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Germanic peoples

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The Germanic (also, Teutonic) peoples are the nations speaking Germanic languages, idioms descended from Proto-Germanic (spoken during the final centuries BC, the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe).


Etymology of "German"

As the Germanic tribes never called themselves so, but the Romans first knew them as allies of the Celts, Germani is thought to be the Celtic name for them. There is also a Latin adjective germanus (<- germen, seed or offshoot), which has the sense of "related" or "kindred" and whence derives the Portuguese irmão and the Spanish hermano, "brother". If the proper name Germani derives from this word, it may refer to the Roman experience of the Germanic tribes as allies of the Celts.

Another possible derivation is the one proffered by the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), which relates the name to Old Irish gair, "neighbor", which actually means "near". The Welsh is ger.

McBain's An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language relates the word to Irish gearr, "cut, short" (a short distance) and states the Proto-Celtic root to be *gerso-s, further related to ancient Greek chereion, "inferior" and English gash. Here the etymological trail becomes decidedly obscured, but there is a good reason for this obscurementl. English gash leads by one path or another to the Greek word character, which is an engraving for an identity sign of some sort. There is no clear root for this word. It could be an Indo-european root, *khar-, *kher-, *ghar-, *gher-, "cut", from which also Hittite kar-, "cut". Or, it could be a pre-Indo-European root, related perhaps to Egyptian kha-, "cut", or the Indo-European root could come from the pre-Indo-European root.

Apparently, the Germanic tribes did not have a self name that included all Germanic-speaking people but excluded all non-Germanic people, except for generic þiuda- "people" (while non-Germanic peoples (primarily Celtic and Roman) were called *walha-. This word lives forth in names such as Wales, Welsh, Cornwall, Walloons, Vlachs, in village names ending in -walchen, such as Straßwalchen or Seewalchen -- mostly located in the Salzkammergut region and indicating Roman settlement --, and in the outdated German word Welsch or Walsch for Italian, which also survives in village names such as Welschnofen-Nova Levante. The adjective *þiudiskaz, referring to the language, continued in German Deutsch, English Dutch, Dutch Dietsch, was not introduced until the 9th century, originally designating the language of the people in contrast to the Latin language.

Classification

The concept of "Germanic" as a distinct ethnic identity was hinted at by the early Greek geographer Strabo [1], who distinguished a barbarian group in northern Europe similar to, but not part of, the Celts. Posidonius, to our knowledge, is the first to have used the name.

By the 1st century A.D., the writings of Caesar, Tacitus and other Roman era writers indicate a division of Germanic-speaking peoples into tribal groupings centred on:

The Istvaeones, Irminones, and Ingvaeones are collectively called West Germanic tribes. In addition to this those Germanic people who remained in Scandinavia are referred to as North Germanic. These groups all developed separate dialects, the basis for the differences among Germanic languages down to the present day.

The division of peoples into west-Germanic, east-Germanic, and north-Germanic was a 19th century hypothesis of linguists. Many Greek scholars only classified Celts and Scyths in the Northwest and Northeast of the Mediterranean and this classification was widely maintained in Greek literature until Late Antiquity. Latin-Greek ethnographers (Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, and Strabo) mentioned in the first two centuries AD the names of peoples they classified as Germanic along the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Danube, the Vistula and on the Baltic Sea. Tacitus mentioned 40, Ptolemy 69 peoples. Classical ethnography applied the name Suebi to many tribes in the first century. It appeared that this native name had all but replaced the foreign name Germanic. After the Marcomannic wars the Gothic name steadily gained importance. Some of the ethnic names mentioned by the ethnographers of the first two centuries AD on the shores of the Oder and the Vistula (Gutones, Vandali) reappear from the 3rd century on in the area of the lower Danube and north of the Carpathian Mountains. Modern scholarship has no explanation for the ethnic processes causing this continuity. For the end of the 5th century the Gothic name can be used - according to the historical sources - for such different peoples like the Goths in Gaul, Iberia and Italy, the Vandals in Africa, the Gepids along the Tisza and the Danube, the Rugians, Sciri and Burgundians, even the Iranian Alans. These peoples were classified as Scyths and often deducted from the ancient Getae (most important: Cassiodor/Jordanes, Getica approx. 550 AD).

The concept of Volk

In the 1990s and the 2000s there has been debate about exactly what "tribe" or "people" meant to these groups, whose fluidity and willingness to sometimes blend is seen while at the same time forced mergers as a result of war were taking place and the tribe as it had been known vanished. The late classical sources are especially clear in the matter of the blended nature of the Alamanni.

The idea of a unified German people, or Volk, was expressed openly in print by 19th century Ethnic Nationalist writers and thinkers after the Napoleonic Wars. Such an identity, however, had existed more implicitly since the Middle Ages, helping to fuel the Protestant Reformation, when many Germanic lands pulled away religiously and politically from the Roman Catholic Church.


History

Origin

File:Nordic Bronze Age.PNG
Map of the Nordic Bronze Age culture, ca 1200 BC

Regarding the question of ethnic origins, evidence developed by both archaeologists and linguists suggests that a people or group of peoples sharing a common material culture dwelt in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia during the late European Bronze Age (1000 BC-500 BC). This culture group is called the Nordic Bronze Age and spread from southern Scandinavia into northern Germany. The long presence of Germanic tribes in southern Scandinavia (an Indo-European language had probably arrived by 2000 BC) is also evidenced by the fact that no pre-Germanic place names have been found in this area.

Linguists, working backwards from historically-known Germanic languages, suggest that this group spoke proto-Germanic, a distinct branch of the Indo-European language family. Cultural features at that time included small, independent settlements, and an economy strongly based on the keeping of livestock.

Map of the Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, ca 500 BC-60 BC. The area south of Scandinavia is the Jastorf culture

The southward movement was probably influenced by a deteriorating climate in Scandinavia ca 600 BC - ca 300 BC. The warm and dry climate of southern Scandinavia (2-3 degrees warmer than today) deteriorated considerably, which not only dramatically changed the flora, but forced people to change their way of living and to leave settlements.

At around this time, this culture discovered how to extract bog iron from the ore in peat bogs. Their technology for gaining iron ore from local sources may have helped them expand into new territories.

The Germanic culture grew to the southwest and southeast, without sudden breaks, and it can be distinguished from the culture of the Celts inhabiting the more southerly Danube and Alpine regions during the same period.

The details of the expansion are known only generally, but it is clear that the forebears of the Goths were settled on the southern Baltic shore by 100 AD. According to some scholars, along the lower and middle Rhine, previous local inhabitants seem to have come under the leadership of Germanic figures from outside.

The early Germanic tribes spoke mutually intelligible dialects, and shared a common culture and mythology (see Germanic mythology), as is indicated by Beowulf and the Volsunga saga. One example of their shared identity is their common Germanic name for non-Germanic peoples, *walhaz (plural of *walhoz), from which the local names Welsh, Wallis, etc. were derived. A second example of a recognized ethnic unity is the fact that the Romans knew them as one and gave them a common name, Germani, the source of our German and Germanic (see Etymology below).

In the absence of large-scale political unification, such as that imposed forcibly by the Romans upon the peoples of Italy, the various tribes remained free, led by their own hereditary or chosen leaders.

Collision with Rome

The Germania by Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, an ethnographic work on the diverse group of Germanic tribes outside of the Roman Empire, is our most important source on the Germanic peoples of the 1st century. By the late 2nd century, B.C., Roman authors recount Gaul (modern France), Italy, and Iberia and Lusitania (modern Spain and Portugal) were invaded by migrating Germanic tribes, culminating in military conflict with the armies of the Roman Empire. Six decades later, Julius Caesar invoked the threat of such attacks as one justification for his annexation of Gaul to Rome.

Map showing the distribution of the Germanic tribes in Proto-Germanic times, and stages of their expansion up to 50 BC, AD 100 and AD 300. The extent of the Roman Empire in 68 BC and AD 117 is also shown.

As Rome advanced her borders to the Rhine and Danube, incorporating many Celtic societies into the Empire, the tribal homelands to the north and east emerged collectively in the records as Germania, whose peoples were sometimes at war with the Empire, but who also engaged in complex and long-term trade relations, military alliances, and cultural exchanges with their neighbors to the south.

The wars against the Cimbri and Teutoni whose military incursion into Roman Italy was thrust back in 101 BC were written up by Caesar and others as historical prototypes of a Northern danger for the Empire to be controlled. In the Augustean period there was - as a result of Roman activity as far as the Elbe River - a first definition of the "Germania magna": from Rhine and Danube in the West and South to the Vistula and the Baltic Sea in the East and North.

Caesar's ethnographic excurses finally established the term Germania. The initial purpose of the Roman campaigns was to protect Gaul by controlling the area between the Rhine and the Elbe. In 9 AD a revolt of their subject Germanics headed by Arminius (decisive defeat of Quintilius Varus in the Teutoburg Forest) ended in the withdrawal of the Roman frontier to the Rhine. At the end of the 1st century two provinces west of the Rhine called Germania inferior and Germania superior were established. Important medieval cities like Aachen, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Worms and Speyer were part of these Roman structures.

Migration Period

Main article: Migration Period

During the 5th century, as the Roman Empire drew toward its end, numerous Germanic tribes, under pressure from invading Asian peoples and/or population growth and climate change, began migrating en masse in far and diverse directions, taking them to England and as far south through present day Continental Europe to the Mediterranean and northern Africa. Over time, this wandering meant intrusions into other tribal territories, and the ensuing wars for land escalated with the dwindling amount of unoccupied territory. Wandering tribes then began staking out permanent homes as a means of protection. Much of this resulted in fixed settlements from which many, under a powerful leader, expanded outwards. A defeat meant either scattering or merging with the dominant tribe, and this continued to be how nations were formed. In Denmark the Jutes merged with the Danes, in Sweden the Geats merged with the Swedes. In England, for example, we now most often refer to the Anglo-Saxons rather than the two separate tribes.

Role in the Fall of Rome

Some of the Germanic tribes are frequently blamed in popular conceptions for the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 5th century. Professional historians and archaeologists have since the 1950s shifted their interpretations in such a way that the Germanic peoples are no longer seen as invading a decaying empire but as being co-opted into helping defend territory the central government could no longer adequately administer. Individuals and small groups from Germanic tribes had long been recruited from the territories beyond the limes (i.e., the regions just outside the Roman Empire), and some of them had risen high in the command structure of the army. Then the Empire recruited entire tribal groups under their native leaders as officers. Assisting with defense eventually shifted into administration and then outright rule, as Roman traditions of government passed into the hands of Germanic leaders. Odoacer, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, is the ultimate example.

The presence of successor states controlled by a nobility from one of the Germanic tribes is evident in the 6th century - even in Italy, the former heart of the Empire, where Odoacer was followed by Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, who was regarded by Roman citizens and Gothic settlers alike as legitimate successor to the rule of Rome and Italy.

Conversion to Christianity

Main article: Germanic Christianity

The Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Vandals were Christianized while they were still outside the bounds of the Empire; however, they converted to Arianism rather than to orthodox Catholicism, and were soon regarded as heretics. The one great written remnant of the Gothic language is a translation of portions of the Bible made by Ulfilas, the missionary who converted them. The Lombards were not converted until after their entrance into the Empire, but received Christianity from Arian Germanic groups.

The Franks were converted directly from paganism to Catholicism without an intervening time as Arians. Several centuries later, Anglo-Saxon and Frankish missionaries and warriors undertook the conversion of their Saxon neighbours. A key event was the felling of Thor's Oak near Fritzlar by Boniface, apostle of the Germans, in 723. Eventually, the conversion was forced by armed force, successfully completed by Charlemagne, in a series of campaigns (the Saxon Wars), that also brought Saxon lands into the Frankish empire.

Assimilation

"Germanic" as understood today is a linguistic term. For this reason, not all peoples that largely descend from he ancient Germanic peoples, genetically, are Germanic speakers today. Germanic peoples were often quick to assimilate into foreign cultures. Established examples include the Romanized Norsemen in Normandy, and the societal elite in medieval Russia among whom many were the descendants of Slavified Norsemen (a theory, however, contested by some Slavic scholars in the former Soviet Union, who name it the Normanist theory).

Great Britain is similarly considered an example of assimilation, where elements of the Germanic tribes called the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes merged with Celts and French-speaking Norsemen.

Scotland is historically a country of mixed Germanic and Celtic culture and settlement; while the Scottish Highlands and Galloway were until recently more Celtic and akin to Celtic Ireland in its culture and Scottish Gaelic language, the Scottish Lowlands share their culture and language closely with its neighbour to the south and other Germanic peoples, speaking the Scots language. The Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands, though a part of Scotland, were historically Scandinavian in culture, though they no longer speak their native language Norn as an influx of Lallans speaking lowland Scots resulted in its displacement.

Ireland is also a country of mixed Germanic and Celtic culture, but for different reasons than Scotland. As with Scotland, Ireland had much Scandinavian settlement, both in Viking and Anglo-Norman colonies. Through centuries of British dominance, many parts of Ireland gradually developed a character that was more British than native Celtic, particularly in Ulster and Leinster.

France saw a great deal of Germanic settlement, and even its namesake the Franks were a Germanic people. Entire regions of France (such as Alsace, Burgundy and Normandy) were settled heavily by Germanic peoples, contributing to their unique regional cultures and dialects. But most of the languages spoken in France today are Romance languages, while the people have a heavy Gallic substratum that predates Latin and Germanic settlement.

Portugal and Spain also had a great measure of Germanic settlement, due to the Visigoths and the Suevi (Quadi and Marcomanni), who settled permanently. The Vandals (Silingi and Hasdingi) were also present, before moving on to North Africa, where they left no trace of Germanic settlement and were absorbed into the local population.

Italy, especially the area north of the city of Rome, has also had a history of heavy Germanic settlement. Germanic tribes such as the Visigoths, Vandals, and Ostrogoths had successfully invaded and sparsely settled Italy in the 5th century AD. Most notably, in the 6th century AD, the Germanic tribe known as the Lombards entered and settled primarily in the area known today as Lombardy.

Culture

Thor, god of thunder, one of the major figures in Germanic mythology.

See: Germanic king, Germanic paganism

The Germanic tribes were each politically independent, under a hereditary king. The kings appear to have claimed descendancy from mythical founders of the tribes, the name of some of which is preserved:

List of Germanic tribes


Precautionary Note: These ethnic names were culled from a variety of ancient and mediaeval sources dating from the middle of the 1st millennium BC to the early 2nd millennium AD. They do not necessarily represent contemporaneous, distinct or Germanic-speaking populations. The peoples referenced do not necessarily have common ancestral populations. Some identities closely fit the concept of a tribe. Others are confederations or even unions of tribes. Some may not have spoken Germanic at all, but were bundled by the sources with the Germanic speakers. Some were undoubtedly of mixed culture. Some tribes may have assimilated to Germanic; others to other cultures from Germanic. Long-lasting ethnic identities changed population base and language over the centuries. As for genetic characteristics, they must be considered unrelated to these names. Apart from these limitations, it is probably safe to assume that, on the whole, most of these populations spoke some branch of Germanic and contributed to pools of descendants who currently live in the Germanic-speaking countries. Many of the names descend to modern place names.

Some tribal maps of ancient Germany can be found at:

Note: these maps or any other maps represent an interpretation of the information available to the map-maker. Typically the ancients did not know or did not leave enough information for us to locate them exactly. The maps only give us a rough idea of the features and ethnic locations of ancient Germany. In addition, some of tribes, e.g. the Bastarnae are not identified as Germanic with any certainty and large areas in Central Europe the Germanic tribes probably only constituted a newly arrived minority among Slavs and remaining Celts. Wolfram (1990:91f), for instance, points out that the early Visigoths, called Tervingi also comprised many Taifalans (unknown origin) and Alans (Iranians). The Alans became so Gothicized that non-Germanic people considered them to be Goths.

Contemporary Germanic peoples

The following is a list of present day descendants of the Germanic tribes. Howerver, it is important to note that there is no such thing as a "pure Germanic" due to the mixing of various population groups throughout history. Hence, the list can not be complete, but only show where Germanic influence has been particularly strong.

and their cultural descendants around the world, including large groups in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Afrikaners and Anglo-Saxons of South Africa.

See also

The present day decendants of the Germanic tribes include: 

   * Danes
   * Dutch
   * English
   * Flemings
   * Finns 
   * Frisians
   * Germans (including Ethnic Germans in other countries)
   * Icelanders
   * Norwegians
   * Yiddish speaking Jews
   * German majority in Austria
   * People speaking an Alamannic accent in Switzerland
   * Swedes
   * French
   * Northern Italians
   * Lowland Scots
   * Ulster Irish
   * Faroese
   * Luxembourgians
   * Liechtensteiners

and their cultural descendants around the world, including large groups in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Afrikaners and Anglo-Saxons of South Africa.

Further reading

  • Beck, Heinrich and Heiko Steuer and Dieter Timpe, eds. Die Germanen. Studienausgabe. Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter 1998. Xi + 258 pp. ISBN 3-11-016383-7.
  • Collins, Roger. Early medieval Europe. 300-1000. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan 1999. XXV + 533 pp. ISBN 0-333-65807-8.
  • Geary, Patrick J. Before France and Germany. The creation and transformation of the Merovingian world. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988. Xii + 259 pp. ISBN 0-195-04458-4.
  • Geary, Patrick J. The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002. X + 199 pp. ISBN 0-691-11481-1.
  • Herrmann, Joachim. Griechische und lateinische Quellen zur Frühgeschichte Mitteleuropas bis zur Mitte des 1. Jahrtausends unserer Zeitrechnung. I. Von Homer bis Plutarch. 8. Jh. v. u. Z. bis 1. Jh. v. u. Z. II. Tacitus-Germania. III. Von Tacitus bis Ausonius. 2. bis 4. Jh. u. Z. IV. Von Ammianus Marcellinus bis Zosimos. 4. und 5. Jh. u. Z. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1988 -1992. I: 657 pp. ISBN 3-05-000348-0. II: 291 pp. ISBN 3-05-000349-9. III: 723 pp. ISBN 3-05-000571-8. IV: 656 pp. ISBN 3-05-000591-2.
  • Pohl, Walter. Die Germanen. Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 57. München: Oldenbourg 2004. X + 156 pp. ISBN 3-486-56755-1.
  • Pohl, Walter. Die Voelkerwanderung. Eroberung und Integration. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 2002. 266 pp. ISBN 3-170-15566-0. Monograph, German.
  • Todd, Malcolm. The Early Germans. Oxford: Blackwell 2004. Xii + 266 pp. ISBN 0-631-16397-2.
  • Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Berkeley: University of California Press 1988. Xii + 613 pp. ISBN 0-520-6983-8.
  • Wolfram, Herwig. The Roman Empire and its Germanic peoples. Berkeley: University of California Press 1997. XX + 361 pp. ISBN 0-520-08511-6.
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