Germanic names

[Alanus]

Ron,

You got that right! Terry Gilliam once called the era, "Darker than anyone expected." Not much to go on. :lol:

Atlantis! We should ask Captain Nemo to find it for us. As far as I know-- and it even exceeds Thera-- there is a lost underwater city but it's in the wrong place-- Kyrgsthan (or however you spell it). It was called Chen-Gu by the Chinese; and the Russian Geographer Peter Tienshansky searched for it in vain. In the 1950s, clues showed up along the shore of Issyk Kul; and in 2007, a dive team found it. The city lies completly underwater in the lake. The culture was Saka-Sogdian, and I equate this "underwater palace" with the birth of the Lady of the Lake legend.

I hopefully suppose one can write a migration-era "novel" and infuse it with goofy scenarios like the above. In my most recent tale, the one I'm going to try and publish, the animus of the Lady of the Lake finally transmigrates to a female protagonist in the 350s. Her mentor is Merjands, basically a "sleeper" who hibernates for extended periods and then shows up again, aka Merlin. Some of this novel stuff has to be off the wall or the reader loses the entertainment factor, and the author has lost the reader. A good example would be the Mists of Avalon, strange metaphysical stuff filling in the lack of historical evidence. In my story's case, the Saka/Alans did believe in transmigration of the soul; and so I can have a woman return after an 800 year absence. It's not history, but it's human nature. At the same time, the plot follows historical events, the Gothic purge of the Christian Arians that either hid in Transylvania or crossed the Danube under the blessing of Emperor Constantius.

I always thought Veleda would be a good character for a Germanic-based plot. Tacitus gives us little on her, but hey!-- she could have been beautiful, probably was intelligent, and perhaps built like Marilyn, or was it Marlon, or maybe Marlin, the piscatorial obsession of Hemingway. 8)

pasta love vista, and verse visa,
A.J. Campbell