[gothic-l] Gepids

[Bertil Häggman]

Steve,

Neither could I find it in my Latin-Swedish
dictionary so it might after all not exist.
I did note it in some encyclopedia on
Germanic history, but that statement
might be incorrect. I have not been able
to find gepidus in any other connection but
if I do, I'll report.

On Gapt we disagree as I see the origin
of Gaut from  the meaning gjuta, goet, gjutit (pour in
English) of course related to the goet/
got/gut/geat name.

The god Gaut is likely a fertility god, a god
of creation. The Swedish byword for Gaut is
"avlaren" (if such the word exists in English
it would be "the begetter" from beget, or maybe
the multiplier). 

For the "avlaren" meaning see Professor Ake 
Hultcrantz, "Vem är vem i nordisk mytologi", Stockholm 
1991.

The only problem is of course
the "p" instead of "t", so I don't know if it is
linguistically possible. 

Gaut was the father of the Goetar (which are most
likely the gautoi of for instance Procopius, or the
gouthai of Ptolemaeus).

Maybe also one has to reflect on the background of the
Goetar and Nordic mythology. The Goetar might well have
emerged already during the Bronze Age while the Nordic
myths are mainly from Snorri Sturlason, that is there are
2000 to 3000 years between the emerging Goetar and
Snorri. The question is if the gepids also if the Gepids
existed as a seperate people already in Scandza. They
certainly maintained a separate identity throughout,
fighting as subjugate, I think, on the side of Attila.
In 567 AD they were completely crushed by the Langobards
and disappear from history.

I have also been wondering if Icelandic "gifdar" are the Gepids?

Gepidically

Bertil
 



> Gepidus is late Latin?  My (classical) latin dictionary fails to even include 
> a gep- root.  Is it a loan word?  Sorry for all the questions. 

> I suspected that the tribal name was a corruption of something and this makes 
> much sense.  My initial reaction to Jordanes' version of Gothic origins was 
> to see it as a reflex of the wider creation legend where the world is made 
> from the corpse of the giant Ymir.  Gapt might be head (haubith), Hulmul the 
> "helm" (hilms), Augis the eyes (augo), and Amal the shoulders (ams).  Being 
> several christian generations removed from the pagan source, it is hard to 
> say how jumbled the terms might have become by the time Jordanes (being no 
> Snorri) records them.  Comparisons have been made between the 
> "deconstruction" of Ymir in Norse mythology to similar Vedic reflexes 
> (Puhvel's Comparative Mythology:284ff) and, of course, the propensity to 
> carry tribal geneologies back to the "first man" is well documented (cf 
> Turville-Petre's Myth and Religion of the North, Ch 9).



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