The advantage of Wolfram’s ethnogenesis
model was that again, it allowed people to see peoples as ad hoc accumulations
of individuals. Membership was about signing up to a set of ideas, rather than
biological descent or anything like that.
This is a model that has been
very seriously criticised and indeed has been one of the most bitter debates in
late antique history, fought out essentially between what has been called the
Vienna school, of Wolfram, his principal student and successor, Walter Pohl, and Pohl’s own students, and on the other hand
a ‘Toronto school’ led by another Walter, Walter Goffart and Goffart’s
students, chiefly Alexander Callander Murray. Much of the heat was produced
by the Toronto school’s careless - and in my view entirely needless - accusation
that Wolfram and Pohl were continuing in their works a line of Nazi ideology
but had simply wrapped it up in a new set of vocabulary. Goffart is a Jew who
was forced to flee Europe as a very small child because of the Nazis; Wolfram,
Pohl and the others, as Austrians, obviously feel the weight of their country’s
Nazi past (and neo-Nazi present) very keenly so this was hardly going to end
well. On the face of it, Callander Murray had a point when he showed that
Wenskus’ model of links of people to a leader had links to the ways some Nazi
historians thought about the links between a Gefolgschaft
(a following or retinue) and a leader or Führer. He wasn’t wrong. The
problem is that the Nazis had absolutely no cogent or coherent body of
historical ideas; different Nazi thinkers thought all sorts of things – many
entirely incompatible with each other – about the ‘Germanic’ past. So turning a
kind of intellectual line of descent for a strand of thought into a
surreptitious continuation of an ideology was essentially defamatory. It’s possible
that it would be difficult to find any post-war German thinking about
the Germanic past that didn’t have some link to some idea
accepted by some particular Nazi or other. This was unnecessarily,
offensively polemical.
The biggest problem was the evidence.
The ‘Germanic’ ethnogenesis model relied for its evidence upon stories written
down in the early middle ages, after the ends of the migrations, usually in the
post-imperial western kingdoms, in Latin, often by people who weren’t members
of the ‘Germanic’ people in question but people of provincial Roman descent.
The Getica, the earliest of the Histories of the Goths, was actually
written in Latin, in Constantinople, by someone called Jordanes who claims to
have been a Goth, but the sources he mentions were a lost history of the Goths
written by the Italian Cassiodorus, whom we’ve met before and another Gothic
history by someone called Ablabius who was possibly a Gallo-Roman. The History
of the Lombards was written by Paul the Deacon, who was a Lombard
but who was writing in the late eighth century, in Latin. Another Gothic
History was written by the Hispano-Roman Isidore of Seville; there are no
extant histories of the Franks before the seventh century, by which time they
have acquired all sorts of mythical additions; Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
of the English People was written in the early eighth century, in Latin.
None of this stuff, in other words, comes from early Germanic-speaking peoples
in an unmediated form. Even sources like Jordanes – if he was using authentic
Gothic tradition – admits that there were other Gothic traditions that told
quite different stories. Indeed, the Gothic History told by Isidore in
seventh-century Spain is nothing like the history told by Jordanes in Constantinople
two generations previously
Now, we simply don’t know what
the sources were that these writers used, or how historically reliable they
were, or how genuine they were as bits of Gothic or Lombard or Saxon legend. We
don’t know what the writers did to these sources when they incorporated them
into their Histories. Indeed, we can’t even be sure, most of the time,
that they hadn’t made the whole thing up out of their own heads. Goffart has
effectively argued that. I don’t think we need to go that far all the time but
the bottom line is that usually – overwhelmingly usually – there’s no way of
proving that they didn’t.
Another problem is the
interrelationship of the sources. There are numerous similarities between Paul
the Deacon’s History of the Lombards and Jordanes’ Getica. Is
that because the Lombards and the Goths shared a similar ‘Germanic’ origin
legend’ or because Paul had copied Jordanes (or Cassiodorus)? It’s difficult,
too, to avoid the idea that these writers were in a way competing to give their
people a history that was just as good as – or indeed better than – the others,
whether Romans, Goths, Lombards or whatever. The Gothic history started in
Scandinavia and by the ninth century it seems to have become de rigueur to have
your people’s history start there.
These stories, furthermore, don’t
just include elements that look like possible elements of ‘Germanic’ origin
legends; they are sometimes filled with other material. Jordanes’ Getica
includes things from classical myth and legend. The Goths turn up at the siege
of Troy for instance, and intermarry with the Amazons, and so on. He weaves the
Goths into stories from earlier Roman history. Indeed, pretty much wherever we
can compare Jordanes’ account with more contemporary evidence, he’s wrong. On
this basis it becomes difficult to know on what basis one can sift out the
other, uncorroborated stuff as fragments of authentic Gothic history. There are
two points that also come out of that. One is that both Jordanes’ and Paul the
Deacon’s histories of their people were not stand-alone works; both also wrote
a Historia Romana, a history of the Romans against which it was supposed
to be set. In that sense we might have something comparable to Eusebius of Caesarea’s interest in weaving Christian
history into the history and mythology of Rome and Greece. Finally, these
origin legends of histories of people are not something that only include the
Germanic-speaking barbarians. There was a fad in late antiquity for what one
might call ethnic histories. Works existed in which the different peoples of
Italy were traced back to mythological ancestors often via tortuous migrations
(often from Troy).
Indeed, the Romans themselves had
an origin myth that conforms to many of Wolfram’s elements of a Germanic origin
myth. There are alliterative twin brothers, Romulus and
Remus; there’s a hero, Aeneas, who crosses a sea from his homeland, kills a
mighty enemy and takes his lands and so on. It’s very easy to see the writers
of these sources composing works that simply gave their people a pedigree, a
place, and an acceptable history in the antique Mediterranean world.
Another, major problem is that no
source contains all of the elements of Wolfram’s ideal ethnic history.
Wolfram’s reconstruction is way too schematic. He takes some elements from one
source, adds others from another and yet others from a third. Things are
interpretated according to the place where they ought to be or the role they
ought to be playing in his schematic Germanic history. And sometimes he even corrects
the sources – like Bede – for allegedly getting their legends wrong! According
to Wolfram, Hengest and Horsa should come at the
start, as Vanir brothers, not the Aesir god Woden! Silly old Bede.
This probably sounds very silly,
but the reason Wolfram did this was because of his philological approach to the
early medieval source material. It was for a long time believed that you could
talk of ‘Germanic’ peoples as a sort of unity, sharing a unified ethos. Thus
what one had in one Germanic origin myth could be put into a melting pot with
all the others. This would allow you to fill in the gaps in some sources from
parts of others and so on, as mentioned above. The same approach was taken to
the law-codes of the post-imperial West, which were also regarded as Germanic.
So you stirred all the laws in together and on that basis reconstructed the
pure, original proto-Germanic custom that they all descended from. Here you
ended up with the original, pure proto-Germanic origin legend. Ultimately, this
had all originated in the politics of nineteenth-century Germany. In the course
of the Napoleonic Wars a belief in a shared German nation had become very
popular. Historical projects set out to underpin this. One, founded in Hanover
and still going, but now in Munich, was the Monumenta
Germaniae Historica: the Historic Monuments of Germany. Because the
Middle Ages had been created when the ‘Germanic’ peoples conquered the Roman
Empire, the Middle Ages were a German creation and its entire literary output
could be claimed as Germanic!
In spite of originating so
clearly in a particular historical moment with a specific national political
agenda, the influence of this way of thinking is still frequently to be found in
writing about the barbarian migrations and the early middle ages. But if we can
see past it, and people have been unpicking this for a generation now, we can
get a much more interesting insight into the ways in which people wrote
histories and origin legends to try to give their people a place in the world of
Rome and its successors.