[gothic-l] Goths, Eruli in the East

[Bertil Haggman]

The Harvard Professor Omeljan Pritsak in his pathbreaking
_The Origin of Rus'_ has brought up the extensive East
Scandinavian/East Germanic cultural traces and connections
between the Goths, Eruli in the east and Scandinavia.

He also points to the extensive contacts between Goths/Eruli
plus many others and the steppe peoples. He also notes
that the Goths/Eruli and other East Germanic peoples can be
regarded as the predecessors and the models of the Vikings.
Here Pritsak establishes an important link between the Goths
in the east and the later vikings. It is thus important to see the
whole period 150 AD to around 1250 AD in its totality.

Of course the contacts between the steppe peoples and the East
Germanics took many forms. There were military campaigns and
clashes, combined piratical expeditions into the territories
of the sedentary states, Germanic trade expeditions to the east,
joint settlement  and founding of kingdoms on the ruins of the
west Roman empire (Alans were the most prominent allies
in this). But we must not forget both the First and the Second
Great Gothic Kingdoms in the east.

It is unfortunate that there is not a wealth of extant sources of these
highly interesting interrelations. I have just had a very interesting
exchange with an Italian scholar who pointed out the traces of
Iranian culture in Gothic Italy and he has promised to provide me
with further details as times go by.

The problem of course in the early times is that neither group,
with some exceptions, were literate. One can however believe
in the possibility that they developed similar ideologies. For example
there is indications that Gothic mercenaries in Roman service
worshiped the Iranian war god Mithra. Steppe myth can have
been reintroduced in Scandinavia which had fallen into oblivion
in the agricultural life in Scandinavia but was taken up through the
contacts with the practicing Nomads. The Poetic Edda provides
ample examples that Attila became the main hero of Germanic epic
even going so far as to being presented as the embodiment of
an ideal ruler, although he and Ermanarik fared less well than Rolf Kraki,
for example.

Bertil Haggman


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