[gothic-l] Re: Mars =? Gaut/Gapt (Tyr) - Origin of tribes

[trbrandt at POST9.TELE.DK]

--- In gothic-l at y..., Alburysteve at a... wrote:
>
> In the Getica, Jordanes has assumed that peoples mentioned by
earlier
> historians in the area later occupied by the Goths were also
Goths.
> Following the proper names and the events, it's pretty  easy to
identify
> Jordanes' "Goths" as Scythians, Thracians, Dacians, etc.
>
> Rgds,
>
> Steve O'Brien
> Albury, Ontario

Hi Steve
and other contributors

You are probably right in your identification, but Jordanes might
also be a little right in case "disappeared" groups of such people
joined the Goths who conquered their territory. To whom did "their
history" belong? Maybe one of the "mistakes" of Jordanes was, that he
or one of his sources tried to place them in a single chronological
order.

I believe that most of the confusion being discussed at this list
regarding the origin of Goths and other tribes is caused by groups of
tribe members or a whole tribe following a strong and succesfull
leader or army of another tribe - sometimes after being subdued. This
was of course especially possible among the Germanic tribes who were
often closely related due to language and religion, but in the Hunnic
campaign a lot of Germanic and Asiatic people were also mixed up.
These mixtures of tribes and following splits were natural among the
migrating groups and the groups of Roman mercenaries not being tied
up by a farming area - and this was just the case for many people in
the Migration Ages.

This does not mean that the tribal membership was without importance
as the tribal structure and its chieftain family probably often
survived inside the new group - sometimes at a lower social level.
When they worshipped their own ancestorgods, the old structure must
have been especially strong.

Maybe Ingemar is right about non ethnic leagues like the Gauts
binding tribes together around the Baltic Sea and Kattegat at an
early stage, but for a migrating tribe the strong leader was so
important, that a devine status was natural if he was succesfull -
and consequently was followed by foreign warriors wanting to share
his success. Therefore Gaut (whom we don't know much about) or his
decendents probably changed to characters like the warriorgods Wothan-
Woden-Odin-Tyr (By Roman writers translated to Ares-Mars-Mercury).
Because of the above mentioned changings we can find the same heroic
gods/ancestors and legends in different shapes and spellings in the
cronicles of several of the later groups of more settled people
formed/merged 450-550.

This is of course not the only truth, but I think this will guarantee
us a lot of confusion if we try to analyze the history of a specific
tribe or tribal religion by regarding it as the same entity through
hundreds of years. This is just what historians like Jordanes - and
we in these discussions - are often doing.

Regards
Troels



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