Part 2

How did the belief that Troy was the original home of the Teutons arise? Does it rest on native traditions? Has it been inspired by sagas and traditions current among the Teutons themselves, and containing as kernel "a faint reminiscence of an immigration from Asia" or is it a thought entirely foreign to the heathen Teutonic world, introduced in Christian times by Latin scholars? These questions shall now be considered.

Already in the seventh century - that is to say, more than five hundred years before Heimskringla and the Prose Edda were written - a Teutonic people were told by a chronicler that they were of the same blood as the Romans, that they had like the Romans emigrated from Troy, and that they had the same share as the Romans in the glorious deeds of the Trojan heroes. This people were the Franks. Their oldest chronicler, Gregorius, bishop of Tours, who, about one hundred years before that time - that is to say, in the sixth century - wrote their history in ten books, does not say a word about it. He, too, desires to give an account of the original home of the Franks (Hist. Franc., ii. 9), and locates it quite a distance from the regions around the lower Rhine, where they first appear in the light of history; but still not farther away than to Pannonia. Of the coming of the Franks from Troy neither Gregorius knows anything nor the older authors, Sulpicius Alexander and others, whose works he studied to find information in regard to the early history of the Franks. But in the middle of the following century, about 650, an unknown author, who for reasons unknown is called Fredegar, wrote a chronicle, which is in part a reproduction of Gregorius' historical work, but also contains various other things in regard to the early history of the Franks, and among these the statement that they emigrated from Troy. He even gives us the sources from which he got this information. His sources are, according to his own statement, not Frankish, not popular songs or traditions, but two Latin authors - the Church father Hieronymus and the poet Virgil. If we, then, go to these sources in order to compare Fredegar's statement with his authority, we find that Hieronymus once names the Franks in passing, but never refers to their origin from Troy, and that Virgil does not even mention Franks. Nevertheless, the reference to Virgil is the key to the riddle, as we shall show below. What Fredegar tells about the emigration of the Franks is this: A Frankish king, by name Priam, ruled in Troy at the time when this city was conquered by the cunning of Ulysses. Then the Franks emigrated, and were afterwards ruled by a king named Friga. Under his reign a dispute arose between them, and they divided themselves into two parties, one of which settled in Macedonia, while the other, called after Friga's name Frigians (Phrygians), migrated through Asia and settled there. There they were again divided, and one part of them migrated under king Francio into Europe, travelled across this continent, and settled, with their women and children, near the Rhine, where they began building a city which they called Troy, and intended to organise in the manner of the old Troy, but the city was not completed. The other group chose a king by name Turchot, and were called after him Turks. But those who settled on the Rhine called themselves Franks after their king Francio, and later chose a king named Theudemer, who was descended from Priam, Friga, and Francio. Thus Fredegar's chronicle.

About seventy years later another Frankish chronicle saw the light of day - the Gesta regum Francorum. In it we learn more of the emigration of the Franks from Troy. Gesta regum Francorum (i) tells the following story: In Asia lies the city of the Trojans called Ilium, where king Æneas formerly ruled. The Trojans were a strong and brave people, who waged war against all their neighbours. But then the kings of the Greeks united and brought a large army against Æneas, king of the Trojans. There were great battles and much bloodshed, and the greater part of the Trojans fell. Æneas fled with those surviving into the city of Ilium, which the Greeks besieged and conquered after ten years. The Trojans who escaped divided themselves into two parties. The one under king Æneas went to Italy, where he hoped to receive auxiliary troops. Other distinguished Trojans became the leaders of the other party, which numbered 12,000 men. They embarked in ships and came to the banks of the river Tanais. They sailed farther and came within the borders of Pannonia, near the Moeotian marshes (navigantes pervenerunt intra terminos Pannoniarum juxta Moeotidas paludes), where they founded a city, which they called Sicambria, and here they remained many years and became a mighty people. Then came a time when the Roman emperor Valentinianus got into war with that wicked people called Alamanni (also Alani). He led a great army against them. The Alamanni were defeated, and fled to the Moeotian marshes. Then said the emperor, "If anyone dares to enter those marshes and drive away this wicked people, I shall for ten years make him free from all burdens". When the Trojans heard this they went, accompanied by a Roman army, into the marshes, attacked the Alamanni, and hewed them down with their swords. Then the Trojans received from the emperor Valentinianus the name Franks, which, the chronicle adds, in the Attic tongue means the savage (feri), "for the Trojans had a defiant and indomitable character".

For ten years afterwards the Trojans or Franks lived undisturbed by Roman tax-collectors; but after that the Roman emperor demanded that they should pay tribute. This they refused, and slew the tax-collectors sent to them. Then the emperor collected a large army under the command of Aristarcus, and strengthened it with auxiliary forces from many lands, and attacked the Franks, who were defeated by the superior force, lost their leader Priam, and had to take flight. They now proceeded under their leaders Markomir, Priam's son, and Sunno, son of Antenor, away from Sicambria through Germany to the Rhine, and located there. Thus this chronicle.

About fifty years after its appearance - that is, in the time of Charlemagne, and, to be more accurate, about the year 787 - the well-known Longobardian historian Paulus Diaconus wrote a history of the bishops of Metz. Among these bishops was the Frank Arnulf, from whom Charlemagne was descended in the fifth generation. Arnulf had two sons, one of whom was named Ansgisel, in a contracted form Ansgis. When Paulus speaks of this he remarks that it is thought that the name Ansgis comes from the father of Æneas, Anchises, who went from Troy to Italy; and he adds that according to evidence of older date the Franks were believed to be descendants of the Trojans. These evidences of older date we have considered above - Fredegar's Chronicle and Gesta regum Francorum. Meanwhile this shows that the belief that the Franks were of Trojan descent kept spreading with the lapse of time. It hardly needs to be added that there is no good foundation for the derivation of Ansgisel or Ansgis from Anchises. Ansgisel is a genuine Teutonic name. (See No. 123 concerning Ansgisel, the emigration chief of the Teutonic myth.)

We now pass to the second half of the tenth century, and there we find the Saxon chronicler Widukind. When he is to tell the story of the origin of the Saxon people, he presents two conflicting accounts. The one is from a Saxon source, from old native traditions, which we shall discuss later; the other is from a scholastic source, and claims that the Saxons are of Macedonian descent. According to this latter account they were a remnant of the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great, which, as Widukind had learned, after Alexander's early death, had spread over the whole earth. The Macedonians were at that time regarded as Hellenicised Trojans. In this connection I call the reader's attention to Fredegar's Chronicle referred to above, which tells that the Trojans, in the time of king Friga, disagreed among themselves, and that a part of them emigrated and settled in Macedonia. In this manner the Saxons, like the Franks, could claim a Trojan descent; and as England to a great extent was peopled by Saxon conquerors, the same honour was of course claimed by her people. In evidence of this, and to show that it was believed in England during the centuries immediately following Widukind's time, that the Saxons and Angles were of Trojan blood, I will simply refer here to a pseudo-Sibylline manuscript found in Oxford and written in very poor Latin. It was examined by the French scholar Alexandre (Excursus ad Sibyllina, p. 298), and in it Britain is said to be an island inhabited by the survivors of the Trojans (insulam reliquiis Trojanorum inhabitatam). In another British pseudo-Sibylline document it is stated that the Sibylla was a daughter of king Priam of Troy; and an effort has been made to add weight and dignity to this document by incorporating it with the works of the well-known Church historian Beda, and thus date it at the beginning of the eighth century, but the manuscript itself is a compilation from the time of Frederick Barbarossa (Excurs ad Sib., p. 289). Other pseudo-Sibylline documents in Latin give accounts of a Sibylla who lived and prophesied in Troy. I make special mention of this fact, for the reason that in the Foreword of the Prose Edda it is similarly stated that Thor, the son of Priam's daughter, was married to Sibil (Sibylla).

Thus when Franks and Saxons had been made into Trojans - the former into full-blooded Trojans and the latter into Hellenicised Trojans - it could not take long before their northern kinsmen received the same descent as a heritage. In the very nature of things the beginning must be made by those Northmen who became the conquerors and settlers of Normandy in the midst of "Trojan" Franks. About a hundred years after their settlement there they produced a chronicler, Dudo, deacon of St. Quentin. I have already shown that the Macedonians were regarded as Hellenicised Trojans. Together with the Hellenicising they had obtained the name Danai, a term applied to all Greeks. In his Norman Chronicle, which goes down to the year 996, Dudo relates (De moribus et gestis, &c., lib. i.) that the Norman men regarded themselves as Danai, for Danes (the Scandinavians in general) and Danai was regarded as the same race name. Together with the Normans the Scandinavians also, from whom they were descended, accordingly had to be made into Trojans. And thus the matter was understood by Dudo's readers; and when Robert Wace wrote his rhymed chronicle, Roman de Rou, about the northern conquerors of Normandy, and wanted to give an account of their origin, he could say, on the basis of a common tradition:

"When the walls of Troy in ashes were laid,
And the Greeks exceedingly glad were made,
Then fled from flames on the Trojan strand
The race that settled old Denmark's land
And in honour of the old Trojan reigns,
The People called themselves the Danes".

I have now traced the scholastic tradition about the descent of the Teutonic races from Troy all the way from the chronicle where we first find this tradition recorded, down to the time when Ari, Iceland's first historian, lived, and when the Icelander Sæmund is said to have studied in Paris, the same century in which Sturluson, Heimskringla's author, developed into manhood. Saxo rejected the theory current among the scholars of his time, that the northern races were Danai-Trojans. He knew that Dudo in St. Quentin was the authority upon which this belief was chiefly based, and he gives his Danes an entirely different origin, quanquam Dudo, rerum Aquitanicarum scriptor, Danos a Danais ortos nuncupatosque recenseat. The Icelanders, on the other hand, accepted and continued to develop the belief, resting on the authority of five hundred years, concerning Troy as the starting-point for the Teutonic race; and in Iceland the theory is worked out and systematised as we have already seen, and is made to fit in a frame of the history of the world. The accounts given in Heimskringla and the Prose Edda in regard to the emigration from Asgard form the natural denouement of an era which had existed for centuries, and in which the events of antiquity were able to group themselves around a common centre. All peoples and families of chiefs were located around the Mediterranean Sea, and every event and every hero was connected in some way or other with Troy.

In fact, a great part of the lands subject to the Roman sceptre were in ancient literature in some way connected with the Trojan war and its consequences: Macedonia and Epirus through the Trojan emigrant Helenus; Illyria and Venetia through the Trojan emigrant Antenor; Rhetia and Vindelicia through the Amazons, allies of the Trojans, from whom the inhabitants of these provinces were said to be descended (Servius ad Virg., i. 248); Etruria through Dardanus, who was said to have emigrated from there to Troy; Latium and Campania through the Æneids; Sicily, the very home of the Ænean traditions, through the relation between the royal families of Troy and Sicily; Sardinia (see Sallust); Gaul (see Lucanus arid Ammianus Marcellinus); Carthage through the visit of Æneas to Dido; and of course all of Asia Minor. This was not all. According to the lost Argive History by Anaxikrates, Scamandrius, son of Hektor and Andromache, came with emigrants to Scythia and settled on the banks of the Tanais; and scarcely had Germany become known to the Romans, before it, too, became drawn into the cycle of Trojan stories, at least so far as to make this country visited by Ulysses on his many journeys and adventures (Tac., Germ.). Every educated Greek and Roman person's fancy was filled from his earliest school-days with Troy, and traces of Dardanians and Danaians were found everywhere, just as the English in our time think they have found traces of the ten lost tribes of Israel both in the old and in the new world.

In the same degree as Christianity, Church learning, and Latin manuscripts were spread among the Teutonic tribes, there were disseminated among them knowledge of and an interest in the great Trojan stories. The native stories telling of Teutonic gods and heroes received terrible shocks from Christianity, but were rescued in another form on the lips of the people, and continued in their new guise to command their attention and devotion. In the class of Latin scholars which developed among the Christianised Teutons, the new stories learned from Latin literature, telling of Ilium, of the conflicts between Trojans and Greeks, of migrations, of the founding of colonies on foreign shores and the creating of new empires, were the things which especially stimulated their curiosity and captivated their fancy. The Latin literature which was to a greater or less extent accessible to the Teutonic priests, or to priests labouring among the Teutons, furnished abundant materials in regard to Troy both in classical and pseudo-classical authors. We need only call attention to Virgil and his commentator Servius, which became a mine of learning for the whole middle age, and among pseudo-classical works to Dares Phrygius' Historia de Excidio Trojæ (which was believed to have been written by a Trojan and translated by Cornelius Nepos!), to Dictys Cretensis' Ephemeris belli Trojani (the original of which was said to have been Phoenician, and found in Dictys' alleged grave after an earthquake in the time of Nero!), and to "Pindari Thebani," Epitome Iliados Homeri.

Before the story of the Trojan descent of the Franks had been created, the Teuton Jordanes, active as a writer in the middle of the sixth century, had already found a place for his Gothic fellow-countrymen in the events of the great Trojan epic. Not that he made the Goths the descendants either of the Greeks or Trojans. On the contrary, he maintained the Goths' own traditions in regard to their descent and their original home, a matter which I shall discuss later. But according to Orosius, who is Jordanes' authority, the Goths were the same as the Getæ, and when the identity of these was accepted, it was easy for Jordanes to connect the history of the Goths with the Homeric stories. A Gothic chief marries Priam's sister and fights with Achilles and Ulysses (Jord., c. 9), and Ilium, having scarcely recovered from the war with Agamemnon, is destroyed a second time by Goths (c. 20).