If I have followed in these lectures the better known and more widely
received etymology of the name Goth, I have done so out of no disrespect
to Dr. Latham; but simply because his theory seems to me adhuc sub
judice. It is this, as far as I understand it. That 'Goth' was not the
aboriginal name of the race. That they were probably not so called till
they came into the land of the Getae, about the mouths of the Danube.
That the Teutonic name for the Ostrogoths was Grutungs, and that of the
Visigoths (which he does not consider to mean West-Goths) Thervings,
Thuringer. That on reaching the land of the Getae they took their name;
'just as the Kentings of Anglo-Saxon England took name from the Keltic
country of Kent;' and that the names Goth, Gothones, Gothini were
originally given to Lithuanians by their Sclavonic neighbours. I merely
state the theory, and leave it for the judgment of others.
The principal points which Dr. Latham considers himself to have
established, are--
That the area and population of the Teutonic tribes have been, on the
authority of Tacitus, much overrated; many tribes hitherto supposed to be
Teutonic being really Sclavonic, &c.
This need not shock our pride, if proved--as it seems to me to be. The
nations who have influenced the world's destiny have not been great, in
the modern American sense of 'big;' but great in heart, as our
forefathers were. The Greeks were but a handful at Salamis; so were the
Romans of the Republic; so were the Spaniards of America; so, probably,
were the Aztecs and Incas whom they overthrew; and surely our own
conquerors and re-conquerers of Hindostan have shewn enough that it is
not numbers, but soul, which gives a race the power to rule.
Neither need we object to Dr. Latham's opinion, that more than one of the
tribes which took part in the destruction of the Empire were not
aboriginal Germans, but Sclavonians Germanized, and under German leaders.
It may be so. The custom of enslaving captives would render pure
Teutonic blood among the lower classes of a tribe the exception and not
the rule; while the custom of chiefs choosing the 'thegns,' 'gesitha,' or
'comites,' who lived and died as their companions-in-arms, from among the
most valiant of the unfree, would tend to produce a mixed blood in the
upper classes also, and gradually assimilate the whole mass to the
manners and laws of their Teutonic lords. Only by some such actual
superiority of the upper classes to the lower can I explain the deep
respect for rank and blood, which distinguishes, and will perhaps always
distinguish, the Teutonic peoples. Had there even been anything like a
primaeval equality among our race, a hereditary aristocracy could never
have arisen, or if arising for a while, never could have remained as a
fact which all believed in, from the lowest to the highest. Just, or
unjust, the institution represented, I verily believe, an ethnological
fact. The golden-haired hero said to his brown-haired bondsman, 'I am a
gentleman, who have a "gens," a stamm, a pedigree, and know from whom I
am sprung. I am a Garding, an Amalung, a Scylding, an Osing, or what
not. I am a son of the gods. The blood of the Asas is in my veins. Do
you not see it? Am I not wiser, stronger, more virtuous, more beautiful
than you? You must obey me, and be my man, and follow me to the death.
Then, if you prove a worthy thane, I will give you horse, weapons,
bracelets, lands; and marry you, it may be, to my daughter or my niece.
And if not, you must remain a son of the earth, grubbing in the dust of
which you were made.' And the bondsman believed him; and became his
lord's man, and followed him to the death; and was thereby not degraded,
but raised out of selfish savagery and brute independence into loyalty,
usefulness, and self-respect. As a fact, that is the method by which the
thing was done: done;--very ill indeed, as most human things are done;
but a method inevitable--and possibly right; till (as in England now) the
lower classes became ethnologically identical with the upper, and
equality became possible in law, simply because it existed in fact.
But the part of Dr. Latham's 'Germania' to which I am bound to call most
attention, because I have not followed it, is that interesting part of
the Prolegomena, in which he combats the generally received theory, that,
between the time of Tacitus and that of Charlemagne, vast masses of
Germans had migrated southward from between the Elbe and the Vistula; and
that they had been replaced by the Sclavonians who certainly were there
in Charlemagne's days.
Dr. Latham argues against this theory with a great variety of facts and
reasons. But has he not overstated his case on some points?
Need the migrations necessary for this theory have been of 'unparalleled
magnitude and rapidity'?
As for the 'unparalleled completeness' on which he lays much stress, from
the fact that no remnants of Teutonic population are found in the
countries evacuated:
Is it the fact that 'history only tells us of German armies having
advanced south'? Do we not find four famous cases--the irruption of the
Cimbri and Teutons into Italy; the passage of the Danube by the
Visigoths; and the invasions of Italy first by the Ostrogoths, then by
the Lombards--in which the nations came with men, women, and children,
horses, cattle, and dogs, bag and baggage? May not this have been the
custom of the race, with its strong feeling for the family tie; and may
not this account for no traces of them being left behind?
Does not Dr. Latham's theory proceed too much on an assumption that the
Sclavonians dispossest the Teutons by force? And is not this assumption
his ground for objecting that the movement was effected improbably 'by
that division of the European population (the Sclavonic and Lithuanian)
which has, within the historic period, receded before the Germanic'?
Are these migrations, though 'unrepresented in any history' (i.e.
contemporaneous), really 'unrepresented in any tradition'? Do not the
traditions of Jornandes and Paulus Diaconus, that the Goths and the
Lombards came from Scandinavia, represent this very fact?--and are they
to be set aside as naught? Surely not. Myths of this kind generally
embody a nucleus of truth, and must be regarded with respect; for they
often, after all arguments about them are spent, are found to contain the
very pith of the matter.
Are the 'phenomena of replacement and substitution' so very strange--I
will not say upon the popular theory, but at least on one half-way
between it and Dr. Latham's? Namely--
That the Teutonic races came originally, as some of them say they did,
from Scandinavia, Denmark, the South Baltic, &c.
That they forced their way down, wave after wave, on what would have been
the line of least resistance--the Marches between the Gauls, Romanized or
otherwise, and the Sclavonians. And that the Alps and the solid front of
the Roman Empire turned them to the East, till their vanguard found
itself on the Danube.
This would agree with Dr. Latham's most valuable hint, that Markmen, 'Men
of the Marches,' was perhaps the name of many German tribes successively.
That they fought, as they went, with the Sclavonian and other tribes (as
their traditions seem to report), and rolled them back to the eastward;
and that as each Teutonic tribe past down the line, the Sclavonians
rolled back again, till the last column was past.
That the Teutons also carried down with them, as slaves or allies, a
portion of this old Sclavonic population (to which Dr. Latham will
perhaps agree); and that this fact caused a hiatus, which was gradually
filled by tribes who after all were little better than nomad hunters, and
would occupy (quite nominally) a very large tract with a small
population.
Would not this theory agree at once tolerably with the old traditions and
with Dr. Latham's new facts?
The question still remains--which is the question of all. What put these
Germanic peoples on going South? Were there no causes sufficient to
excite so desperate a resolve?
(1) Did they all go? Is not Paulus Diaconus' story that one-third of
the Lombards was to emigrate by lot, and two-thirds remain at home, a
rough type of what generally happened--what happens now in our modern
emigrations? Was not the surplus population driven off by famine toward
warmer and more hopeful climes?
(2) Are not the Teutonic populations of England, North Germany, and the
Baltic, the descendants, much intermixed, and with dialects much changed,
of the portions which were left behind? This is the opinion, I believe,
of several great ethnologists. Is it not true? If philological
objections are raised to this, I ask (but in all humility), Did not these
southward migrations commence long before the time of Tacitus? If so,
may they not have commenced before the different Teutonic dialects were
as distinct as they were in the historic period? And are we to suppose
that the dialects did not alter during the long journeyings through many
nations? Is it possible that the Thervings and Grutungs could have
retained the same tongue on the Danube, as their forefathers spoke in
their native land? Would not the Moeso-Gothic of Ulfilas have been all
but unintelligible to the Goth who, upon the old theory, remained in
Gothland of Sweden?
(3) But were there not more causes than mere want, which sent them
south? Had the peculiar restlessness of the race nothing to do with it?
A restlessness not nomadic, but migratory: arising not from carelessness
of land and home, but from the longing to found a home in a new land,
like the restlessness of us, their children? As soon as we meet them in
historic times, they are always moving, migrating, invading. Were they
not doing the same in pre-historic times, by fits and starts, no doubt
with periods of excitement, periods of collapse and rest? When we
recollect the invasion of the Normans; the wholesale eastward migration
of the Crusaders, men, women, and children; and the later colonization by
Teutonic peoples, of every quarter of the globe, is there anything
wonderful in the belief that similar migratory manias may have seized the
old tribes; that the spirit of Woden, 'the mover,' may have moved them,
and forced them to go ahead, as now? Doubtless the theory is strange.
But the Teutons were and are a strange people; so strange, that they have
conquered--one may almost say that they are--all nations which are alive
upon the globe; and we may therefore expect them to have done strange
things even in their infancy.
The Romans saw them conquer the empire; and said, the good men among
them, that it was on account of their superior virtue. But beside the
virtue which made them succeed, there must have been the adventurousness
which made them attempt. They were a people fond of 'avanturen,' like
their descendants; and they went out to seek them; and found enough and
to spare.
(4) But more, had they never heard of Rome? Surely they had, and at a
very early period of the empire. We are apt to forget, that for every
discovery of the Germans by the Romans, there was a similar discovery of
the Romans by the Germans, and one which would tell powerfully on their
childish imagination. Did not one single Kemper or Teuton return from
Marius' slaughter, to spread among the tribes (niddering though he may
have been called for coming back alive) the fair land which they had
found, fit for the gods of Valhalla; the land of sunshine, fruits and
wine, wherein his brothers' and sisters' bones were bleaching unavenged?
Did no gay Gaul of the Legion of the Lark, boast in a frontier wine-house
to a German trapper, who came in to sell his peltry, how he himself was a
gentleman now, and a civilized man, and a Roman; and how he had followed
Julius Caesar, the king of men, over the Rubicon, and on to a city of the
like of which man never dreamed, wherein was room for all the gods of
heaven? Did no captive tribune of Varus' legions, led with horrid shouts
round Thor's altar in the Teutoburger Wald, ere his corpse was hung among
the horses and goats on the primaeval oaks, turn to bay like a Roman, and
tell his wild captors of the Eternal City, and of the might of that Caesar
who would avenge every hair upon his head with a German life; and receive
for answer a shout of laughter, and the cry--'You have come to us: and
some day we will go to you?' Did no commissary, bargaining with a German
for cattle to be sent over the frontier by such a day of the week, and
teaching him to mistranslate into those names of Thor, Woden, Freya, and
so forth, which they now carry, the Jewish-Assyrian-Roman days of the
se'nnight, amuse the simple forester by telling him how the streets of
Rome were paved with gold, and no one had anything to do there but to eat
and bathe at the public expense, and to go to the theatre, and see 20,000
gladiators fight at once? Did no German 'Regulus,' alderman, or king,
enter Rome on an embassy, and come back with uplifted eyes and hands,
declaring that he had seen things unspeakable--a 'very fine plunder,' as
Blucher said of London; and that if it were not for the walls, they might
get it all; for not only the ladies, but the noblemen, went about in
litters of silver and gold, and wore gauze dresses, the shameless
wretches, through which you might see every limb, so that as for killing
them, there was no more fear of them than of a flock of sheep: but that
he did not see as well as he could have wished how to enter the great
city, for he was more or less the worse for liquor the whole time, with
wondrous stuff which they called wine? Or did no captive, escaped by
miracle from the butcheries of the amphitheatre, return to tell his
countrymen how all the rest had died like German men; and call on them to
rise and avenge their brothers' blood? Yes, surely the Teutons knew
well, even in the time of Tacitus, of the 'micklegard,' the great city
and all its glory. Every fresh tribe who passed along the frontier of
Gaul or of Noricum would hear more and more of it, see more and more men
who had actually been there. If the glory of the city exercised on its
own inhabitants an intoxicating influence, as of a place omnipotent,
superhuman, divine--it would exercise (exaggerated as it would be) a
still stronger influence on the barbarians outside: and what wonder if
they pressed southwards at first in the hope of taking the mighty city;
and afterwards, as her real strength became more known, of at least
seizing some of those colonial cities, which were as superhuman in their
eyes as Rome itself would have been? In the crusades, the children,
whenever they came to a great town, asked their parents if that was not
Jerusalem. And so, it may be, many a gallant young Teuton, on entering
for the first time such a city as Cologne, Lyons, or Vienna, whispered
half trembling to his lord--'Surely this must be Rome.'
Some such arguments as these might surely be brought in favour of a
greater migration than Dr. Latham is inclined to allow: but I must leave
the question for men of deeper research and wider learning, than I
possess.