[gothic-l] Re: The Scandinavian Origin of the Goths and Other Germanic Peoples

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hello Dirk,

You wrote:

>Personally I think that any claim of origin for the Germanic people
>is  inevitably incorrect. The whole procesess took place dynamically
>over time and space and my comment was targeted against claims that
>the Germanic people originated in Scandinavia which is just as wrong
>as the claim the the Germanic people originated in today's Germany.

Yes, I agree that the "fazit" is, that it is simply not known.
I, in my turn react a bit against (some) Germans who seem to think
that "of course" the Germanics originitated (somewhere) in Germany,
and think of the Scandinavians as a kind of German settlers.

"Gotland" was only chosen as an example - a kind of compromise,
a kind of "let's meet in the middle" (of the Baltic).
But it is of course true that it probably is a hospitable place
that must have been relatively more isolated than the
Danish islands. I have not been to Gotland, but you say that it
is "too small". That reminds me of a saying [about the Zurich
bankers]: "Auch die Gnomen haben klein angefangen>"

On another account, that is only distantly related to the present
discussion, I always pay attention when I hear about discoveries
of very early human remains in SW Scandinavia, and it now seems
that human beings also lived on the Scandinavian peninsula
_during_ the Ice Age. (in the coastal areas where everything wasn't
covered with ice, as was previously thought)

Sweden however, seems to have been _entirely_ covered with ice.
That is clear whereever a lot of sand and rubble is found.

The question then is what people lived off.

Archaeologists who have tried to popularize their insights,
have represented the people of those days as a kind of eskimos,
using harpoons and small boats for hunting and fishing.

So maybe, if there during periods was _a lot of fish_, there
may also have been a rapid increase in the population,
as long as they lived near a place here there was a good food-supply.
But on the whole, I think the main viewpoint is that people in those
days were much more mobile than they became thousands of years later
when agriculture was taken up.

But when we consider the question of the arising of Proto-Germanic
as a separate language, we were of course already well into the
agricultural period. A linear kind of reasoning would then
imply that it was the agriculturalists (=Indo Europeans)
who became the first Germans, wherever their centre of
development was. But was it like that? Perhaps linguistics gives
some hints here; i.e. word counts could
indicate what kind of society it can have been. But of
such I only have a memory of someone saying
that Germanic contains a large percentage of extraneous words.

Perhaps one should also consider that a strong iron age culture
could only arise where there was a good supply of iron ore.
Of course, Sweden _was_ such a place, with lots of timber
as well. (timber for producing charcoal to process the iron)

Keth







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