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.
