Wolfram based his work in turn on
that of a German historian called Reinhard Wenskus who
published a hugely important, often cited but rarely actually read, book called
Stammesbildung und Verfassung. One reason that it isn’t translated, apart
from it being long and technical, is that many of the terms translate with
difficulty into English, and that includes all three concepts in the title:
Stamm, Bildung and Verfassung!. Stammesbildung means, roughly, the formation of
tribes, though ‘Bildung’ means more than simply putting something together as,
like ‘formation’ in French, it can also mean education, and Stamm has a
different valence from ‘tribe’ in English – it doesn’t necessarily carry the
same sense of something pre-modern, or a simpler social formation. Verfassung
is trickier. It means something like constitution but like the word
constitution in English, it can also mean the state of your health, and thence
it can mean the state itself. Anyway, Wenskus’ book was in some ways a sort of
typology of the ways in which Stamme, which I’ll translate as peoples, were
formed. One of the important aspects of Wenskus was that he eschewed the notion
that there was anything inherent or natural about peoples.
In earlier work in German in the
19th and 20th century there had been a great deal of work
on the Volk, the people. The Volk had picked up unpleasant connotations because
of its use by the Nazis. Ein Volk; Ein Reich; Ein Führer: One people; one
empire; one leader. So there was a strand that saw peoples as very much
biological, genetic entities, in a way that could lend itself to the sort of
hierarchy of peoples of which the Nazis were fond. Not, it must be said, that
the Nazis had a monopoly on this type of thinking. This was fundamental to the
idea of the nation state – that they were coterminous with a people, with a
history and racial unifying features, national characteristics and so on,
defined – like Romanness – in opposition to set of idealised others: a
constitutive outside, in technical language – meaning that a category is
defined by all the things that are outside it as well as (and often more than)
by all of the things it contains.
Wenskus instead took the line
that peoples were formed by people crystallising in some way or other around a
particular type of leader and/or a particular type of set of core beliefs about
what they were as a people (here we come back to some of the things I said
about identity in the last lecture). In German this could be referred to as the
Traditionskern – the kernel of tradition
(kernel as in core, rather than colonel). This was the body of stories, myths
and so on, customs, laws perhaps, religious beliefs that gave a unity to a
people. These things are very important even today. Consider the current furore
about the National Trust presenting the history of Britain in ways that
challenge the national historical myth; or the ways in which inhabitants of the
southern USA object so violently to any questioning of the mythology of the
Confederacy built up in the early 20th century; why people in loads
of countries across the world really object to history that shakes up the
national myth. People take it personally because they see it as an attack on
their very identity. For me that is the big challenge of history: how to make
people realise that history doesn’t and can’t work like that. Anyway, the key
thing was the peoples were active, social and political creations, and not
biological/genetic realities.
The popularisation of this idea
more widely in the world of medieval studies, however, came with the Austrian
historian Herwig Wolfram who worked mainly on the
Goths and whose works were translated, into English and French and other
languages. Wolfram employed the term ethnogenesis, which hadn’t appeared in
Wenskus’ work. Wolfram took it from the work of a Soviet ethnologist called Julian Bromlej. Wolfram developed the idea of
ethnogenesis in a particular way, based around Germanic philology (that is the
study of the development of languages, words and their meanings, the original
forms and meanings of words and texts, and so on). Now, we’ll come back to the
problems inherent in this but for now it’s important to set out what what we
might call the ‘strong thesis’ of ethnogenesis was.
It was an almost rule-like theory
about 'Germanic' legends about the formation of a people, which were then
'borne' as the 'kernel of tradition' by the aristocratic core of a new people,
which would then attract new recruits along the way. This, was where he
developed Wenskus’ work
In this reconstruction, the
Germanic origin legend went like this. Once upon a time, the people in question
left their ancient homeland. To do this they had to cross some sort of physical
frontier, usually a river or a sea. They did this under the leadership of
brothers, often twins, referred to by Wolfram using (ironically) the term from
classical Greek legend dioscuri. Once they arrived
on the other bank or shore, the people fought what one might think of as their
defining enemy, from whom they took the land. Various other changes were held
to take place at this point in the story. For one thing, the people underwent a
religious change. Wolfram said that this stage marked the shift from
worshipping the Vanir gods, with their twin founders
related to a goddess, to worshipping the newer Aesir gods, with Woden as their
chief deity. Wolfram also thought there were changes in the political
constitution of Germanic peoples. The old Germanic languages had several words
for king. In old English the word is cyning, which is related to kin,
and suggests a role within a greater kindred, perhaps. The words Wolfram was
more interested in, however, were the Gothic Thiudans and Reiks. Thiudans,
a bit like cyning, is a term that links the ruler to the people; it is
cognate with modern Deutsch, which derives from a word meaning ‘the people’. Reiks
on the other hand is a word with a wider Indo-European meaning – cognate with
Latin rex, Irish rí, Sanskrit raja and so on – and has a
clearer monarchical sense. Wolfram wanted to link these terms to a passage in
Tacitus, which I have mentioned before. In the Germania Tacitus says
that the Germani ‘reges ex nobilitate, duces
ex virtute sumunt (‘the Germani choose their kings according to
their nobility and their war-leaders according to their prowess’) to argue
that there were two types of king: a ‘sacral’ king who belonged to a royal
family and who had long-lasting powers but largely religious functions, and a
war-leader-king chosen only at times of crisis but who had more wide-ranging
but short-lived authority.
I am going to criticise this
pretty seriously, but it’s important for me to say first that Wolfram is a
tremendous scholar and actually a very flexible thinker. He has changed his
mind about various aspects of his theory and responds generously to other
people’s work. But I will leave that critique for the next [blog-post].
