Ostrogoths[gothic-l] The old Border between Norway and Sweden.

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Dear Bertil,
What an odd answer that was to my post !  My first perception of
your post was that you have terribly misundersood what I wrote.
And again your post is formulated in such a way that a third
person who reads your post, will get a completely wrong impression
of what it was that I wrote, which effect is indeed much increased
by the habit of delegating all quotes to the end of the post,
so that it is not so easy for a third party to compare what you write
with what I originally wrote.
 

You ask about specifically "Norwegian" research on the Goths.
But the only thing involved in the argument I posted, as should have
been clear, was a precise reading of Jordanes' text, and comparing it with
well known geographical features, that may perhaps be more readily
accessible to me, since I frequently drive through these areas 
and thus dispose of the region's auto atlas. If you are specifically
interested in Norwegian research, which is frequently performed by people
from other nations who hold academic positions here, I think the best
to contact http://www.uio.no where you will find the relevant links.

Certainly Professor Lehmann's is not an "interpretation", in the
sense that he "invented" it. As you know, Winfred P. Lehmann is the
compiler of "A Gothic Etymological Dictionary", and the entries
there certainly only reflect the current opinion of science, as it
is reflected in its journals.

Under the letter "O" the dictionary has the major part of a column
devoted to "Ostrogothae" and he refers to a scholar "Wagner" who
has published on its etymology ca. 1967. He also refers to 
Hachman ca. 1970.

For Ostrogothae he has the name explanation "Shining Goths",
i.e. not "East Goths". He refers the term back to words for 
"brightness", "dawn", and "Easter".

Any way, I think we seriously ought to consider that "Ostro"
does not necessarily refer to a geographic direction, but
rather to the quality of "light".


BTW Why do you say that Winifred Lehmann  "offers no argument"?
In fact, etymological dictionaries abound with references to the 
literature, where things are explained in depth. So it is simply
a terrible distortion of the facts to say such a thing. What he
offers as argument is of course all the references that he cites.

And besides, the Goths were a wandering people, and in the
beginning of the 1st milennium, they were constantly wandering 
and on the move. Hence if at one time or another the "Ostrogoths"
did indeed live "East" (a relative term), then such a relationship
can easily become meaningless as soon as they begin to wander.

If you reread my post, you will see that I said nothing about
"Urheimat", which I consider an impossible idea.

All I said was that at the point in time when Jordanes describes 
the Ostrogothae (or Jordanes' source), at that particular time 
they seem to have lived NEAR the later Bohuslän. Not IN Bohuslän.
I never said that. In fact, what I said was that the "Raumaricii"
lived in the later Bohuslän.  Hence, if the Raumaricii lived there,
the place would presumably already be taken.

I also indicated a typical distance of ca. 200 km, which is the
distance from Oslo to the Göta river mouth. (approximately)
So of you draw a circle with a radius of 2oo km 
with Bohuslän as centre, you 'may' find the home of
the Ostrogothae some time prior to AD 551 (the date 
of Jordanes' book).   --    I did not say 'must'.


Then you ask (again) for the opinion of Norwegian archaeologist(?).
But as far as I know, there is no specific research on the
subject "Goths" going on in Norway, nor has there been,
as far as I know. But that doesn't mean much, because I 
mostly just read what scholars in general say, and I don't
worry so much from what country they are.

What archaelogist do, is usually to excavate sites where it
looks like they may find something, which is often a matter
of routine on land where housing development takes place.
Then they have to dig fast, because the housing developers
are often impatient. (many interesting discoveries have been
made that way) But they don't say: today we are going to look
for "Goths". And also. when they find things, they very rarely
say "and these are Goths". But of course, on occasion they did find
objects that are similar to objects found near the Black sea. 
But I don't think they then exclaim "these are Goths" or 
anything like that. okay?


In another post, I also noted that some of the writers
of antiquity who wrote on its history were educated 
as rhetors (speakers). Such professions were probably
also common in Constantinople. And hence I think the 
classical principles of rhetoric survived into the early
Middle Ages, for example Martianus Capella and Augustinus.
The point is that when they spoke, and also when they wrote,
they used a logical system. Such systems were in principle
arbitrary, but in practice it worked by mentally "tying
things together" such that the sequence of one type of items
(locii) gave the key to another sequence of items (topoi).
[something like that]  


Jordanes a monk, you say? Isn't that a bit of a mischaracterisation?
My dictionary says he was notary to the Gothic ruler Gunthigis
Baza. That suggests that his background was in the civilian professions.
(notary =/? rhetor)
However, it is true that he at one point converted to Catholicism
and then went to live in a monastery. But by that time he was already
a mature individual with an education as well as a civil career
behind him.


On the order of peoples names:
As I said in my post, it is the sequences that are mentioned
in a single sentence that are important. Jordanes' book
shows the signs of having been compiled from several sources,
and Jordanes himself probably didn't understand the exact
significicance of everything he copied. But he nevertheles
faithfully copies as best as he can from the documents
at his dispossal. And in the process he must have preserved
the original sequences of names in many cases.

There is no reason that all peoples with "Goth" or "Gaut"
in their names should have been neighbors. Because peoples 
were movable entities. And even if they were once neighbors
this could easily have changed in the course of some centuries.

Whether the "Saami" lived in Skaane?
Well, here you'd have to ask the archaeologist, how they interpret
their finds. There were some sacrificial(?) sites found in mid-Sweden
that they attribute to an old hunter/gatherer culture that lived
on the Stone Age level. (arrowpoints of bone and flints)
These are thought to refer to the predecessors of what we today
call "Saami", but who were in the past usually called "Finnar"
and "Lappar", and who were also desribed in medieval literature
(to wit in the "Historia Norvegica") and also by classical authors
such as Tacitus, and of course also by Jordanes, in the relevant
paragraphs, which are the ones we are discussing now. In some cases
it is possible to document that Jordanes' sequences of names
reflect real geographic sequences. Hence one may hypothesize that
some of the other sequences may also reflect geographical ordering,
even if such belong to the set sequences where such ordering has
not been collated with other sources, and thus stand on their own.
What I said in my post was in fact that I do *not believe Saami lived
as far South as Skåne, which I thought I expressed clearly when I wrote:

  "which is of course possible, but somwhat less likely.
  (because one generally assumes that the Saami live North
  of a certain debatable line in  Scandinavia)."


Best regards
Keth




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