Characteristics of Early Germanic Migrations

Although it has been generally accepted that those we refer to as the Germans moved from their original lands into Western Europe, the reasons for which they did so continues to be debated. As Herwig Wolfram (The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples) pithily observed, the “[d]ebates concerning the Germanic identity of the Germanic tribes who lived east of the Rhine fill entire libraries.” The most questionable early historical discussions centered on attempts to pinpoint the specific migratory path of certain Germanic tribes. Yet, as C.R. Whittaker (Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study) cautioned:

We have to break away from the stereotypes of ‘tribal’ history and mass movements of tribal migration, which, when we can trace them archaeologically…seem to be slow movements of infiltration by small groups of warriors.

Originally, historians believed that the Burgundians were among what came to be classified as the East Germans. These tribes left their lands beyond the Elbe River in the third and fourth centuries in search of new lands on a journey that took them towards the Black Sea and the Danube. Historians hypothesized that growing population and a related need for better food resources, as well as migratory pressure from other tribes, were probably the motivating factors in East German migration. Two good examples of this traditional theory are in Bury's Invasion of Europe Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Both Gibbon and Bury thought the wars fought by Marcus Aurelius during the end of the second century provided evidence for the movement of the East Germans because, they concluded, the barbarians Aurelius fought had been displaced by migrating East Germans.

These theories are still generally sound, though the attempt to specify migratory paths has been criticized by historians such as Walter Goffart (Barbarians and Romans. Additionally, Herwig Wolfram (Germanic Peoples) discounted the role of hunger or desire for goods as motivation for the migrations. Instead, he attributed pressure from constant warfare within barbarian society. According to Wolfram, this constant warfare was a direct result of “the driving force of tribal life [which] was the pathos of heroism. Barbarian traditions are the tales of the ‘deeds of brave men’—only the warrior matters; tribe and army are one.”

More recent scholarship has relied primarily on archeological evidence and has re-classified the Burgundians as Elbe Germans (Geary in Before France and Germany). Wolfram (Germanic Peoples) noted that linguists used to consider the Burgundians as East Germans, but are no longer so sure. The Burgundians were traditionally classified as a Gothic people, but this may have been because they were Arian Christians. Sidonius himself considered them to be Germanic, not Goths, a classification that a contemporary ethnographer would not confuse, according to Wolfram.

Their appearance in written sources clearly indicates that a Germanic tribe known as Burgundians existed, though their specific migration route remains unknown. As Malcolm Todd (Everyday Life of The Barbarians: Goths, Franks, and Vandals) argues, it is impossible to link a tribe mentioned by Tacitus and others of that era with so-called “archeological cultures” and most modern archeologists “prefer to leave on one side questions concerning the ethnic significance of archeological mater.” For his part, Todd placed the Burgundians among an eastern group of Germans, living between the Oder and Vistula, with the Goths, Vandals and Rugii.

An analysis of the few Burgundian remains, primarily skulls, indicated characteristics similar to those of people of Asiatic origin. Additionally, some historians have detected Asiatic themes and styles in the artwork of various Germanic tribes, including the Burgundians, during the migration period. Lucien Musset(Germanic Invasions), in particular, mentioned that analysis of Burgundian skulls indicated Asian characteristics and he also pointed out that it had been conjectured that the second part of the name of a later king, Gundiocus (Gundioc), showed Hunnic influence (based on Herbert Kuhn's “Asiatic Influences on the Art of the Migrations,” Parnassus 9).

Other archeological evidence taken from the area around the lower Vistula, traditionally believed to be a home to the Burgundians, indicated that the region experienced a population loss some time toward the end of the third century. Some historians took this as evidence of a western migration of the Burgundians at this time. However, this by itself is not enough to determine the specific migratory movements of the Burgundians.

Todd (The Northern Barbarians) and Patrick Geary (The Myth of Nations) each offer a substantive recounting of the problems associated with relying on nineteenth century interpretations of the history of the Germanic tribes from the time of Caesar to the migration period. Geary detailed how the compilation of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) lay at the root of many of these problems as its composition relied heavily on the science of philology which resulted in classifying people according to a language family, from which tribal nationalities were then developed.

UP NEXT: Burgundian Contact with the Roman Empire

SOURCES:
Herwig Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1997).
C.R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
Bury, Invasion of Europe.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Great Books of the Western World, vol.40-41 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952).
Goffart, Barbarians and Romans.
Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany.
Malcolm Todd, Everyday Life of The Barbarians: Goths, Franks, and Vandals. (New York: Dorset Press, 1972).
Musset, Germanic Invasions.
Herbert Kuhn, “Asiatic Influences on the Art of the Migrations,” Parnassus 9, no.1 (1937).
Todd, The Northern Barbarians.
Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations.

Early Germanic Society - Social Groups

The largest portion of the population of a Germanic "community" was comprised of the free men. The number of cattle or swine they held determined their status in the community and they exhibited their freedom by joining in warfare. Generally, it was a patriarchal society and households combined into a larger group, or clan. The unifying factors of the clan were twofold, internal and external. Internally, the clan provided a basic form of law that kept the peace among its members. Externally, the members united into greater groups, the largest called tribes, to participate in feuds with other groups.

Families composed villages, led by a group of free men led by a headman, or chief, who may have been determined based on a variety of attributes, including, but not limited to, wealth, ancestry, family connections or influence in the larger group of kindred, “the people” or gentes, of which his village was a part. As explained by Patrick Geary, the villages that made up these gentes “were bound together by a combination of religious, legal, and political traditions that imparted a strong, if unstable, sense of unity.” Ancestry myths were based on the lives and exploits of heroes, who were seen as divine founders of a gentes. The tales of revenge, war, blood feud and kinship helped groups of Germans to unite because of a sense of shared ancestry to a specific individual.

According to Geary (The Myth of Nations), some historians believe that the royal families were those primarily associated with the particular myths of a group. It is also possible that different families had other traditions and stories and attempted to impose these as preeminent over those of other families. Such stories and traditions were also probably more dispersed throughout a society than being seen as the sole property of one family. If this is so, then Geary asserted that, during the fourth and fifth centuries, when certain individuals emerged as tribal leaders, they and their families became associated, or they claimed for themselves, the traditional myths and stories of the tribe. Later, we will see how this may be the case with how the Burgundians came to associated themselves with the Gibichungs (or Niebelungs).

The Germanic tribes were led by two sorts of kings, one religious and the other military. These men ruled the tribe by a complicated mixture of single or joint rule, dependent upon the particular situation in which the tribe found itself. The first type of chief, identified as being more religious in nature, was the thiudans. He belonged to a traditional royal family that was associated with the mythic, historical and cultural origins of the tribe and was a symbol of tribal stability. In time of war, military authority was given to the martial, usually non-royal leader, called a dux (or general) by Tacitus. These leaders presided over the Germanic council of free warriors, called a Thing. The organization of a Thing varied, but in general, it gathered to judge its members, discuss war, and to formulate tribal policy. The Thing was the core of the fundamental idea of kindred, or gentes, which was the basis of Germanic society. Yet, tribes were constantly in flux as every disruption of internal or external peace could result in a splintered clan and new clans reformed along different lines. This natural state of tribal ebb and flow was exacerbated by contact with the Roman Empire, which intensified both kinds of disruption.

UP NEXT: Characteristics of Early Germanic Migrations

SOURCES:

Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany.
Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Early Germanic Society - Women and Marriage

Women were considered valuable contributors to Germanic society. According to Suzanne Fonay Wemple they “provided a network of kinship ties” and “gave inspirational support and were nurturers and providers.” They were responsible for housework and at least some helped to plow fields. According to Tacitus, the wives of the barbarians went to battle with their husbands to tend wood, bring food and offer general encouragement. The historian Ammianus claimed that some of these wives also fought. Tacitus also said that the Germans “conceive that in woman is a certain uncanny and prophetic sense: and so they neither scorn to consult them nor slight their answers” and that they revered many women ancestors.

Wemple also explains that German marriage was not a “legal relationship” but “an arrangement, accepted as social fact, whereby a man cohabitated with a woman for the purposes of copulation, procreation, and the division of labor.” Gender was the main determinant of labor: men were warriors while women raised the children, worked the fields and took care of the home. In Germanic society, it was considered a mother’s duty to provide the primary example and instruction in religious and moral matters. As a result, it was the Germanic women, be they mothers, grandmothers, or aunts, who played a key role in the upbringing of Germanic males when they were most impressionable.

UP NEXT: Early Germanic Society - Social Groups

SOURCES:
Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister 500 to 900, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
Tacitus, Germania.
Ammianus Marcellinus, The Surviving Books of the History, trans. John C. Rolfe, Ammianus Marcellinus, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939).

Early Germanic Society - Sacrifice

Human and animal sacrifice was practiced, with mostly domesticated livestock serving as the ritualistic object, though dogs and wild animals also were used. The animals were eaten in sacrificial meals, with the remains often deposited in bogs. As Malcolm Todd wrote in his Northern Barbarians:

The prominence of the horse in the animal sacrifices deserves special notice. Commonly only the skull, tail and feet are represented….This rite of burying the skull and extremities of the skeleton links the Germanic world with the Baltic regions and the Steppes.

The dog appears to have been the most sacrificed animal in many regions, though there is no evidence that any portion of the dog was eaten in a ritualistic meal. Their sacrifice was probably linked to a fertility cult, although it could also have served as a substitute for a man as skeletons of both often occur in the same archeological digs.

Evidence of human sacrifice exists, mostly among prisoners that were sacrificed to war gods, though there were other rituals that seemed to require human sacrifice to different gods. According to Todd, the corpses found in the bogs of northern Europe have provided much evidence in this area. (Todd also hypothesizes that, much like the ancient Egyptians who buried their cats with them, perhaps the Germans buried their dogs for companionship in the afterlife.)

Osterby Man

A.D. 1-100
Found near Osterby, Germany in 1948

Only his decapitated head was found, wrapped in a deerskin cape. He was likely killed by a blow to his left temple before he was decapitated. His hair, reddened by chemicals in the peat, is tied in an elaborate hairstyle called a Swabian knot. The Roman historian Tacitus, who lived in Osterby Man's era, describes the hairstyle as typical of the Suebi tribe of Germany.

Windeby Girl
A.D. 1-200
Found near Windeby, Germany in 1952
It's unclear exactly how she died, but given that she was merely 13 to 14 years old and that she was buried in a bog with a woolen band covering her eyes, it was likely from unnatural causes. Only five yards from her body the corpse of a man lay buried, and some experts suggest that the two were punished for an adulterous affair.... Windeby Girl had part of her hair cut off at the time of her death.

Rendswühren Man

100 B.C.-A.D. 100
Found near Kiel, Germany in 1871

The year Rendswühren Man was discovered, a self-taught German scholar named Johanna Mestorf—who coined the word Moorleiche (bog body)—published the first catalogue of such finds. She interpreted Rendswühren Man as a murder victim. He was 40 to 50 years old when he died, likely from a blow to his head. Near his body were the remnants of a woolen cloak and a skin cape. His caretakers in the 19th century smoked his body in order to preserve it.

UP NEXT: Early Germanic Society - Women and Marriage

SOURCES:

Malcolm Todd, Northern Barbarians
NOVA, "The Perfect Corpse"

Early Germanic Society - What did they make?

Rings and brooches with gold filigree provide evidence of Germans working in gold dating from the mid-first century B.C. to the beginning of the first century A.D. The Germans actually preferred Roman silver to gold and evidence of them working in silver dates to roughly the same period.

While working in these precious metals was important to the Germans, and was perhaps more importantly of interest to the Romans, the Germans viewed iron-working as the most important craft of all. Evidence has been found of large iron manufacturing centers, but most iron was produced in smaller quantities by local smiths.

Thus, Tacitus’ assertion that “iron is not plentiful among them” seems to have been derived from ignorance rather than fact. Salt was also an important commodity and was often the object of tribal conflict. Pottery, wood-working, textiles and leather were also important industries. In all of these areas, Germanic technology progressed in fits and starts, often stagnating in isolated spots or progressing rapidly in others.

UP NEXT: Early Germanic Society - Sacrifice

SOURCES:

Tacitus, Germania
Malcolm Todd, The Northern Barbarians

Early Germanic Society - How'd They Live?

In general, archeological findings have indicated that the Germanic people living east of the Rhine were primarily pastoral, though not nomadic, like the people of the Eurasian steppes, because the climate of Germany did not necessitate such movement. They did not spend all of their time tending herds as they also hunted and farmed to supplement their diet of meat, milk, and cheese.

The settlements which existed in Germania during this time ranged from the small, single farm to a group of farms situated in what would best be described as a village. Archeologists and historians have determined that the early Germans tended to stay within a certain territory for long periods of time. However, they would occasionally move their homes to a new site.

They were not entirely dependent, or socially defined by, their possession of animals, though it was their primary means of subsistence and source of prestige, dignity and wealth. Cattle were the most important livestock, but geography and environment determined whether sheep or pigs were the second most important. They were also farmers, and barley, oats and rye were the most common grains, while vegetables and herbs were also cultivated.

Additionally, fruits, such as apples, berries and grapes were gathered, though not cultivated. Thus, with the ability to raise, grow, or gather a wide array of food, and the ability to barter for that which they could not produce on their own, the Germanic economy was able to support fairly large communities, much like the neighboring western Roman provinces.

UP NEXT: Early Germanic Society - What did they do?

SOURCES:

E.A. Thompson, “The Germans in the Time of Caesar,” in The Barbarian Invasions: Catalyst of a New Order, ed. Katherine Fischer Drew, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans.
Malcolm Todd, The Northern Barbarians.

Interpretations of Burgundian Origins or Who Are These Guys?

So where did the Burgundians come from? For that matter, where did other Germanic tribes originate? Entire forests have been pulped so that historians could attempt to answer those questions. Understandably, it's easier to supply a general answer regarding the origins of those whom we call the Germanic people. But devils are in details, especially when trying to parse out the origins of one particular group. Yet, historians continue to try!

Pliny the Elder mentioned the Burgodiones in his Natural History (c. A.D. 79). He believed that these Burgodiones were members of the “Vandal race” of Germans and placed them near the Oder and Vistula rivers. Later, Ptolemy, in his Geography (c. A.D. 150), wrote of the Burguntae, who lived between the Suevus and the Vistula rivers. Additionally, Jordanes, in his Origins and Deeds of the Goths, mentioned the Burgundians, claiming that Fastida, King of the Gepidae, had nearly destroyed them near the Vistula. These early writers attempted to classify Germans by using either a geographical system, as did Pliny and Ptolemy, or a combination of this with a mythical or genealogical system, as did Tacitus in his Germania.

Historians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries utilized linguistic evidence to determine that the name of a Swedish island, Bornholm, located in the Baltic Sea east of Denmark, south of Sweden, and north of Poland, was a shortened form of Burgundarholm. This, they concluded, was the ancestral holm of the Burgundians. [For examples of early efforts at philological investigation, see George Hempl, “The Linguistic and Ethnografic Status of the Burgundians,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 39 (1908) and Kemp Malone, “Ptolemy’s Skandia,” The American Journal of Philology 45, no.4 (1924)].

In addition to this linguistic evidence, historians interpreted written sources and oral tradition such that they placed the Burgundians among those East German tribes that migrated from Scandinavia toward the Vistula during the first century. This confirmed the location of the Burgundians as portrayed in the writings of Pliny, Tacitus, Ptolemy, and Jordanes. However, more recent scholarship has called these attempts at linguistic forensics into question. For example, Walter Goffart (Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation) argues that Scandinavian toponyms, like Borgundarholm, could be derived from a number of other sources and thus mean something other than a place where a people called the Burgundians once lived.

The use of archeology to supplement the writing of history came to the fore in the 1880s, led by German historians. The centerpiece of their theory was an idea of ethnic homogeneity that allowed them to link specific archeological finds with particular people mentioned in the classic works of Pliny, Tacitus, and others, as well as the work of the contemporary philologists. As such, their interpretation of archeological evidence confirmed or only slightly modified these beliefs.

As Malcolm Todd (The Northern Barbarians: 100 B.C.-A.D. 300) explained, these historians were led by Gustav Kossinna, whose theories were considered the standard treatment of the subject until World War II. Kossinna’s method convinced himself and others that the Germans had been an ethnically homogenous people from the Bronze Age through the Roman Iron Age. This was a product of the nationalism that swept Europe in the nineteenth century and used nefariously by the Third Reich during the Second World War. In the years immediately following World War II, an understandable reaction occurred against this nationalistic, ethnically homogeneous interpretation.

Unfortunately, during this initial backlash, some critics went too far in not recognizing any sort of Germanic culture prior to 100 B.C. It has since been determined that a definite, Germanic material culture can be traced to the northern Iron Age of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Yet, the idea of an ethnically and culturally united Germanic people is no longer supported, though the various “Germanic people” did share some common traits.

NEXT: Early Germanic Society - How'd They Live?


SOURCES:
Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942).
Ptolemy, Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, trans. and ed. Edward Luther Stevenson (New York: New York Public Library, 1932; reprint, New York: Dover Books, 1991).
Jordanes, The Origins and Deeds of the Goths. trans. Charles C. Mierow [book on-line] (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1915).
Tacitus, Germania, in Tacitus, trans. Maurice Hutton and rev. E.H.Warmington, vol. 1, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus, Loeb Classical Series (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914. Reprint 1970).
Lucien Musset, The Germanic Invasions: The Making of Europe AD 400-600, trans. Edward and Columba James (University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975).
Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation,(Princeton University Press, 1987).
J.B. Bury, The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967; reprint, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).
Robert Latouche, Caesar to Charlemagne: The Beginnings of France, trans. Jennifer Nicholson (London: Phoenix House, 1968).
Malcolm Todd, The Northern Barbarians: 100 B.C.-A.D. 300. (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1975).