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A History of the Vikings

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
THE NORTH GERMANS

HERODOTUS did not know of the Germans, and the first appearance of these people in history may perhaps L have been the mention of a tribe dwelling on the north German coast that was included in a lost book The Ocean by a Massiliot Greek, Pytheas, the merchant-explorer whose famous voyage to Ultima Thule and the North Sea (1) took place in the fourth century B.C. But by the time of Poseidonios (135 B.C.-45 B.C.), the Stoic of Apamea, it seems, even though this writer's work is likewise lost, that many of the German peoples were well known in the classical world, and, furthermore, if Athenaeus has repeated a fragment of Poseidonios verbatim, (2) that the word Germani was already in use as a collective term. At any rate, from the days of Julius Caesar onwards, the name, betokening a distinct race of men, was commonly employed, and it is current in the writings of Caesar himself, and of Pliny, Livy, and Tacitus. As a race-name, however, it was at first rather loosely employed in a not always successful attempt to distinguish certain groups of people from the Celts of Gaul (3); but by the time of Tacitus, who wrote the Germania in A.D. 98), it was clearly understood to refer to the numerous population living between the Rhine and the Elbe, and also believed to inhabit lands even further to the north and east, a huge confederacy of tribes of which many at this late period were well known to the Romans. Tacitus himself described the territories of the Germans in the opening paragraph of his book. He says:

1. Pliny, N.H., XXXVII, 35. It is sometimes said that the Guiones of Pytheas, the tribe in question, lived in Jutland; his amber-island Abalos may be Heligoland. See M. Cary and E. Warmington, The Ancient Explorers, London, 1929, p. 38.
2. IV, 153e.
3. Cf. B.G., II, 4, 1 and 10; VI, 32, 1. Note that Strabo (VII, 290) also refers to the Germans and gives a fanciful derivation of their name. For a general summary of the early classical references, see G. Schütte, Our Forefathers, I, Cambridge, 1929, p. 17 ff.

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'The real Germany (1) is divided from the lands of the Gauls, the Raeti (in east Switzerland and Tyrol), and the Pannonii (in Austria and Hungary), by two rivers, the Rhine and the Danube; from Sarmatia (south-west Russia and lands east of the Weichsel) and from Dacia (Rumania and north-east Balkans) it is divided by mountains (the Carpathians), and also by the fact that the Germans and the people of these countries live in dread of one another. The rest of Germany has the sea as boundary, and this part of the country includes broad promontories (? Jutland) and great islands (? Scandinavia, that was at first thought to be an island); here our military expeditions have lately discovered various peoples and their kings.'
These Germans, who now take up their appointed rôle in history, were the children of the neolithic and Bronze Age civilization of southern Scandinavia, Denmark, and the neighbouring lands between the Elbe and the Oder. Perhaps the first nucleus of the Germans as a race was the amalgamation of the peoples of this area during the Stone Age into the distinctive 'Megalithic Culture' (p. 44) and the subsequent fusion of this culture with that of the ' Single-Grave' or 'Battle-Axe' people, who had arrived in the north at the end of the Stone Age. For, on most counts, it seems likely that the proto-Germans of the last period of the Stone Age, if so they may be called, were Germans by the time the Bronze Age was fully established, and that whatever outside influences may have contributed to the evolution of the typical German, the basis of the stock was the long-established population of the north. On this view, the Indogermanic element that gave the decisive turn to the racial development of the northern peoples was most probably supplied by the Battle-Axe folk. (2)
In early historical times there were three main divisions of the German peoples. In the first place, there were the North Germans of Scandinavia, whose history, since it is they from whom the vikings are sprung, will be the main interest of this chapter; and there were also the East Germans--an offshoot from the North Germans--and the West Germans.

1. Germania omnis (cf. B.G., I, 1. 1). Tacitus does not include the transrhenan provinces of Germania superior and Germania inferior; he refers, if one may express the distinction in modern terms, to ' Germany Proper' as opposed to 'Greater Germany'.
2. On the difficult question of the origin of the Germans, see R. Much in Hoops , Reallexikon, s.v. Germanen; among recent books on the subject, T. A. (formerly Fr.) Braun, Die Urbevölkerung Europas und dio Herkunft der Germanen, Berlin, 1922; S. Feist, Indogermanen und Germanen, Halle, 1924; G. Kossinna, Ursprung und Verbreitung der Germanen in vor- und frühgeschichtlichen Zeit, Berlin, 1926. An admirable work in English is The Aryans by Prof. V. G. Childe (London, 1926); another, and indispensable, book is Our Forefathers by G. Schütte (Cambridge. 1929).

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        The last-named folk were tribes that, at some time shortly after 1000 B.C., had pushed westwards and south-westwards into the territories of the Celtic peoples, and, by about 200 B.C., had advanced the German boundary to the Rhine and the Main. There was also a steady movement of the West Germans up the Elbe valley, and in the first century A.D. these folk had occupied most of southern Germany. It was these West Germans, of course, who came into collision with the Romans, and, since they alone were under continued observation from the north-western provinces of the Empire, it is to the West Germans beyond a doubt that the descriptions of the German people by Caesar and Tacitus must, in the main, apply. Their history, after their first clash with Rome, is remarkable for the change from a pastoral manner of life to busy agricultural pursuits, and for the development of great federations of tribes within their own West German society. The Alamanni, the Saxons, and the Franks are famous names of the composite tribal groups (nations, one might almost say) (1) thus formed.
       The East Germans were a branch of the German peoples who migrated, probably at some period about or after 500 B.C., to the lands between and around the Oder and the Weichsel, and who pressed southwards during the following two centuries along these rivers until they approached the foothills of the Carpathians. This folk, whose progress was not stayed by the frontiers of the Roman empire, could expand their territory almost at their will, and they were thus able to preserve, in contrast with the West Germans, the accustomed pastoral life of their race.
       Most of the East Germans were of Scandinavian origin, and their migration to the Continent during the pre-Roman Iron Age is the counterpart of that noticeable deterioration of the Scandinavian culture during this period to which archaeology can bear witness (p. 51). Among these emigrants were many folk from the island of Gotland, the Lombards from Scania, the Burgundians from Bornholm, and the Rugians from Rogaland in south-west Norway; but the best known of them were the Goths whose original home was situated in the northern provinces (Öster- and Västergötland) of Götaland in Sweden. (2) The

1. See the late Professor J. B. Bury, The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians, London, 1928, pp. 10-15.
2. Not the island Gotland: see Birger Nerman, Fornvännen, 1923, p. 165. For a most excellent general account of these emigrations, see Nerman, Die Herkunft und die frühesten Auswanderungen der Germanen, III F., K. Vitt. Ant. Akad. Handl., I, 5 (Stockholm, 1924).

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East Germans also included in their number the Vandals, a name perhaps bestowed in north-east Germany on a large group of emigrants from Denmark, (1) the Gepids, and the Heruls, these last-named folk being distinguished from the other migrants by the fact that while a section of them followed the Goths to south Russia a large body of them remained in their Danish home (probably south Jutland and Fyen) so that they still counted in the ensuing centuries as a people of the north until they were conquered by the invading Danes (p. 73). (2)
The tendency of the East Germans in the third and fourth centuries was to advance slowly into Europe, moving chiefly in a south-easterly direction towards the Black Sea. Here in southern Russia lay the new territory of the Goths, and it was here that these people divided into two great bodies, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, a division that was no doubt governed by the order of the arrival of the successive migrating bands. (3) And it was from this region that was launched the great Gothic attack on the Roman empire that began about A.D. 247.

1. In the Vandal group were the Silingi whose name can be perhaps connected with Zealand. It has been suggested that the term Vandal itself may be derived from the name Vendsyssel in north Jutland, but Kossinna believes that Vandal is a sobriquet meaning merchant. See the references on p. 241 of his paper Die Wandalen in Nordjütland, Mannus 21 (1929).
2. The Heruls were an interesting people, and are deemed to have played an important part in the development of Scandinavian and Danish civilization. Those who had migrated to the shores of the Black Sea won for themselves considerable notoriety as pirates in the third century. Like the Goths, these South Russian Heruls were driven from their settlements by the Huns, and they subsequently established themselves in Hungary where they remained until the beginning of the sixth century. Then they were driven forth once more, this time by fellow-Germans, the Lombards (p. 74). But throughout all their wanderings they seem to have maintained a close connexion with their countrymen in Denmark, and the introduction of many southern fashions into the north has been explained as the result of the coming and going between the migrants and the stay-at-homes. The Heruls remaining in Denmark were also redoubtable pirates, for Hieronymus has recorded that in the fifth century parties of them raided the coasts of France and Spain, and much of their power must have been derived from the fact that the great trade-route from the mouth of the Rhine to the Baltic crossed directly over their territories. For the Heruls, see O. v. Friesen, Rö-stenen, Ch. III, Uppsala Univ. Årsskrift, 1924, I, and L. Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Stämme, I (1910), p. 333 ff.
3. It has been suggested (Schück, Svenska folkets historia, I, p. 96, note) that these names are not to be interpreted as meaning East Goths and West Goths, even though it is common ground that the Visigoths dwelt to the west of the Ostrogoths; but I confess I find the alternative interpretation difficult to accept.

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