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Chapter 4 [ordanes's Getica and the Disputed Authenticity ofGothic Origins from Scandinavia The noted Prussian historian Heinrich von Sybel said, ''A nation that does not keep a living connection with its origins is close to withering, as certainly so as a branch that has been cut from its roots. We are still today what we were yesterday:'! This is a harmless remark-one historian's statement among many others affirming the civic relevance of his subject. It might be paraphrased as "History is important. A country that does not cultivate its history is like a branch torn from its trunk." What has importance when such a saying is invoked is the content poured by users into the neutral outlines. Is it enough for us Americans to maintain a living connection with the Revolution and George Washington, or do we need to go back to the first European immigrants, or to the homelands from which the Europeans carne, or more remotely still to the past of native Americans? Should we understand ourselves to be still what the Hopewell people once were? A lighthearted answer might be, All the above and much more; you cannot have too much history. But, in some contexts (and Sybel's looks like one of them), history is deeply serious. To touch certain parts of it with the scalpel of criticism seems comparable to tearing out the heart of a nation. In the 1690S Gabriel Daniel was forced to retract the opening volume of his Histoire de France because he dismissed the historicity of the Merovingian ancestor Pharamond. So patriotism, faith in the good old story, triumphed over the temerity of the critic.' Cherished tales of origins die hard. A Privileged Origin? The report that the earliest Goths departed from Scandinavia for the Continent at some undetermined moment in the distant past still commands an impressive body of believers. The most recent translator of Iordanes's Gothic history into [ordanes and GothicOrigins 57 French prizes the link to Scandinavia as "all the more precious information in that it is traced to the oral tradition of the Goths." Experts in Germanic literature ' who instantly discount reports of Trojan or Scythian or Noachic origins as being fabulous, solemnly assent: emigration from Scandinavia is an authentic "tribal memory:' the one kernel of historicity to be plucked from an unholy stew of misconceptions and fabrications.' And that emigration from the far north holds not only for the Goths but for quite a few other peoples including the Burgundians and the Vandals. The Middle Ages mixed together all sorts of origin legends, but amid "the most peculiar combinations of diverse traditions, ... the autonomous (eigenstiindig) Germanic tradition succeeded in winning out. Knowledge of homeland and migration route was not Iost." It is as though medieval Germans had such critical sensitivity, or obstinate patriotism, that in spite ofbeing assailed by competing origin legends oflearned origin, they clung fast to the old, true one reaching back to the frozen homelands. This characterization of medieval Germans cannot be accurate. The amiably messy origin stories found in medieval and Renaissance writings by no means attest to the "success" of an autonomous Germanic tradition in "winning out." This alleged success required the discernment and acumen of modern scholars, who are indeed trained (as earlier scholars were not) to detect a difference between the descent of Goths from Scandinavia and their descent from the Scythians or Magog, grandson of Noah. Even here, there is a decisive condition: the source of the Scandinavian version has to be preferable for serious, historical reasons to the obviously literary alternatives. This, too, cannot be taken for granted. "Grigo Gothica, the Particular Origin of the Goths" The story that the Goths (and others) departed from Scandinavia in the hoary mists of time-long before the Trojan War-survives originally in only one mid-sixth-century document, the GothicHistory, or Getica, of Iordanes." In the words of Peter Heather, "The core of any argument in favor of [a] link between the Goths and Scandinavia remains, therefore, the Geticds account of Berig's migration." A later author, Arne Soby Christensen, states, "It is still only through an analysis of the text in the Geticathat we can hope to verify or refute [ordanes 's claim that the Goths once emigrated from Scandza-i-a.cy: years before their kingdom met its downfall in 540."7 The position is not quite so simple as that. To some present-day scholars, Jordanes barely exists. The onus of the...

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