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

[Alburysteve at AOL.COM]

Hi Troels:

>  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.

Very possibly though earlier historians were quite clear on the ethnicity of
these peoples.  It is generally true that ancient ethnographers tended to
borrow other peoples history when they wanted to establish their subject's
antiquity.  I mentioned it only to save another subscriber fruitless research
because he had taken at face value Jordanes' claim that the "Goths" had
invented the bowstring.

>  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.

Very true.  But the people in question, the Thracian Getai who resisted the
Persians, lived in the region half a millenium before the arrival of the
Goths.  This in not a minor temporal dislocation.

>  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 -

Again, perhaps true.   When Theodoric entered Italy, he was accompanied by
some Bessoi, people of a Thracian tribe.  But that was almost a thousand
years after the event in question.

>  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.

While we may be generally guilty of this, in this case I am drawing a very
specific distinction between the Thracians tribes who lived at the time of
the Goths and those who preceded the Goths by five hundred years or more.
Our study of the Goths would devolve into chaos if, like Jordanes, we did not
distinguish them culturally and linguistically from the antecedent Skythians,
Thracians, Parthians, Amazons, Dacians, and other peoples real or mythical.
A case in point is Keth's ponderings over the 'Getic' bowstrings, something
he would not have done if Jordanes had not misidentified the Getai as a
Gothic people.

Regards,

Steve

You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>.

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/