The Germanic Peoples

German (n.)

"a native of Germany," 1520s, from Latin Germanus (adjective and noun, plural Germani), first attested in writings of Julius Caesar, who used Germani to designate a group of tribes in northeastern Gaul, of unknown origin and considered to be neither Latin nor Germanic. Perhaps originally the name of an individual tribe, but Gaulish (Celtic) origins have been proposed, from words perhaps originally meaning "noisy" (compare Old Irish garim "to shout") or "neighbor" (compare Old Irish gair "neighbor"). Middle English had Germayns (plural, late 14c.), but only in the sense "ancient Teuton, member of the Germanic tribes." The earlier English word was Almain (early 14c., via French; see Alemanni) or Dutch. Shakespeare and Marlowe have Almain for "German; a German."

Þe empere passede from þe Grees to þe Frenschemen and to þe Germans, þat beeþ Almayns. [Ranulph Higden’s "Polychronicon," mid-14c., John Trevisa's translation,  1380s]

Their name for themselves, die Deutschen (see Dutch), dates from 12c. Roman writers also used Teutoni as a German tribal name, and writers in Latin after about 875 commonly refer to the German language as teutonicus (see Teutonic). Meaning "the German language" in English is from 1748. High German (1823 in English) and Low German as a division of dialects is geographical: High German (from 16c. established as the literary language) was the German spoken in the upland regions in southern Germany, Low German (often including Dutch, Frisian, Flemish), also called Plattdeutsch was spoken in the regions near the North Sea. In the U.S. German also was used of descendants of settlers from Germany.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/german

Homework

Read the sections below.  Use the Table of Contents above to navigate if you wish.

As we move into historical periods, the amount of information we have goes up by a huge amount.  Which may be a feeble excuse as to why this chapter is so long.  But you've got two weeks to read it and I hope you'll enjoy it.  Try to at least skim Tacitus; it's very interesting to hear a description of a people after we've been struggling for weeks to understand them primarily through archeology.

Questions to Ponder:

1. What do you think the significance is of Thor's hammer?

2. What do you think of Völuspá?  As you read it, does it remind you of anything in modern culture?

3. What is the significance of the shaving razor in the Nordic Bronze Age burials?

4.  How do you guess how the people of the Nordic Bronze Age got so rich?

5. What strikes you about Tacitus' Germania?  What elements of proto-Indo-European culture or religion can you see?

6. Why do you think there is relatively less war today than during the Migration Period?

7. Why do you think German is only spoken in Germany today, as opposed to the rest of Western Europe?

8. What traces of Germanic culture do you see in America today?

9. Bonus trivia question: What do these three surnames have in common: Smith, Gonzales, Rodriguez?

If you hate reading on the web, you can CLICK HERE to open a 26 page pdf of this long web page which you can print out; however, you'll have to go back to this web page to click through to some of the attachments.

Germanic Religion and Myth

Germanic is an Indo-European language, so despite a 4000 year gap between the Yamnaya and Snorri Sturlson's compilations, we can see elements of Indo-European cosmology.   The stories start with an icy void.   Instead of Manu and his twin Yemo, we have the giant Ymir, who is an apparent hermaphrodite, who gives birth to the gods.  The cosmic cow is there to feed Ymir.  Three gods sacrifice Ymir and from his body the seas, mountains, trees, clouds and heavens are formed.  One of the three god, Odin (or Woden in English) is the ruler of the Gods.  The meaning of his name is "Leader of those possessed, frenzied, raging",  perhaps the leader of the männerbünde.  Odin is married to Frigg, an earth goddess associated with marriage, prophecy, clairvoyance and motherhood.  One of their children is Thor, the Norse version of the proto-Indo-European Thunder God.  With his famous hammer (why a hammer?) Thor is associated with lightning, thunder, storms, sacred groves and trees, strength, the protection of humankind, hallowing, and fertility.  Another god is Týr, a war god who lost his right hand binding the great wolf Fenrir.  Loki is another famous Norse god.  He is a trickster god, common to many cultures, in which he is clever, but unreliable, sometimes siding with the gods, sometimes working against them.  His name suggests he invented the fishing net and shared it with mankind.

In Norse mythology, there is a cosmic tree named Yggdrasil.  Its branches go up to support heaven, and it has three roots under which live mankind, the frost giants, and hel (English hell), which houses the afterlife for less fortunate people.  A variety of mythological beings live in Yggdrasil, including the proto-Indo-European dragon, Jörmungandr, that Thor does battle with, and the three Norn maidens, Urda (Past), Verdandi (Present), and Skuld (Future) who spin the threads of fate for man.  In one story, Odin goes on a quest for knowledge.  He suffers a spear wound, sacrifices one eye, and hangs upside down on Yggdrasil for nine days.  In return he obtained the knowledge of the runes which he shared with mankind.

Historical sources attest to worship of sacred trees and groves among Germanic peoples.  Religious ceremonies and sacrifices were held in sacred groves as opposed to temples.  Certain trees were thought to house particular gods or spirits and were sacred, perhaps as counterparts to the cosmic tree Yggdrasil.

Norse mythology is perhaps unique among Indo-European cultures in embracing an apocalyptic story of Ragnarök, in which the gods battle to the death, the earth is destroyed in fire and flood, and the world rises again, cleansed and fertile, to be repopulated by gods and men.

Weapons

More than 70% of burials dating to the Nordic Bronze Age contain metal objects of various kinds.  The weapons were of a new type for northern Europe: swords and spearheads, together with daggers, richly decorated with geometric symbols:

During the 15th and 14th centuries BCE, Scandinavia produced more elaborate bronzes  than any other region of Europe.  Many fine weapons were ceremonially deposited in lakes and streams, perhaps as a form of sacrifice, including this elaborate scimitar, with a picture of a Nordic ship:

Rock Art

The coast of Sweden and Norway has thousands of sites with rock carvings from the Nordic Bronze Age.  Most of these sites were along fjords or seacoasts, accessible only by water.  The engravings depict human figures, often with masks and horned helmets holding weapons, ships, chariots, solar symbols, and various animals.  The typical ship had a crew of six to thirteen, built with planks and rowed with oars.  Similar images can be found in rock art in Iberia and on stone carvings in the shaft graves of Mycennae.  Speculation about the purposes of the rock art include initiation rituals into secret warrior associations.

The End of the Nordic Bronze Age

The Nordic Bronze Age was impacted by the collapse of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean in the 12th century BCE, in which many empires and their advanced trade networks collapsed.  As Wikipedia relates, "The old long-range trading networks south–north between the Mediterranean cultures and Northern Europe had broken down at the end of the Nordic Bronze Age and caused a rapid and deep cultural change in Scandinavia. Bronze, which was an imported alloy, suddenly became very scarce; and iron, which was a local natural resource, slowly became more abundant, as the techniques for extracting, smelting and smithing it were acquired from their Central European Celtic neighbours. Iron was extracted from bog iron in peat bogs, and the first iron objects to be fabricated were needles and edged tools such as swords and sickles. The rise of iron use in Scandinavia was slow: bog ore was only abundant in southwestern Jutland and it was not until 200–100 BC that iron-working techniques were generally mastered and a productive smithing industry had evolved in the larger settlements. Iron products were also known in Scandinavia during the Bronze Age, but they were a scarce imported material. Similarly, imported bronze continued to be used during the Iron Age in Scandinavia, but it was now much scarcer and mostly used for decoration.[6]

The cultural change that ended the Nordic Bronze Age was influenced by the expansion of Hallstatt culture from the south and accompanied by a changing climate, which caused a dramatic change in the flora and fauna. In Scandinavia, this period is often called the "Findless Age", due to the lack of archaeological finds. While the archaeological record from Scandinavia is consistent with an initial decline in population, the southern part of the culture, the Jastorf culture, was in expansion southwards. It consequently appears that climate change played an important role in this southward expansion into continental Europe." It appears that there was an abrupt cooling cycle around 850 BCE which contributed to the Celtic people of the Hallstatt culture in Germany moving south and west, and Germanic tribes from Scandinavia taking their place, moving south and east, into the plains of northern Germany and Poland.  That is all we know, until the Germanic tribes appear in the historical record, described by Roman sources.

In the first century CE, Tacitus described over fifty small Germanic tribes, mostly living a subsistence economy.  By the fourth century CE, there were radical transformations.  Instead of letting most farmlands lie fallow to regenerate, the tribes learned to manure their fields and practice crop rotation and plowing, which led to an explosion in agricultural output.  This led to a population boom and also an increase in social stratification.  The Goths expanded eastward from Poland to take over the territories of modern day Hungary, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine from the Sarmatians, Iranian speaking pastoralists. 

In the fourth century CE, the Goths came under attack from the Huns.  The Huns were a steppe people related to the Xiongu, a nomadic steppe people who had battled the Han Chinese empire centuries before.  No one knows how or why Huns travelled across the steppes from China to the west, but when they attacked the Goths, they were a formidable force.  The Huns were mounted archers who had developed a type of recurve bow with great range that allowed them to scatter the opposing armies and then cut them down with cavalry charges.  The Huns conquered and absorbed many Goths from the eastern Pontic steppes, and many more fled west.

In 376 CE two groups of Goths, the Greuthungi and the Tervingi, showed up at the Danube and asked to be let in to the Roman empire.  The groups comprised somewhere from 60,000 to 200,000 people traveling in huge wagon trains pulled by oxen.  The Emperor Valens had deployed much of his army to oppose the Persians further east, and did not have sufficient troops to resist the Goths, so they let them settle in the Balkans.  The Roman border army abused the Goths by taking slaves in return for food, and then tried to kill their leaders, causing the Goths to revolt.  In 378, the Emperor Valens tried to put down the revolt with the Eastern Field army, but in the Battle of Adrianople, the Goths slaughtered the Romans, and killed the Emperor.  The Goths were then free to pillage the countryside of the Balkans.

The Roman empire was used to dealing with barbarians and over the next few decades they coopted the Goths by giving them lands and recruiting many of their warriors into the Roman army.  The Goths had learned that having peaceful lands to graze their animals was good, but it was even better to be employed by the Roman Empire as mercenaries where they not only got paid, but obtained plunder.  

The Huns, being accustomed to conquest, did not stop their westward movements for long.  Starting from 395 CE, they travelled over 1000 miles, from the Volga to the Hungarian plains, displacing fleeing Goths as they went.  Between 405 CE and 408 CE, several very large groups of Germanic tribes and Iranian speaking Alans, crossed into Roman territory, this time much farther west, crossing the Rhine around what is today Mainz, Germany.   Increased wealth and centuries of fighting had transformed the Germanic tribes from small squabbling tribes, to large armies, headed by a king, and comprising tens of thousands of fighting men with their families.  The Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and Burgundians were able to cross the Rhine unimpeded and move into the territory of Gaul, comprising modern day France, settled by Celtic people and conquered by Julius Caesar in the Gallic Wars, around 50 BCE.  By 405 CE the Gauls were fully incorporated into the Roman Empire, with Roman cities, and large land-owning estates owned by Roman citizens, paying taxes to Rome.  The Germanic tribes realized that if peacefully grazing cows or fighting for the Romans was good, plundering rich Roman estates was even better.  Orientus said, "All Gaul was filled with the smoke of a single funeral pyre."  Prosper of Aquitaine wrote about seeing the collapse of "the frame of the fragile world":  "He who once turned the soil with a hundred ploughs, now labours to have just a pair of oxen; the man who often rode through splendid cities in his carriages now is sick and travels to the deserted countryside wearily and on foot. The merchant who used to cleave the seas with ten lofty ships now embarks on a tiny skiff, and is his own helmsman. Neither country nor city is as it was; everything rushes headlong to its end."  Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (p. 208). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

After ransacking Roman Gaul, in 409 the Vandals, Alans and Suevi forced their way over the Pyrenees into Roman controlled Spain, where they found the best jobs of all, as rulers.  Hydatius tells us, "[they] apportioned to themselves by lot areas of the provinces for settlement: the [Hasding] Vandals took possession of Gallaecia, and the Sueves that part of Gallaecia which [is] situated on the very western edge of the Ocean. The Alans were allotted the provinces of Lusitania and Carthaginensis, and the Siling Vandals Baetica. The Spaniards in the cities and forts who had survived the disasters surrendered themselves to servitude under the barbarians, who held sway throughout the provinces."  Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (p. 208). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

Rome, beset with a huge loss of tax base, sent a message to the Romans in Britain to fend for themselves, and struggled amongst civil wars to re-control Gaul, which they did with the help of another German tribe, the Visigoths, which had sacked Rome in 410 CE, and had been resettled in southern Gaul.  The Romans and the Visigoths attacked the Vandals, Alans and Suevi in Spain and won back some land.  The Vandals then decided to take their confederation and move somewhere safer.  In 429 CE, they used fleets of ships to cross the straits of Gibraltar and they conquered North Africa, which was the most profitable province of the Empire, providing much of the food supply for Italy. 

Worse came to worst in 441 when Attila (Gothic meaning "little father") the Hun took over the Hunnic empire, which by then included Huns, Ostrogoths, Alans and Bulgars, among others.  After rampaging through the Balkans, he demanded and received from Constantinople an annual tribute of 250 pounds of gold.  The Romans attacked them and lost, and Attila raised the tribute to 4400 pounds of gold as punishment plus 1600 pounds annually.  In 451, Attila crossed the Rhine at Mainz and invaded Gaul, which by then was a Visigothic kingdom.  Using siege weapons he was able to capture and destroy all the fortified cities: Cologne, Amiens, Paris, Orleans, Metz and Trier.  In 452 he plundered Italy although he didn't reach Rome.  Mercifully Attila died in 453 and shortly thereafter his empire fell apart, reduced by internal warfare as well as attacks by the Empire.

The end of the Western Roman Empire finally came in 468 CE.  Rome and Constantinople raised huge amounts of tax money and built an armada of 1100 ships with 50,000 men to attack the Vandal/Alan alliance at Carthage, in North Africa.  They landed in the shelter of Cape Bon, in Tunisia.  Genseric, the leader of the Vandals offered to surrender and began negotiations.  However, the Vandals had become expert sailors and under the guise of negotiations, they prepared a counterattack.  The Vandals got lucky, the wind was blowing from the north-west.  As Peter Heather says, "The Vandals, having put out from Carthage, held the wind gauge so could choose exactly when and where to engage, while the Romans, with the wind in their faces, could move only slowly and at an angle. The sources give no sense of one side or the other possessing the better ships; the unchanging wind kept the Roman fleet pinned against the western side of Cape Bon. Grasping at the opportunity, the Vandals did in 468 exactly what the English would do eleven hundred and twenty years later, in 1588, when they found the Spanish Armada similarly placed. They launched fireships."  Heather, Peter. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History (p. 403). Pan Macmillan. Kindle Edition. 

The loss of the armada sealed the fate of the Western Roman Empire.  It took a few years, but eventually Rome was taken over by the Ostrogothic Kingdom.  By 476 CE, all of western Europe was controlled by Germanic kingdoms.

Bill Bryson in his delightful book The Mother Tongue, English, and how it got that way, notes that echoes of the different Germanic dialects may be still heard today: "In about A.D. 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, these two groups of people and two other related groups from the same corner of northern Europe, the Saxons and Jutes, began a long exodus to Britain. It was not so much an invasion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place over several generations. The tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each bringing its own variations in speech, some of which persist in Britain to this day—and may even have been carried onward to America centuries later. The broad a of New England, for instance, may arise from the fact that the first pilgrims were from the old Anglian strongholds of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, while the pronounced r of the mid-Atlantic states could be a lingering consequence of the Saxon domination of the Midlands and North. In any case, once in Britain, the tribes variously merged and subdivided until they had established seven small kingdoms and dominated most of the island, except for Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, which remained Celtic strongholds."  Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way (pp. 46-47). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Middle English 1170 to 1470 CE

Britain was invaded by a (formerly) Germanic tribe a third time in 1066 in the Norman conquest.  The Normans were Vikings who had raided and settled in Normandy, France, and solidified their conquest by pledging fealty to the King of France in 911.  The Normans quickly gave up their Norse language (and diet) in favor of that of the French, but continued their mercenary ways, raiding Italy, Sicily, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

William the Conqueror defeated the Anglo-Saxons in 1066 and quickly changed the government, replacing the landed gentry with 8000 of his French countrymen.  The language of the government was Norman French and its use in the government, courts and among the landed gentry quickly added many French words to the English language.  Although the Normans ruled England for less than a century, from 1066-1154, the English spoken by the majority of people underwent a dramatic change from Old English to Middle English.  The standardization of Old English devolved into a free for all, with spelling varying widely, and only becoming re-standardized after the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century.  The Viking influence had simplified Old English grammar, but in Middle English, noun, adjective, and verb inflections were further simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions.  The result brought English much closer to a level of modern intelligibility, as you can see by reading the most famous literary work of the period, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Part of the problem of English today is that spelling of words doesn't match their pronunciation.  This came about due to a few factors.  One is due to regional differences in pronunciation.  As Bill Bryson describes, "When at last French died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That is why we use the western England spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation “bizzy” and the second the Kentish pronunciation “berry.” Similarly, if you’ve ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be pronounced “wun” and once could be “wunce,” the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled—i.e., “oon” and “oons.”  Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue (p. 124). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Another reason is that spelling became standardized with the printing press, but pronunciation then changed with the mysterious Great Vowel Shift.  Dramatic changes in pronunciation do happen in languages from time to time; recall the satem/centum split.   As Bryson says, "Unluckily for us, English spellings were becoming fixed just at the time when the language was undergoing one of those great phonetic seizures that periodically unsettle any tongue. The result is that we have today in English a body of spellings that, for the most part, faithfully reflect the pronunciations of people living 400 years ago. In Chaucer’s day, the k was still pronounced in words like knee and know. Knight would have sounded (more or less) like “kuh-nee-guh-tuh,” with every letter enunciated. The g was pronounced in gnaw and gnat, as was the l in words like folk, would, and alms. In short, the silent letters of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation."  Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue (pp. 127-128). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Early Modern English 1470 to 1700 CE

During the Early Modern English period, many printed publications emerged which helped to standardize the language and grow its vocabulary.  The vocabulary and phrasing of the King James Bible and works of Shakespeare had a large and lasting impact on the language.  These works are intelligible to modern readers despite certain peculiarities: there were two forms of the letter <s>; <i> and <j> were different forms of the same letter, as were ,<u> and <v>.

Modern English 1700 to today

By the 1600's Britain had begun a major colonial expansion which brought English to much of the world.  The public/private partnerships of the London Company, the Plymouth Company and the East India Company secured investments for expansion.  Trade in spices, tobacco, tea, sugar, opium and slaves generated enormous profits.   The profits were recycled into a massive Army and Navy which controlled the seas and her colonies.  Like the Roman Empire, it was a virtuous cycle of growth and investment which lifted the fortunes of both the rulers and their subjects.

As with Norman French, colonial subjects ruled by the British often learned English in order to get ahead in society, a process known as "Elite recruitment" and described by David Anthony (in the context of proto-Indo-European): "Language shift can be understood best as a social strategy through which individuals and groups compete for positions of prestige, power, and domestic security ... What is important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical social mobility and a linkage between language and access to positions of prestige and power ... A relatively small immigrant elite population can encourage widespread language shift among numerically dominant indigenes in a non-state or pre-state context if the elite employs a specific combination of encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases ... demonstrate that small elite groups have successfully imposed their languages in non-state situations."[9]

The other driving force spreading English in the 20th and 21st centuries has been that of the lingua franca, that is a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.  The term lingua franca dates from the 17th century when French was the lingua franca of Europe.  Today English is the lingua franca, not only of Europe, but of the entire world, and the internet is only reinforcing that trend.  English has come a long way from its roots in Corded Ware Scandinavia.  It has loosed the bounds of its war-like Germanic tribes and perhaps has become a civilizing force for much of mankind.