In Feanor's Footsteps - Page 4
© Michael Martinez
In reality, even "famous" German leaders of only a few generations after the Cimbri and Teutoni's rampage through Roman Europe, such as Julius Caesar's enemy Ariovistus (mid 1st century BCE) and Tiberius' enemy Arminius (mid 1st century CE), had been forgotten by the Angles and Saxons by the time Bede was writing his Ecclesiastical History of England. The most ancient Germanic king who survived in German tradition, and in fact became famous throughout the German world, was Ermanarik (Hermanarik, and several other variations): a Gothic king who committed suicide in 375 CE when the Huns overran his realm, and whose name occurs in several sources, including one or two Anglo-Saxon poems.
Ermanarik was immortalized by Jordanes, whose book on Gothic origins in 551 provided a bridge between ancient (East) German traditions and history and medieval Germanic (west) Europe. The Ostrogoths seized control over Italy at the end of the 5th century. Their kingdom was destroy in the middle 6th century by the eastern empire, but by that time the Visigoths had been driven from the Aquitane in Gaul to Iberia, and they preserved many Roman traditions. The Visigoths and Ostrogoths interacted with the Franks, who were brought together by Clovis in the early 6th century. His descendants fell into decadence but their kingdoms transmitted a number of traditions and ideas to the British Isles.
And all that has everything to do with the War of Wrath.
Look at any of the major wars fought by the Greeks and Romans from about 500 BCE onward and you'll find one or more extensive books detailing who said what, what clothes the various kings wore, how their favorite concubines looked in the morning, etc. But look for details on the wars of the ancient Germans and there just aren't any. Historians must scour a few medieval source documents, or lift names and events from Greco-Roman documents which may have some connection to an ancient German people. We know there were many tribes living in northern Europe. Archaeology has confirmed that for us. And those tribes sustained themselves through a mixture of agriculture and animal husbandry. But many of them also engaged in sporadic warfare. Eventually, some of them (like the Batavians) became permanently associated with warfare through long-term mercenary relationships with the Roman Empire.
But what were their conflicts like? Who were their heroes? What stories did they tell each other during those long winter nights? We simply don't know. What we do know is that, centuries later, when the medieval world was dominated by German families in France, Spain, Scandinavia, England, Italy, and Germany, the traditional tale-telling had become a refined art which mingled with other traditions. The story-tellers produced books, gestes, poems, epics, short runic inscriptions, art, and who knows what else. They didn't simply appear over night, after the western empire had collapsed. The story-tellers were always there. They simply stopped telling the older stories, except for the most popular ones, and over the centuries condensed a lot of material.
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