10-19-2012, 02:43 PM
Quote:In reference to my last post:
I think it's especially misleading because of past attempts to appropriate all of Germanic antiquity, including Gothic antiquity, for German nationalism. It is just as reasonable to incorporate Gothic antiquity into Polish, Ukrainian, Moldavan, Romanian, and Bulgarian history, inter alia.
... though among them it could be only Polish who could ever be interested in doing so as Poland was the place of birth of both Goths and Vandals but then even Polish who view themselves more as west-slavic people and not as slavised east-Germanic are not so interested in doing so afterall. Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Russians are all closely related Slavic cultures (and regionally as people) which regard extremely negatively the spread of germanic cultures in Eastern Europe. At best, they view Goths as temporary passing by tribes and such these had been since they left behind minimal cultural, linguistic, archaeological or other traces, very few to consider adding them in any narrative.
Goths were a specific tribe that traced initial origins in an island of the Baltic. Technically they were of Scandinavian ancestry, Swedish to be precise, and it is only when employing the term "Germanic tribes" in the broader sense of "Teutonic tribes" which encompass a massive array of differentiated northern European tribes speaking various languages of the same linguistic family, that Goths are termed as "Germanic people". Now if this fitted more "German nationalism" or "Swedish nationalism" it is the problem of Germans and Scandinavians to short out but certainly Goths cannot fit easily into Slavic national narratives nor to Romanian ones who apart the Roman Empire look more up to Dacians and Scythians and the southern Greeks rather than the Goths. Unless of course we are talking about modern mish-mashes of "all happy togetherness" which is quite in vogue today by some circles.
The historic reality is that Goths were not any massive nation or something but a collection of tribes that gradually followed southeast the already established trade-routes via the Eastern rivers and found progressively their way to modern day Ukraine where the decreasing power of the nomadic Scythians as well as the Roman destruction of the nearby powerful Dacian state left them more space to expand laterally and occasionally even raid south till the Aegean, provided there was no organised Roman resistance. By the time they had reached the Black-Sea coast Goths were already a heavily mixed tribe just as later Normands of northern France with the difference that Goths had not adopted local languages but retained their own Germanic one (an eastern quite distant from others today extinct branch) spreading it momentarily over a fraction of local populations, a large array of quite differentiated tribes ranging from local Dacians and Scythians, Caucasian-iranian tribes such as Sarmatians and Alans as well as Eurasian people with heavy mongolic influence such as the Turanic Huns who of course subdued them. Thervingi and Greuthungi - especially the latter that moved in the steps - were greatly mixed with Scythians, Alans and Sarmatians. It was the Huns' pressure that led desperate Goths into enterring the Roman Empire where they became a primary tool of the rising Eastern "christian-spreading" oligarchies for the manipulation of politics inside the Empire, and this even prior to the events that led to the battle of Adrianopolis, a catastrophe maybe for the roman army but quite over-inflated in modern times. In that battle we speak of "Gothic armies" when it was a joint force of Goths, Alans, Sarmatians and even renegade Huns. Interestingly it was the Alanic cavalry that played the decisive role for the "Gothic" victory. The events that followed showed that clearly inside the Roman Empire there were oligarchies employing the riff-raff of Goths for internal power games in an era of transfer of power from the west to the east and the totalitarian imposition of the christianic faith.
