ms., 2005), 8. Avaialble at: http://www.bermudez-otero.com/lifecycle_
chapter4.pdf, accessed March 2017; Nelson Goering, “Early Old English Foot Structure,” Transactions of
the Philological Society 114, no. 2 (2016): 180.
10 See the references in footnote 7 above.
244 Nelson Goering
lengthening.11 He takes the example of Old English þū and Norse þú, which have
long vowels (we can see the length still in modern English thou, and modern
Icelandic þú). Pascual claims that this word had an etymologically short vowel,
Proto-Germanic *þu, and that the lengthening of this light *þu to heavy *þū is a
sign of the heaviness requirement becoming a part of the phonological structure
of the North and West Germanic languages. Pascual then argues further that with-
out the heaviness requirement, Gothic (and Proto-Germanic before it) would have
had no basis for resolution in their poetry, and therefore could not have had
‘Germanic’ alliterative metre, in which resolution plays such a fundamental rhyth-
mic role.
Pascual is probably right to draw such a strong connection between the heavi-
ness requirement, poetic resolution, and ‘Germanic’ alliterative metre. ‘Germanic’
metres have a number of fairly specific metrical characteristics with a close ground-
ing in linguistic properties, of which resolution is a prime example. We find allitera-
tion in other poetic traditions—Finnish, Mongolian, Old Irish—but the rhythmic
properties of the metrical systems in those languages are very different from what we
find in Germanic. Pascual might, perhaps, place a little too much emphasis on resolu-
tion alone, but he is certainly right in associating the ability of a language to use this
metre in its familiar forms with particular elements of linguistic structure.
But while Pascual’s reasoning is sound, his premise probably is not: Gothic most
likely did have the linguistic heaviness requirement, and therefore (by Pascual’s
plausible arguments) at least had the linguistic preconditions for a verse form in
which resolution played a fundamental role. The evidence of Northwest Germanic
lengthening is both more complicated and less significant than has always been ac-
knowledged. The specific example of þu, for instance, is probably not an example of
such lengthening at all: the Gothic script does not mark length one way or the other
on this vowel, and this pronoun was probably historically long, Proto-Germanic *þū,
Proto-Indo-European *tuʜ or *tū.12
There are other words in which Northwest Germanic lengthening can be more
clearly evidenced, such as the demonstrative *sa (lengthened as sá in Old Norse or the
preposition *bi (widely lengthened to *bī in West Germanic). However, all such
11 Karl Luick, Historische Grammatik der englischen Sprache (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1921), 119; Jerzy
Kuryłowicz, “Latin and Germanic Metre,” English and Germanic Studies II (1949): 38; Kuryłowicz, Die
sprachlichen Grundlagen der altgermanischen Metrik, (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der
Univ. Innsbruck, 1970), 8–9; Robert D. Fulk, “Kuryłowicz on Resolution in Old English,” in Analecta
Indoeuropaea Cracoviensia, Vol. II: Kuryłowicz Memorial Volume. Part One, edited by W. Smoczyński
(Cracow: Universitas, 1995), 491; Pascual, “Old English Metrical History and the Composition of
Widsið,” 290–91.
12 Joshua Timothy Katz, “Topics in Indo-European Personal Pronouns” (PhD thesis, Harvard
Univ., 1998), 23–24; Don Ringe, From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2006), 57, 290. In fairness to Pascual, the supposed lengthening of *þu > *þū has a lengthy
history in the literature, and was cited by both Luick and Fulk.
examples are function words (demonstratives, prepositions, adverbial particles),

which were probably variably stressed in early Germanic. The heaviness requirement
would be expected to apply only to the stressed uses of such words (in Old English, bī
indeed exists alongside short be), and it may indeed have done so already in Proto-
Germanic. ‘Northwest Germanic lengthening’ is not so much a single change as evi-
dence of the ongoing interplay between stressed an unstressed variants of the same
grammatical words.13 For all we know, such interplay happened in some cases in
Gothic as well, since the script often does not allow us to establish length with any
confidence: bi was always short in Gothic, but we simply do not know if the demon-
strative sa was short, or long sā (or variably both).
Against the slight and difficult evidence of these lengthenings, there is a con-
siderable body of linguistic evidence suggesting that Proto-Germanic in fact had a
strong heaviness requirement. For one thing, among regularly stressed words,
like nouns or adjectives, there are no ‘light’ monosyllables: there are no stressed
words like ˣsi or ˣfa. All stressed words meet the heaviness requirement, implying
it is a part of the phonotactic structure of Proto-Germanic.14 There is also a good
deal of evidence from a linguistic process called Sievers’s law. The exact details of
Sievers’s law have been the subject of considerable phonological discussion,15 but
all phonological accounts of it assume some form of the heaviness requirement.
The basic idea behind Sievers’s law is that in certain verb classes (chiefly), we
find a slightly different ending after lighter and heavier syllables in Gothic:
– lag-jiþ ‘s/he lays’

– wēn-eiþ ‘s/he expects’
13 Goering, “The Linguistic Elements of Old Germanic Metre,” 281–82.

14 Russom, Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre, 15–16; Paula Fikkert, B. Elan Dresher and Aditi
Lahiri, “Prosodic Preferences: From Old English to Early Modern English,” in The Handbook of the
History of English, edited by Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 128.
15 The following give a good range of modern perspectives, and contain extensive further references:
Theo Vennemann, “The Phonology of Gothic Vowels,” Language 47, no. 1 (1971): 106–10; Murray and
Vennemann, “Sound Change and Syllabic Structure in Germanic Phonology,” 518; Robert W. Murray,
Phonological Strength and Early Germanic Syllable Structure (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1988); Robert
W. Murray, “Early Germanic Syllable Structure Revisted,” Diachronica 8 (1991): 201–38; Murray,
“PGmc. *Vci ̆ ̯v: A Response to Barrack,” American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 5
(1993): 10–14; B. Elan Dresher and Aditi Lahiri, “The Germanic Foot: Metrical Coherence in Old
English,” Linguistic Inquiry, no. 2 (1991): 264–69; Riad, “Structures in Germanic Prosody,” 65–67;
Seiichi Suzuki, “The Decline of the Foot as a Supersyllabic Mora-Counting Unit in Early Germanic,”
Transactions of the Philological Society 93, no. 2 (1995): 227–72; and Paul Kiparsky, “Sievers’ Law as
Prosodic Optimization,” in Mīr Curad: Studies in Honor of Calvert Watkins, edited by Jay Jasanoff,
H. Craig Melchert, and Lisi Oliver (Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Univ. Innsbruck,
1998), 345–60. My own favoured description of the law follows Kiparsky’s very closely.
246 Nelson Goering
Whether we find -ji- or -ei- depends on the weight of the previous syllable. What
makes this process particularly relevant in the current context is that we also find
the ei version, appropriate after heavy syllables, in words like:
– mikil-eiþ ‘s/he magnifies’
That is, the two syllables of miki(l)- seem to be treated as the equivalent of a single
heavy syllable, like wē(n)-, exactly like poetic resolution. Despite the differences be-
tween the various phonological analyses cited in note 15, these facts have led nearly
all investigators to conclude that Gothic (and Proto-Germanic, for which similar al-
ternations can be reconstructed) had some phonological trait analogous to what we
have been calling the heaviness requirement.
To step back from the phonological details, what are the implications of all this
for ‘Germanic’ alliterative verse? Firstly, as noted above, this metre relies heavily on
elements of linguistic structure, such as the ‘heaviness requirement’. As Pascual
notes, this requirement is clearly found in North and West Germanic—but contrary to
his claim, it is also found in Gothic, and there is good evidence to suggest that it also
existed already in Proto-Germanic. From this we can probably say that ‘Germanic’ al-
literative verse could have existed in more or less the form we know it not just in North
and West Germanic, but in any older Germanic language, including Proto-Germanic
itself. On the other hand, this precise metrical form could not so easily have existed
outside this group of historically related and structurally similar Germanic languages,
which have these particular rules of resolution (not to mention other shared linguistic
elements, such as stress patterns and compounding rules). It seems reasonable to
argue that the close connection between the metrical system of alliterative verse and
language gives a pretty good justification for using the linguistic label ‘Germanic’ for
the metre as well.
When I say that Germanic alliterative verse ‘could have’ existed in any earlier
Germanic language, I do not want to claim that it necessarily did. What is more inter-
esting here is that there is a dependency relationship between Germanic language
and ‘Germanic’ metre. There is no particular reason why speakers of an early
Germanic language would have to use alliterative metre—and in fact we find rhyming
metres used as early as Otfrid. But Germanic alliterative verse does ‘have to’ be in a
Germanic language. There are linguistic constraints limiting the languages in which
Germanic alliterative metre can be easily used.
This conclusion may have some potential use in thinking about different
supposedly ‘Germanic’ cultural elements beyond the language. Metre can poten-
tially be seen a link of sorts between language and the wider poetic tradition,
which includes not just the technical details of rhythm, but also things like for-
mulas, poetic vocabulary, proverbs, charms, and stories. Writing over a century
ago, R. W. Chambers noted how the legend of, for instance, Gūðhere/Gunnarr/
Gunther the Burgundian
became known from end to end of Germania. Eight centuries after his fight Gundahari was still
remembered from Iceland to Austria […].16
Nearly a decade later, he was again at pains to note the cultural dimension of
Germanic poetry:
So, if by “nation” we mean the whole Germanic race, then Germanic poetry is essentially “na-
tional.” The Huns were the only non-Germanic tribe who were received (for poetical purposes)
into Germania […]. But with this exception the tribes and heroes of Germanic heroic poetry are
Germanic.17
There is good reason to be cautious of pursuing the idea of ‘Germania’ or the

‘Germanic race’ too strenuously, or of imposing an idea of a unitary Germanic eth-
nic consciousness on such a wide range of peoples at different times and places.
Nonetheless it remains interesting that English and Norse poems, at least, do
have a good number of references to other Germanic speakers often very far re-
moved in time and space, like Gundahari‘s late career in distant Iceland, and that
the further spread of such references into other literary traditions was fairly lim-
ited. I would like to suggest that poetry might give us an alternative to an endur-
ing ‘Germania’ in accounting for this literary-cultural fact: assuming stories like
this were transmitted in poetic form, and that this form was dependent on lan-
guage, it is easy to understand how such traditions would be more easily passed
between speakers of Germanic languages, and less easily across linguistic bound-
aries. The primary thing that is ‘Germanic’ about these traditions is they were put
into a particular poetic form in a particular language which, on a practical level,
allowed easier transfer to other people with a similar language without needing to
be substantially reworked into a new poetic form.18 From this perspective, metre
would serve as a link—a soft link allowing exceptions, as is inevitable in any cul-
tural sphere, but still a link—helping over time to create a potentially fuzzy over-
lap between Germanic languages and at least some aspects of ‘Germanic’ non-
material culture. This view may allow something of a middle ground between, on
the one hand, the assumption of a clear and distinct Germanic ‘national’ identity
16 Raymond W. Chambers, Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1912), 60.
17 Raymond W. Chambers, Beowulf: An Introduction to the Study of the Poem (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1921), 99.
18 Poetry may have a long history of standing between language and culture in Indo-European tra-
ditions: it has been proposed that the desire to partake in prestigious traditions of praise poetry in
early Indo-European dialects may have been one among a number of factors driving early language
shift (at least among elites), and helping this language family spread across such a large and di-
verse area; see David W. Anthony and Don Ringe, “The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic
and Archaeological Perspectives,” Annual Review of Linguistics, no. 1 (2015): 212–14.
248 Nelson Goering
of the sort Chambers appears to have imagined,19 and on the other a perhaps
overly strong rejection of any possible validity of the term ‘Germanic’ when ap-
plied to poetic and legendary traditions.
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19 Chambers’s views on ‘Germania’ are certainly romantic, but they are not simplistic, and the
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Erin Sebo
The Limits of Obligation and Friendship:
Hrothgar, Beowulf, and the ‘Germanic’ Ideal
Vostre proecce, Rollant, mar la veïmes!
La Chanson de Roland (1731)
During Beowulf and Hrothgar‘s meeting, Unferth criticises Beowulf by suggest-

ing that accepting the swimming contest with Breca was dolgilpe1 (Beowulf, 509),
“stupid boasting”, and wlenc (Beowulf, 508), “arrogance”. While Beowulf flatly
rejects Unferth’s other slight (the suggestion that he lost to Breca), he tacitly ac-
cepts the charge of arrogance as a serious one. He is at pains to excuse it as a
youthful exploit but seems to accept the criticism, conceding that they gebeote-
don, boasted:
Wit þæt gecwædon cnihtwesende

ond gebeotedon wæron begen þa git
on geogoðfeore þæt wit on garsecg ut
aldrum neðdon (Beowulf, 535–38)
(We two said—being young—and boasted—we were both then still

youthful—that out in the ocean we would risk our lives.)
The extent to which Beowulf accepts the idea of his former recklessness has gone
largely unremarked and yet, it is an intriguing moment. Being prepared to risk
one’s life is a sign of bravery, a quality often regarded as the chief heroic virtue.
But, in fact, Beowulf’s response suggests that he does not believe that bravery is
an absolute good and further, that it may even be a bad quality if it encourages
warriors to lessen the strength of the war-band by throwing away their lives.
Nevertheless, there has been a tendency, especially in early scholarship, to read
the poem through a Tacitean lens as expressing a certain kind of idealised
‘Germanic’ martial honour code. Heroism has been thought of as an ideal, not a
pragmatic quality, and more importantly, as an ideal which is found more or less uni-
formly across ‘Germanic’ cultures. I suggest that the poem’s discussion of these ques-
tions is more complex. In this paper, I use Tacitus’s articulation of the ‘Germanic
ideal’ as a point of comparison for understanding the heroic values expressed in
Beowulf and suggest that although there are similarities in broad terms, the influence
1 All quotations from Beowulf or The Fight at Finnsburg are from Robert D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork,
John D. Niles, eds., Klæber’s Beowulf and The Fight at Finnsburg (Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press,
2008). All translations are my own.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-014
252 Erin Sebo
of Tacitus has encouraged modern readers to overlook those aspects of the text
which do not conform to it. The small differences between similar value systems, it
seems to me, are far more illuminating than the similarities. It is in the differences
that cultural nuance is revealed. Tacitus’s clear articulation of a heroic ethos illumi-
nates both what Beowulf is and what we expect it to be, but is not.
Germania
Tacitus’s Germania has been, and perhaps still is, the most influential and often-
quoted source for understanding early English social relationships, despite the
fact that it is pre-dates the first English speakers by at least half a millennium. It
is hard to imagine that even the most traditional and conservative society would
not change in the centuries between Classical times and the early medieval period,
especially given the vast array of other social changes, including the development of
a new language and the conversion to Christianity. Moreover, there are specific in-
stances where the archaeological record reveals that the early English developed and
changed practices brought to England from their homelands and that the ideas and
cultural constructions around them also changed.2 In the case of boat burials, for ex-
ample, recent dendrochronological studies demonstrate that the development of the
grander ship burials was an English innovation.3 Moreover, while it had been a
form of burial for ‘warriors’ in Scandinavia, in England it is reserved for the elite,
and possibly restricted exclusively to royalty; an innovation which implies chang-
ing cultural ideas around kingship. If the sheer expanse of time were not enough
to make us reconsider how similar their social structures might be, then perhaps
these extensive changes should. Nevertheless, Germania continues to influence
our understanding of early English social obligations. We still have a tendency to
think in Tacitean terms—literally; comitatus is his word for the lord/retainer
relationship.
Scholars, conscious of these issues, are cautious when using Germania. Magennis,
for example, warns that Tacitus, “drawing an implicit contrast with his own
world, which he perceived to be decadent, presents the Germanic tribes as fierce
Century AD,” Antiquity 93, no. 370 (2019): 954–69.
3 Neils Bonde and Frans-Arne Stylegar, “Between Sutton Hoo and Oseberg: Dendrochronology and
the Origins of the Ship Burial Tradition,” Danish Journal of Archaeology 5 (2016): 19–33.
The Limits of Obligation and Friendship 253
but virtuous barbarians and with strong bonds of group loyalty”.4 Similarly,
O’Brien O’Keeffe notes:
Germania must be read as a work with a political and moral bias and is an unreliable guide to
‘historic’ details about either contemporary German barbarians or their post-migration
descendants.5
However, ultimately, the problem is that which besets all pre-modern scholars;
the lack of sources promotes a tendency to extract all that we can from what does
survive. Moreover, since virtually all extant Old English poetry survives in tenth-
century copies, we are rarely in a position to place texts with any historical preci-
sion anyway. So, after his caveat Magennis concludes, cautiously and condition-
ally, that the text, “when carefully sifted, throws some light on values that the
colonizers of Britain would have embraced.”6 In the case of O’Brien O’Keeffe, she,
too, concludes:
[…] many of the traits which Tacitus describes in his account of the German comitatus are con-
sonant with features of heroic convention found in Old English literature […] generosity and
feasting, feud and settlement, the valour expected of a man and chief.7
However, it is not simply the problems of historical specificity. The prevailing sense,
as O’Brien O’Keeffe indicates, has been that Tacitus’s account does accord with what
we find in Old English poetry and it is here that we encounter methodological dan-
gers. Since Germania does indeed seem to coincide with some early English cultural
values, it becomes a convenient standard by which poems may be interpreted. For
example, of all Old English heroic poetry, it is The Battle of Maldon which exemplifies
most exactly the values described in Germania. Consequently, Maldon is often re-
garded as the poem which most clearly and unambiguously expresses the early
English heroic ideal. As Magennis notes, it “has been viewed as representing a clas-
sic expression of Germanic values” and as “quintessentially heroic in its sentiment”.8
Similarly, Irving notes the poem, “has often been placed beside Tacitus’s Germania
as the classic statement, the pure essence, of the Germanic heroic ideal”9 while, for
Battles, who also draws the parallel with Tacitus, “[n]o other Old English poem medi-
tates as intensely upon the virtues and emotions associated with the retainer’s
4 Hugh Magennis, Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 2011), 36.
5 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Heroic Values and Christian Ethics”, in The Cambridge Companion to
Old English Literature, edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1991), 107.
6 Magennis, Anglo-Saxon Literature, 36.
7 O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Heroic Values,” 107.
9 Edward Irving, “The Heroic Style in the Battle of Maldon,” Studies in Philology 58, no. 3 (1961):
457–67; 458.
254 Erin Sebo
obligation of loyalty toward his lord”.10 Even Gwara who attempts a more nuanced
and complex understanding of Anglo-Saxon honour, concludes “Maldon and
Beowulf’s dragon fight have the same literary typology, that they express virtually
identical perspectives on the values of heroism and responsible leadership”.11 In fact,
unlike many Old English poems, we know that Maldon was composed not long after
the events it describes. Indeed, Irving calls it a “fragment of medieval journalism”
and we know that it has a specific cultural context; Æthelraed’s policy of paying
Danegeld to avoid conflict. So this poem which juxtaposes aristocratic cowards who
run from the battle to save themselves while the lowliest show courage in standing
their ground is not only a deconstruction of the nature of true nobility but also a po-
litical allegory. Because of this historical context, Maldon might well have been read
as a less reliable indicator of broad cultural values than other poems, if not for the
influence of Tacitus.
However, perhaps the most interesting element of the scholarly use of Germania
is the focus on finding similarities, or ‘consonance’, with Anglo-Saxon ideas; a ten-
dency revealed in the comments of both O’Brien O’Keeffe and Magennis above.
Naturally, early English culture has many similarities with the societies Tacitus de-
scribes, so a methodology which seeks similarities runs the risk of smoothing out cul-
tural nuance. I would like to propose a different approach to the use of Tacitus as a
source for cultural values. Since he is describing a ‘Germanic’ society at the very
time that much of the ‘historical’ material found in Old English poetry was taking
place, the way in which his account does not accord with heroic poetry seems to
me to be of greater interest. It demonstrates how cultural attitudes have changed
and it reveals what is culturally specific to this society. It allows us to consider
this culture in its nuances.
Evaluating Germania
I have argued that Maldon is a singular text and should not be used as an indicator of
broad cultural values and since Beowulf is also a singular text—in every way—the
same argument might be made there. So, it is also worth considering whether the val-
ues of Germania are present in other Old English texts and perhaps the most appropri-
ate texts with which to evaluate this are Maxims I and II. Like Germania, these texts
discuss social relationships and proper behaviour—but with the crucial difference that
they were composed in early medieval England. The Maxims are also aspirational
texts; that is, they describe the ideal, not necessarily the reality, which makes them an
10 Paul Battles, “‘Contending Throng’ Scenes and the Comitatus Ideal in Old English Poetry, with
Special Attention to The Battle of Maldon 122a,” Studia Neophilologica 83 (2011): 41–53.
11 Scott Gwara, Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 324.
appropriate point of comparison for Heroic literature. These are exactly the kind of
poems in which one would expect to find a reflection of Tacitus’s ideal—if it exists.
The central point of the Tacitean heroic ideal is that public, not personal rela-
tionships, are at heart of ‘Germanic’ culture. Tacitus describes ‘Germanic’ society as
founded on hierarchical relationships to the exclusion of peer friendship and he
stresses loyalty and honour over affection:
Cum ventum in aciem, turpe principi virtute vinci, turpe comitatui virtutem principis non adae-
quare. iam vero infame in omnem vitam ac probrosum superstitem principi suo ex acie reces-
sisse: illum defendere, tueri, sua quoque fortia facta gloriae eius adsignare praecipuum
sacramentum est: principes pro victoria pugnant, comites pro principe. (Tacitus, Germania, 14)12
(When they go into battle, it is a disgrace for the chief to be surpassed in valour, a disgrace for
his followers not to equal the valour of the chief. And it is an infamy and a reproach for life to
have survived the chief, and returned from the field. To defend, to protect him, to ascribe
one’s own brave deeds to his renown, is the height of loyalty. The chief fights for victory; his
vassals fight for their chief.)
This ethos is essentially competitive and each man has an obligation based on his
position in the hierarchy; the leader to be bravest, the followers to die in his service.
In Maxims II we find the same relationship described quite differently:
Geongne æþeling sceolan gode gesiðas

byldan to beaduwe and to beahgife13 (Maxims II, 14–15)
(Good followers of the young noble shall encourage him to fight battles and give gifts)
Here the followers inspire and help the noble to become a great man and their rela-
tionship is imagined in more equal terms, closer to friends or advisers. In fact, the
sense of loyalty seems reversed:
Fyrd sceal ætsomne,

tirfæstra getrum. Treow sceal on eorle,
wisdom on wer. (Maxims II, 31a – 32)
(An army should be together, gloriously bound together. A noble should be true,
A man should be wise.)
As Stanley notes, this fyrd is apparently “an idealized pre-Conquest polity:

a citizen army with the eorl of the officer class, and a wer of the soldiery com-
manded by officers”.14 The obvious conclusion of such a reading is that the obli-
gation to be loyal is upon the leader more even than his men and yet Stanely
12 All quotations from Germania are taken from James B. Rives, (trans.) Tacitus: Germania (Oxford,
Oxford Univ. Press: 1999). All translations are my own.
13 All quotations from Maxims II are from Richard Marsden, The Cambridge Old English Reader
(Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press: 2015). All translations are my own.
14 Eric G. Stanley, “The Gnomes of Cotton MS Tiberius B.i,” Notes and Queries 62, no. 2 (2015): 191.
256 Erin Sebo
argues that these lines indicate that the officer class must be “loyal to both the
superiors and to the soldiery under their command”15 when, in fact, the passage
does not mention these superiors at all. Stanely’s reading is unusual in that it
challenges Tacitean assumptions, but he cannot dispense with them altogether,
even when there is no textual evidence for them. In fact, the imagery of the fyrd is
not hierarchal, rather it is imagined as a single entity through the image of a knot
“getrum”. If the poem does indeed reflect a hierarchy then, grammatically and
metrically, the poet links the obligation of the eorl to be loyal with the obligation
of a wer to be wise—an altogether more complex, more critical, malleable and
thoughtful relationship than the unquestioning and suicidal bravery imagined by
Tacitus. It is significant, too, that though Maxims II does discuss the obligations
of kings—the superiors to which Stanley refers—it is in an entirely separate part of
the poem. This seems to be because the king himself is imagined as separated
from the fyrd. He should be “in healle”, closed off from the battle field and, seem-
ingly, behind a door: “duru sceal on healle”. It is his obligation healdan rice
(Maxims II, 1), (“to hold the kingdom”) and beagas dælan (Maxims II, 29), (“to
give rings”). He is not part of the getrum of the fyrd itself.
If anything, the difference between Germania and Maxims I is even starker
with Maxims II: extraordinarily, here there is no mention of hierarchical loyalty at
all; a striking fact in the literature of any pre-Modern monarchy, let alone one
which was apparently built on the lord-retainer relationship. The poem begins
with an account of the relationship between God and his creation and then moves
to human society:
[…] þing sceal gehegan

frod wiþ frodne; biþ hyra ferð gelic,
hie a sace semaþ, sibbe gelærað,
þa ær wonsælge awegen habbað.16 (Maxims I, 18b – 21)
([…] A meeting must be held, the wise with the wise; their minds will be alike; they will always
resolve trouble, preach peace, when earlier discontents have disturbed it.)
This could not be further from the Tacitean account. Here, decisions seem to be
made and problems resolved through co-operative, group discussion amongst
equals. In fact, here there is no need for an authority figure to decide which advice
should be followed since “biþ hyra ferð gelic”, ‘their minds will be alike’. When we
do eventually come to the question of kings at line 56, the poem avoids all mention
15 Stanley, “Gnomes of Cotton MS Tiberius B.i,” 191.

16 George Philip Krapp and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book: The Anglo-Saxon Poetic
Records. III. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press: 1936). All translations are my own.
of loyalty. As in Maxims II, if there is an implication of loyalty between warriors,

the king is not included in this:
[…] beoþ þeoda geþwære, þonne hy geþingad habbað,
gesittað him on gesundum þingum, ond þonne mid gesiþum healdaþ
cene men gecynde rice. Cyning biþ anwealdes georn;
lað se þe londes monað, leof se þe mare beodeð. (Maxims II, 56–59)
([…] the people are peaceful when they have assemblies. They sit in steadfast meetings, and
then, with companions, brave men will hold the kingdom. A king is eager for ruling. He hates
the one who claims land, loves the one who offers more.)
This, too, does not seem to accord with the Tacitean view. Rather than a heroic de-
piction of the role of the warrior in winning land and treasure for his lord, the poet
of Maxims I depicts kings as almost grasping. Moreover, by beginning this section
with the question of what makes the þeod happy the poet gives this first importance
—not whatever the king’s desires may be. The passage is egalitarian in emphasis
and, arguably, rather critical of kings in general. It is the cene men, “brave men”,
who rule the kingdom and listen to wise counsel mid gesiþum, “with companions”,
while the king himself seems eager only for the power and wealth of ruling, not for
the responsibilities.
In fact, about a quarter of Maxims I is dedicated to discussing social relationships
and although it refers to kings—as in the passage above—mostly it focuses on peer
friendship, as in this discussion on the proper behaviour between warriors in a war
band. As Clark notes, the friendship is depicted as a “union of equals” so much so
that “the gnomicists’ words echoing the traditional marriage ceremony”17:
A scyle þa rincas gerædan lædan
ond him ætsomne swefan;
næfre hy mon tomælde,
ær hy deað todæle.
Hy twegen sceolon tæfle ymbsittan, þenden him hyra torn toglide,
forgietan þara geocran gesceafta, habban him gomen on borde; (Maxims I, 177–82)
(The warriors must always carry gear and sleep together. Never may they be hindered by slander,
before they are parted by death. The two must sit at the gameboard, until their anger glides from
them, forget their sad happenings, have for themselves a game on the board.)
These passages from Maxims I, however, do at least accord with Tacitus in one re-
spect, that they focus on a socially-instituted relationship; that of the warband.
Interestingly, though, much of what Maxims I has to say about friendship is not
within the context of any specific social structure:
17 David Clark, Between Medieval Men (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), 130.
258 Erin Sebo
Wel mon sceal wine healdan on wega gehwylcum;

oft mon fereð feor bi tune, þær him wat freond unwiotodne.
Wineleas, wonsælig mon genimeð him wulfas to geferan,
felafæcne deor. Ful oft hine se gefera sliteð;
gryre sceal for greggum, græf deadum men;
hungre heofeð, nales þæt heafe bewindeð,
ne huru wæl wepeð wulf se græga,
morþorcwealm mæcga, ac hit a mare wille. (Maxims I, 144–51)
(A man must well stick by a friend in every way. Often a man fares far from town, where he
does not know to find a friend. Friendless, an unhappy man takes with him the wolves as com-
panions, treacherous beasts. Full often his companions attack him. One should fear the grey
ones, give a dead man a grave. Lamenting hunger, it [the wolf] will circle the grave, nor indeed
will it weep, the wolf, the grey one, for the slaughter, for the men violently killed; it always
wants more.)
Generally, maxims are brief and, although Maxims I tends to allow lengthier exege-
sis than Maxims II, this metaphor of friendship is given considerable space. It, in
itself, suggests that the social and cultural value accorded to friendship was signifi-
cant. Moreover, it suggests that what is not mentioned is significant; this image of
friendship does not include any implication that the relationship is predicated on
social obligation or social ties. Of course, it does not preclude such a friendship,
but the idea is apparently not important enough to be included. The primacy of this
relationship then, of simple, undefined friendship, is such that to be friendless is to
take wolves for companions; an extraordinary image.
However, it is perhaps the next line of the poem which poses the greatest
challenge to the Tacitean ideal. The gnomicist tells us that: wræd sceal wunden,
wracu heardum men, (Maxims I, 152), “a wound must be wound, an unyielding
man must have vengeance”. Although Maxims I does not condemn vengeance
here, it seems that it has problematic or even negative associations. Yet, in the
Tacitean view, feud and vengeance are asserted to be the most important aspects
of Germanic friendship: suscipere tam inimicitias seu patris seu propinqui quam
amicitias necesse est (Germania, 21), (“it is a duty among them to adopt the feuds
as well as the friendships of a father or a kin”). Of all Tacitus’s assertions about
Germanic culture, it is this which has been most influential and most widely ac-
cepted.18 It may be found in Whitelock who writes “[v]engeance was no mere satisfac-
tion of personal feeling, but a duty that had to be carried out even when it ran
counter to personal inclination”19 as well as in more recent scholars such as Day, who
suggests “the heroic ‘economy of honour’ […] demands certain behavioural choices of
18 There are some exceptions, notably, Guy Halsall, “Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West:
An Introductory Survey,” in Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, edited by Guy Halsall
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 1–45.
19 Dorothy Whitelock, Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952), 39.
its inhabitants”.20 Even Gwara, who challenges elements of this view, speaks of
“the sacred obligation of vengeance”21 and certainly, Baker’s more recent study,
Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf, states emphatically that the “warrior
on the battle field has no interest in exchange or balanced ledgers: his aim is to
be one of the winners in the Economy of Honour.”22 This is a view of Anglo-Saxon
society which suggests that emotion is always subservient to obligation and that
there is no flexibility within those structures and yet this does not seem to be re-
flected at all in Maxims I and II.
Beowulf
It is apparently not the view expressed in Beowulf either; or, at least, if read in
these terms, Beowulf is not much of a hero. He survives the Frisian raid in which
his lord and kinsman, Hygelac, dies; an unforgivable fault according to Tacitus,
who writes that it is: infame in omnem vitam ac probrosum superstitem principi suo
ex acie recessisse (Germania 14), “an infamy and a reproach for life to have survived
the chief, and returned from the field”. Worse, Beowulf flees from the battle field.
Yet, rather than seem apologetic, the Beowulf poet describes the escape as one of
Beowulf’s extraordinary feats and boasts that,
nealles Hetware hremge þorfton

feðewiges þe him foran ongean
linde baeron lyt eft becwom
fram þam hildfrecan hames niosan (Beowulf, 2363–66)
(The Hetwares had no cause to exalt over the foot-battle, those who bore linden-wood shields
against him. Few returned from that warrior to visit their homes.)
Nor does Hygelac’s wife, Hygd, seem to blame Beowulf for his actions; indeed, she
offers him the throne in place of her own son. So here, rather than illuminating the
heroic economy in which Beowulf operates, the Tacitean ideal is an illuminating
measure of what Beowulf is not and of what he consciously refuses to be. In the
same vein, I will use the Tacitean ideal, and especially his notion that sons keep
the friendships and feuds of their fathers,23 to illuminate Beowulf’s interactions
20 David Day, “Hwanan sio foehð aras: Defining the Feud in Beowulf,” Philological Quarterly 78
(1999): 77–96, 77.
21 Gwara, Heroic Identity, 38.
22 Peter Baker, Honour, Exchange and Violence in Beowulf (London: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 73.
23 For the role of family in vengeance in early English legal codes, see Stefan Jurasinski, Ancient
Privileges: “Beowulf,” Law, and the Making of Germanic Antiquity (Morgantown: West Virginia Univ.
Press, 2006), and Erin Sebo, “Ne Sorga: Grief and Revenge in Beowulf.” In Anglo-Saxon Emotions,
edited by A. Jorgensen et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 177–92.
260 Erin Sebo
with his father’s friend, the Danish king, Hrothgar. The meeting between these
two (Beowulf, 320–661) is a seminal moment in the poem. In addition to introduc-
ing the poem’s two central figures, it introduces many of its themes and dilem-
mas. As kings, Hrothgar and Beowulf face analogous difficulties—feuds and
monsters—in their struggles to protect their kingdoms and the comparison be-
tween the two and the choices they make is one of the poem’s structuring devi-
ces. The example of Hrothgar in the Danish half of the poem becomes a measure
by which to understand Beowulf’s choices in the Swedish half. So their meeting
marks a defining moment in the poem. Their words to each other, implicitly and
explicitly, articulate the questions which dominate the poem; among others,
what makes a good king, a good hero, and what are the limits of obligation and
friendship? Beowulf’s conduct here demonstrates that he is not guided by a
Tacitean code of honour. Rather he is pragmatic, diplomatic, brave and above
all, concerned to protect his people.
Unlike the glorious, dramatic introduction of Scyld which begins the poem,
Beowulf’s introduction is rather muted, even vague. Unlike Scyld’s introduction, we
are given no account of Beowulf’s life or deeds, we are not even told his name:
þæt fram ham gefrægn Higelaces þegn

god mid Geatum, Grendles daeda·
se wæs moncynnes mægenes strengest
on þaem dæge þysses lifes
æþele ond eacen het him yðlidan
godne gegyrwan cwæð he guðcyning
ofer swanrade secean wolde
maerne þeoden þa him wæs manna þearf (Beowulf, 194–200)
(Hygelac’s thane, a good man among the Geats, heard from his home of Grendel’s deeds; he
was of the greatest strength of all mankind, on that day in this life, noble and mighty. He or-
dered a good wave-crosser to be made. He said he would seek the war-king over the swan’s
riding—that mighty ruler—since he was in need of men.)
So far, Beowulf’s actions are concordant with at least one aspect of Tacitean hon-
our: he gathers a warband and goes in search of a conflict through which he can
establish his status, just as Tacitus claims:
Si civitas, in qua orti sunt, longa pace et otio torpeat, plerique nobilium adulescentium petunt
ultro eas nationes, quae tum bellum aliquod gerunt, quia et ingrata genti quies et facilius inter
ancipitia clarescunt magnumque comitatum non nisi vi belloque tueare; exigunt enim principis
sui liberalitate illum bellatorem equum, illam cruentam victricemque frameam. (Germania 14)
(If their native state sinks into the sloth of prolonged peace and repose, many of its noble
youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are waging some war, both because inaction is odi-
ous to their race, and because they win renown more readily in the midst of peril, and cannot
maintain a numerous following except by violence and war.)
When the warband arrive in Denmark, they are challenged by the coast guard who
asks them to identify themselves since they are arriving armed. Beowulf responds:
We synt gumcynnes Geata leode

ond Higelaces heorðgeneatas·
wæs min fæder folcum gecyþed
æþele ordfruma Ecgþeow haten·
gebad wintra worn aer he on weg hwurfe
gamol of geardum hine gearwe geman
witena welhwylc wide geond eorþan. (Beowulf, 258–60)
(We are men of the Geatish people and Hygelac’s hearth-companions. My father was known
amongst the people, a noble leader, called Edgetheow.)
This shrewd and diplomatic answer is striking for what it obscures: Beowulf does not
mention any connection to Hrothgar. He speaks about his father, but does not men-
tion Ecgtheow’s connection to the Danish king either. He presents himself as respect-
ably connected but he does not mention that he is the king’s nephew. In fact, when
he speaks about the connection to Hrothgar he does not claim any closer connection
than any of the other men. It seems a deliberate underplaying of his identity and po-
sition. After all, the coastguard has made specific reference to the fact that they are
carrying weapons. Beowulf could most easily have clarified that he does not intend
to invade the Scylding lands by claiming his friendship with the Danish king.
Instead, he omits it. He is equally reticent about his reason for travelling to Denmark.
He tells the coast guard that:
Ic þæs Hroðgar mæg

þurh rumne sefan raed gelaeran·
hu he frod ond god, feond oferswyðeþ (Beowulf, 277a–79)
(I can offer to Hrothgar, from a generous spirit, counsel, how he, wise and good, can overcome
the fiend)
In fact, as we know, he has come to kill Grendel himself, not advise Hrothgar on
how to do it. This answer, like the diminishing of his own social status, reduces the
threat he appears to pose to Hrothgar, a necessary diplomacy given that he appar-
ently does not want to trade on his father’s friendship with Hrothgar. This cir-
cumspection is demonstrated again when the Geats reach the hall and are asked to
identify themselves again. Here, Beowulf is even less-forthcoming about his identity
or any connection to King Hrothgar:
We synt Higelaces
beodgeneatas Beowulf is min nama·(Beowulf, 343b)
(We are Hygelac’s Companions. Beowulf is my name.)
Here he gives his name. It is a dramatic moment, the first time his name is men-
tioned. Again, it is in striking contrast to the introductions of the Scylding kings
262 Erin Sebo
which begins the poem. However, this drama distracts from the more important po-
litical point which is that, from Wulfgar‘s point of view, a first name does not iden-
tify the warrior. To name his father or his relationship to the Geatish king would,
but to give his name without context carries the implication that he does not have
important or famous relatives. Similarly, Beowulf makes no claims for himself, nor
claim leadership over his companions. In fact, he utters as few words and gives as
little information as Wulfgar is likely to accept. Ironically, at the moment at which
he clarifies his identity to the audience, he obscures it from the other figures in the
poem. Ultimately, Wulfgar recommends that the king grant Beowulf an audience on
the strength of nothing so much as his war gear—hy on wiggetawum wyrðe þinceað
eorla geæhtlan (Beowulf, 368b–69), “by their war-gear they seem worthy of the es-
teem of nobles”—after all, he has almost nothing else to go on. Hrothgar‘s initial reac-
tion is one of warm remembrance and recognition. However, this is rather short lived
since, ever practical and ever concerned for the welfare of his people, Hrothgar sees
an opportunity to rid his kingdom of the monster Grendel:
Hine halig god

for arstafum us onsende,
to Westdenum, þæs ic wen hæbbe,
wið Grendles gryre. ic þaem godan sceal
for his modþræce madmas beodan.
Beo ðu on ofeste hat in gan
seon sibbegedriht samod ætgædere·
gesaga him eac wordum þæt hie sint wilcuman Deniga leodum. (Beowulf, 381b–89a)
(Holy God, in kindness, has sent him to us, to the West-Danes—of this I have hope—against
Grendel’s terror. I will offer the good man precious treasures for his courage. Quickly, order the
noble band of kinsmen, all together, to come in. Tell them they are welcome in the Danish
lands.)
When Beowulf goes before the king, he attempts to forestall any claim on his hon-
our by introducing himself as though he is unacquainted with Hrothgar and by spe-
cifically allying himself with his uncle Hygelac rather than with his father, the
king’s friend. Hrothgar is undeterred and his reply is an attempt to shame Beowulf
into helping the Danes:
For gewyrhtum þu, wine min Beowulf,

ond for arstafum usic sohtest.
Gesloh þin fæder fæhðe mæste […]
Siððan þa fæhðe feo þingode;
sende ic Wylfingum ofer wæteres hrycg
ealde madmas; he me aþas swor (Beowulf, 457–64, 470–72)
(For deeds, Beowulf, my friend, and for past favours, you have sought us. By killing, your fa-
ther began the greatest feud […]. Then I settled the feud with payment. I sent the Wylfings over
the waves’ crest ancient treasures; he swore oaths to me.)
Unlike Hrothgar’s words to Wulfgar, this speech is designed to emphasise Beowulf’s

obligation to him. He casts Beowulf’s coming as motivated by a desire to repay this
debt. It is a clear appeal to honour. What is extraordinary is that Beowulf does not
respond. He does not accept Hrothgar’s view but he does not seem concerned to re-
fute it either—a point made all the more dramatically since Hrothgar’s attempt to
shame Beowulf is immediately compounded by Unferth’s taunting which Beowulf
does refute at length. It seems to me that in the ‘economy of Honour’ described by
Tacitus, Beowulf’s response to Hrothgar’s shaming is a cultural impossibility. To re-
mains polite but steadfast in the face of this appeal to obligation would not seem to
be an option in “the heroic ‘economy of honour’ [which] demands certain behaviou-
ral choices of its inhabitants”.24 Yet here Beowulf does not make the demanded
choice, nor does he lose his honour by his response—just as he does not lose his hon-
our when he escapes from the battle field where his freawine, his lord and friend,
Hygelac, dies.
However, there is a further twist because the exchange poses another question;
what are Hrothgar and Beowulf actually arguing over? What is the tension between
them? After all, Hrothgar wants Beowulf to kill the monster—which Beowulf is
going to do anyway; Beowulf wants Hrothgar to reward him—which Hrothgar is
going to do anyway (Beowulf, 384b–85). So far the two seem in complete accord.
The tension seems to surround who will control how the situation and the relation-
ship is defined. As we have seen, Beowulf is reluctant to claim any bond with
Hrothgar, emphasised by his increasing identification with Hygelac. He begins by
identifying himself as his father’s son but puts more and more emphasis on his role
at Hygelac’s kinsman as he advances closer to Heorot and the interview with
Hrothgar. This suggests that he does not want the situation to be understood as the
repayment of an honour debt. Rather, he wants to stress that his decision to fight
Grendel is his own, taken with the advice of his own people. Perhaps this is be-
cause, if he were to accept the situation under those terms, Hrothgar could de-
mand much more of him, including things outside his interest. Beowulf’s anxiety
on this point in is well-founded; Hrothgar later obliges Beowulf to kill Grendel’s
mother by saying that her attack is vengeance for the feud in which Beowulf killed
her son (Beowulf, 133b–35a). Hrothgar, on the other hand, wants the situation to
be understood as an honour debt. For him, Grendel’s continued attacks are an im-
plicit criticism of his kingship. Beowulf first refers to him as leodgebyrgean
(Beowulf, 269a), “security of the people” and yet he is not able to protect them
from Grendel. Nor does he fight Grendel himself—perhaps because his death
would destabilise the already-precarious Danish court. His actions are, in fact,
those of a wise and good king—both qualities attributed to him in the poem—but
perhaps not an honourable warrior.
24 Day, “Hwanan sio foehð aras,” 77.

264 Erin Sebo
The very fact that Hrothgar attempts to leverage the situation by making an ap-
peal to Beowulf’s honour and that he is concerned for the way people will perceive
his honour suggests that conceptions of honour obligation do have power. Beowulf,
himself, confirms this when he predicts to Hygelac (Beowulf, 2041–64a) that the
Heathobard-Danish truce will collapse because eventually one of the older warriors
will goad one of the younger with the dishonour that he would keep a truce with
men who killed his father and now carry his father’s sword. Beowulf’s tone is re-
signed but critical, and he laments the situation of Freawaru, the peaceweaver, who
will not—and we know, does not—prevent the reigniting of the feud. He says such
feuds are oft seldan hwaer (Beowulf, 2029b), “very seldom anywhere” ended, even
þeah seo bryd duge (Beowulf, 2031b), “though the bride is honourable”. If anything, it
seems that being the son of a man who began the faehðe maeste (Beowulf, 459b),
“greatest feud” has taught Beowulf the dangers being drawn into destructive concep-
tions of honour, which deprive him of the opportunity to act constructively. He is un-
questionably a hero of immense courage. Yet, though he is eager to fight monsters,
he is marked by his reluctance to involve himself in human conflicts. Perhaps this is
because monsters do not usually have kin to take up their grievances. Had Beowulf
known of the existence of Grendel’s mother he might not have been so eager to ac-
cept the fight and it is perhaps significant that when Beowulf is on the point of killing
Grendel the poet says that he did not consider sparing Grendel because he does not
his lifdagas leoda aenigum/ nytte tealde (Beowulf, 793b–94a), “consider his life of use
to any people”, which implies that there is no one to take vengeance for the loss of
his life-days, or no one who would care enough to.
Honour clearly carries a certain cultural weight for the audience of Beowulf but
it is not the non-negotiable ‘economy of honour’ described by Tacitus. As we have
seen, Hrothgar attempts to use a conception of honour closer to something like
what Tacitus imagines to compel Beowulf to behave in specific ways but, crucially,
is unsuccessful. Moreover, the events of Beowulf make clear how dangerous such a
code of honour is; most of the þeoda are threatened or destroyed by men who either
subscribe to this code or who see its value furthering their own military or political
ambitions.25 Beowulf, himself, is implicitly critical of the way in which such a con-
ception of honour threatens the peace and predetermines behaviour rather than al-
lowing for the most pragmatic and constructive response to specific situations.
Indeed, even minor characters are prepared to interrogate notions of honour; the
Danes, for example, recognise that Hrothgar wæs god cyning (Beowulf, 864b),
“was a good king” even though he uses a foreign hero to kill his monster. So,
25 See J. Hudson, “Feud, Vengeance and Violence in England from the Tenth to the Twelfth
Centuries,” in Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honour of Stephen
D. White, edited by B. Tuten and T. Billado (Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2010), 29–54, and Halsall,
“Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West,” 1–4.
though something more like a Tacitean sense of honour may once have been
dominant, by the time of Beowulf it is clearly being challenged.
Perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of the influence of Tacitus is that it has en-
couraged the notion that it is possible to speak about “Germanic values”26 or the
“Germanic heroic ideal”,27 as though these cultures were more or less uniform. It has
encouraged a stereotyping which has its roots in nineteenth-century nationalism and
which has obscured aspects of these cultures which do not conform to our ideas of
the ‘Germanic’. In fact, it is clear that, although there are cultural similarities, these
ideas were expressed and realised differently in different groups, just as in all related
cultures. It is worth returning to Magennis’s comment that Tacitus is a useful source
but only “when carefully sifted”.28 Only then is it capable of throwing “some light on
values that the colonizers of Britain would have embraced.”29 Under these circum-
stances, it becomes a useful measure against which the nuances of early English cul-
tural attitudes can be contrasted.
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Fulk, Robert D., Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, eds. Klæber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg.
Toronto: Toronto Univ. Press, 2008.
Gwara, Scott. Heroic Identity in the World of Beowulf. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Halsall, Guy, “Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West: An Introductory Survey.”
In Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, edited by Guy Halsall, 1–45. Boydell Press,
1998.
Harland, James M. “Memories of Migration? The ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Burial Costume of the
5th Century AD.” Antiquity 93, no. 370 (2019): 954–69.
Hudson, John. “Feud, Vengeance and Violence in England from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries.”
In Feud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honour of Stephen D. White,
edited by B. Tuten and T. Billado, 29–54. Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2010.
Irving, Edward B. “The Heroic Style in the Battle of Maldon.” Studies in Philology 58,
no. 3 (1961): 457–67.

27 Irving, “Heroic Style,” 458.
29 Ibid.
266 Erin Sebo
Jurasinski, Stefan. Ancient Privileges: “Beowulf,” Law, and the Making of Germanic Antiquity.
Morgantown: West Virginia Univ. Press, 2006.
Krapp, George P. and Elliot Van Kirk Dobbie, eds. The Exeter Book. The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records
3. New York: Columbia Univ. Press: 1936.
Magennis, Hugh, Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 2011.
O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. “Heroic Values and Christian Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to
Old English Literature, edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge. Cambridge:
Rives, James B., trans. Tacitus: Germania. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999.
Sebo, Erin. “Ne Sorga: Grief and Revenge in Beowulf.” In Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart
in Old English Language, Literature and Culture, edited by A. Jorgensen et al.,
177–92. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.
Stanley, Eric G. “The Gnomes of Cotton MS Tiberius B.i.” Notes and Queries 62, no. 2 (2015):
190–99.
Whitelock, Dorothy. Beginnings of English Society. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
Index
Æthelraed the Unready 254 Cato 229
Chadwick, H. Munro 22
Adam of Bremen 57 Charlemagne 104
Aeneas 44 Charles III of Spain 130
Agathias 51, 56 Charlottesville, Virginia 8
Alfonso X of Castille 130 Chichester, Sussex 194
Ammianus Marcellinus 46, 50, 56, 154–155 Childe, V. Gordon 22
Aneirin 205 Chilperic (the Burgundian) 157
Annius of Viterbo 73 Cicero 153
Anthemius 152 Cleatham, Lincolnshire 175–176, 180
Arcadius 56 Clüver, Philipp 76, 82
Arminius 59 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 133
Arnulf of Carinthia 102 Collingwood, R.G. 29
Asciburgium 238 Conrad Celtis 81
Athanaric 136 Constantine "III" 51
Attila 54, 102 Constantine 49, 51
Augustus Caesar 37 Coumert, Magali 23
Aurelian 49 Crassus 38
Ausonius 21 Cromer, Martin 80
Austeravia 238
Aventinus, Johannes 78, 82 Dahn, Felix 21, 23, 140
de Thou, Jean-Auguste 132
Balibar, Étienne 117 Deira 194, 197
Barth, Fredrik 115 Deleuze, Gilles 171
Basil of Aix-en-Provence 155 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix 171
Bauschatz, Paul 95 Denmark 225, 261
Bebel, Heinrich 67, 77, 79 Derrida, Jacques 13, 171
Beck, Heinrich 94 Desmarest, François 133
Bede 13, 168, 191 Dexippus 28
Beowulf 251, 259, 262–263 Diocletian 40, 49
Beowulf poet, the 11, 259 Diodorus Siculus 35, 42
Berengar, Ramon 133 Domitian 39
Berig 75, 104 Domnicius 159
Bernicia 194 Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire 198
Bialetti, Renato 183 Dukas 53
Boiohaemum 238 Dumézil, Bruno 146
Boniface 57
Bourdieu, Pierre 24 East Yorkshire 197
Brecca 251 Effros, Bonnie 2
Bruni, Leonardo 68 Egica 130
Bury, J.B. 22 Elsham, Lincolnshire 175, 180
Ermanaric 102
Cassiodorus 28, 48, 56 Ermold the Black 105
Cassius Dio 44 Ervig 130, 132
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110701623-015
268 Index
Euric 151, 156, 158 Herrmann, Joachim 219

Exmouth, Devon 195 Holy Roman Empire 13, 76
Homer 145, 228
Fehr, Hubert 25 Hoops, Johannes 4
Fernando III of Castille 130, 132 Horcott, Oxfordshire 198
Foucault, Michel 12–13, 90, 100, 107 Horsa 191
Franck, Sebastian 70 Hrabanus Maurus 105
Frank, Roberta 12, 101 Hrothgar 251, 260–264
Freawaru 264 Hygd 259
Freeman, E.A. 22, 189 Hygelac 259, 263
Freiburg School 1
Fulco of Reims 102 Innes, Matthew 102
Fustel de Coulange, Numa-Denis 2 Ioannes Zonaras 53
Irenicus, Franciscus 71, 75
Geertz, Clifford 114 Isidore of Seville 55, 130, 133, 135, 230
George III of Great Britain 134
George IV of Great Britain 134 James I of England 136
Georgisch, Petrus 139–140 Jażdżewski, Konrad 216
Gerrard, James 169 Jerome 51
Gibbon, Edward 20 Johannis of Aquitaine 155
Gildas 13, 190, 205 John, Lord Lumley 136
Goffart, Walter 6, 91, 128 Jordanes 28, 40, 48, 56, 75, 78, 212
Gordian 49 Jovinus 50
Gratian 50 Julius Caesar 10, 31, 36–39, 43, 81,
Gregory II, Pope 58 212, 234
Gregory of Tours 51, 232 Jutland 174
Grendel 261–263
Grimm Brothers, the 32, 40 Kaiser Wilhelm II 67
Grotius, Hugo 78 Kent 194
Guizot, François 137 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 83
Gundahari 247 Koločin Culture, the 213
Kossinna, Gustaf 4, 22, 216
Hakenbeck, Susanne 9 Kostrzewski, Józef 216
Halsall, Guy 7, 25, 179 Krantz, Albert 80
Hargrave, Francis 139 Kulikowski, Michael 147
Harrington, James 137
Hartlepool, Cleveland 195 La Peyrère, Isaac 71
Heather, Peter 25 Lazius, Wolfgang 20, 76
Heineccii, Johannes Gottlieb 139–140 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 97
Helmold of Bosau 57 Lincoln, Lincolnshire 199, 202
Hengest 191 Lindenbrog, Friedrich 13, 127, 131, 138
Henry IV of Navarre 138 Lindsey 194, 199
Heorot 263 Lobkowitz. Johannes 135
Herakles 229 Louis the German 57–58
Herder, Johann Gottfried 83 Louis the Pious 57, 105
Herodotus 34, 36, 42, 47, 56, 146, 228 Lucy, Sam 168, 191
Index 269
Macpherson, James 82 Rummel, Philipp von 1, 25, 129, 154

Majorian 152 Russom, Geoffrey 241
Marcus Aurelius 45
Marcus Terentius Varro 227 Said, Edward 148
Martin, Toby 170 Sântana de Mureș-Černjachov Culture, the
Maximillian II (Holy Roman Empire) 138 221, 213
Michael Attaleiates 53 Scaliger, Joseph Justus 74
Modaharius 155 Scandinavia 174, 198, 234
Murdoch, Brian 93–94 Scandza 75, 104
Schleswig-Holstein 174
Naqsh-e Rustam 49 Schmidt, Ludwig 23
Nivèlle, Sèbastien 127, 131 Schott, André 127, 131, 134–135
Scremby, Lincolnshire 3
Oakington, Cambridgeshire 203 Seeck, Otto 21
Odin 15 Seronatus 158, 160
Orosius 39–40, 50, 56 Shapur I 49
Ossian 82 Sidonius Apollinaris 12, 145, 149
Ostrogotha 28 Sievers, Eduard 241
Otto of Freising 57 Sigismer 154
Smaragdus of St Mihiel 104
Pascual, Rafael 242 Speidel, Michael 94
Paul the Deacon 40, 54, 56, 75 Spong Hill, Norfolk 173, 176, 193
Pausanias 234 Strabo 35, 37, 39, 43, 228
Pen’kovka Culture, the 213, 221 Sutton Hoo 14, 252
Perry, Gareth 175 Symmachus 21
Peutinger, Konrad 40, 75 Synesius of Cyrene 56
Phillip III of Spain 137
Piganiol, André 23 Tacitus 1, 11, 19–20, 31, 39–41, 60, 68, 70, 77,
Pithou, Pierre 13, 127, 131 90–91, 102, 155, 232, 234–237, 251–252,
Pithou, Pierre jr. 133 254, 265
Pliny the Elder 77, 228–229, 232, 234, Taliesin 205
236–238 Thaumastus 158
Pohl, Walter 6, 24, 102, 219 the Danube 220
Posidonius of Apameia 31, 34–37 the Netherlands 174
Prague-Korčak Culture, the 212–213 the Rhine 212, 220
Priarius 50 Theoderic II 156, 159
Procopius 47–48, 51, 135 Theodoric the Great 28, 56
Przeworsk Culture, the 212–213 Thierry, Augustin 140
Pseudo-Berosus 67, 73 Thule 23
Ptolemy 39–40, 54 Tolkien, J.R.R. 98
Tours glossator of 106
Read, Malcolm 93 Trump, Donald 8, 25
Recceswinth 129, 133 Tuiscon 74
Renatus Profuturus Frigeridus 51
Ricimer 152 Ulfila 104
Rudolf II (Holy Roman Empire) 138 Unferth 251
Rudolf of Fulda 102–103, 106
270 Index
Varus 59 Wentworth, Thomas 134

Vegetius 231 West Heslerton, North Yorkshire 203
Velleius Paterculus 154 Wickham, Chris 128
Vienna School 6, 24, 170 Wielbark Culture, the 211, 213
Virgil 102, 106 Williams, Howard 180
– Tours glossator of 118 Wolfram, Herwig 6, 8, 24
Wood, Ian N. 48
Walahfrid Strabo 104 Wulfgar 262–263
Walter of Aquitaine 102
Wamba 130 Zeumer, Karl 140
Ward-Perkins, Bryan 207 Zosimus 51
Wenskus, Reinhard 24, 121, 128 Zschackwitz, Johann Ehrenfried 79

Interrogating The Germanic'

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Interrogating the ‘Germanic’

A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946663

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

James M. Harland and Matthias Friedrich

Otávio Luiz Vieira Pinto

Veronika Egetenmeyr is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Historisches Institut at the

Matthias Friedrich is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Prehistoric and

label, which accurately describes phenomena including identities, social, cultural or

‘Germanic ancestry’ of the descendants of so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ migrants as a

16 Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der Fruhmittelalterlichen

25 “Vanguard America”, Anti-Defamation League. Available at: https://www.adl.org/resources/

32 Michael Kulikowski, this volume.

chronological alteration. The need for careful contextualisation is also outlined by

Acknowledgements: The conference was supported by several funding bodies in

Halsall, Guy. “Transformations of Romanness: The Northern Gallic Case.” In Transformations of

be a neutral or disinterested scholarly act to discuss our period in terms of “unassimi-

conclusions that will surprise the western medievalist or ancient historian. We

Uncovering the Germanic Past. Merovingian Archaeology in France 1830–1914 (Oxford:

5 Walter Pohl, Die Germanen, Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 57 (Munich: Oldenbourg,

Caesar’s Invention: Germani as a Third Group

Gaius Julius Caesar: An Author with Specific Interests Introduces

Publius Cornelius Tacitus: An Author with Specific Interests Uses

Diocletian’s imperial reorganisation changed the name of these provinces to

A Different View: Diodorus, Strabo and Cassius Dio

East and West After the Third Century: Gothic

All Quiet on the Eastern Front: No Germani, but Gothic Peoples

All Quiet on the Western Front: Franci and Alamanni Replace

Germanoi in Byzantine Sources

69 R. Bruce Hitchner, s.v. “Germanoi,” ODB (1991), 2:845–46.

Scandinavia as a Scythian Land of Origin

81 Charles R. Whittaker, “Barbarian, Barbarian Settlements,” in Late Antiquity. A Guide to the

The Early Medieval Afterlife of Germani and Germania

In eighth-century sources, Germanicae gentes and Germania appear yet again. It is

85 Origo Gentis Langobardorum 1; similarily in Paul. Diac. Hist. Lang. 1,1.

Acknowledgements: It was possible to write this text during a fellowship,

AHR The American Historical Review

Messmer, Hans. Hispania-Idee und Gotenmythos: Zu den Voraussetzungen des traditionellen

Principat 4. Politische Geschichte. Provinzen und Randvölker: Gallien [Forts.], Germanien,

Given this genealogical paradigm, Tacitus’s Germania proved to be a godsend for

Tracing the Germanic: Berosus, Jordanes

genealogical narrative largely independent of Tacitus.19 For simplicity’s sake, I will

19 Hutter, Stammväter, 47–49; Bieder, Geschichte, 36–38.

Classifying the Germanic: The Implications

37 Hirschi, Wettkampf, 332–33; Tiedemann, “Tacitus,” 39.

Delineating the Germanic: The Germans

40 Iord. Get. XVII, 95.

discussed. It is evident that Bebel had a broadly encompassing view of the

nation, an idea matching German scholars’ insistence on a Germanic heritage. This

49 Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Frühneuzeitliche Nationen im östlichen Europa: Das polnische Geschichtsdenken

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra European

Foucault’s genealogical method first deployed in Discipline and Punish.3 In a nutshell,

Not that this is a singularly German problem—different flavours of Germanentum

times through the bas-reliefs on Trajan’s Column to thirteenth-century Scandinavian

22 Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors, 61.

24 Cf. Harland, “A Habitus Barbarus in Sub-Roman Britain?,” this volume.

Interestingly, while Gerrard convincingly detaches ‘Germanic’ from any essentialist

26 James Gerrard, The Ruin of Roman Britain: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge:

signifier represented ‘an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of

33 Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 131–32.

mythological accounts, political structures; everything is open to ‘ethnicness’, that is,

Perceptions of Ethnicity: The Many Ways