[gothic-l] Migration theories

[dirk at SMRA.CO.UK]

I attended an interesting lecture at the British Museum the other
day.
 The speaker presented material about migrations in history and
illustrated most of her points with reference to Germanic migrations
and especially the Goths. The speaker placed various types of
migrations on a continuum with a full scale migration of an entire
people on the one end and the migration of a small but powerful elite
towards the other end. The speaker said that while the Gothic
migration to the Black Sea was probably of the first type, the first
migration of the Goths from Gotland and/or Southern Sweden was
probably of the second type. Thus, she suggested that only a chieftan
or royal family with their retainers migrated from somewhere 'north
of
the Baltic Sea' to establish their rule among the Germanic people
living in the Vistula region of modern Poland. She even postulated
that some migrations (she mentionen the Eruli as a possible
candidate)
 consisted of nothing more than the re-adoption of a 'famous and
heroic
name' by new people. In other words she explains the 'appearance' of
Eruli in far affield places and in particular the re-migration to
Denmark with the simple adoption of that name by a new tribe or at
best the movement of a small group of people (a chieftan with
retainers) instead of an entire people. I found these points quite
interesting.

Dirk


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