Sub-Roman Britain (Cavalry etc)

[Alanus]

The bear doesnt sound very Sarmat to me, it sounds Germanic. The Taifali, according to Marija Gimbutas were Goth types early on, (no surprise given their early location) and then Sarmatianised for reasons that can be reasonably surmised.

Back to you, Dashydog

It looks like Gimbutas got it backwards. Let's look at the geographical placement of the Taifali when they are first recorded. They follow the Roxolani ("light-alani") in westward movement. The Roxolani appear to certainly be an Alanic subtribe. Then the Goths arrive onto the Black Sea littoral. The Goths are followed by the Alani, yet the Taifali join the Goths through some kind of foedus. It seems the Taifali are "cleaved" from the Alanic migration by the Tyrfingi Goths; the Taifali live in "wagons" (fm Wolfram), the Alani live in "wagons" (fm Ammianus), and the Tryfingi live in "houses." To me, that makes the Taifali a Sarmatian culture that subsequently became Gothicised.

Now the bear. A quick study shows the bear important in all cultures of the temperate forests. Britons carved bear amulets from jet, a "magic" stone. Gauls worshiped a bear goddess, aka the "Berne piggy-bank." The Goths lived east of the Celts, influenced by them, and they lived west of the Alanic culture, another influence. In fact, Gothic and Alanic cultures were similar; both worshiped the sword Tyrfing stabbed ritually upright in a mound of rocks (Excalibur?). We see this in the very name of the Gothic Tryfingi, "people of the sword."

Same with the bear. Alanic ritual cups (many from Filippovka) have bear-shaped handles, also bears as cauldron handles. They are round-bottomed and must be passed from one individual to the next. The Russians (Metz, Alekseev, Korolkova) give a good account, noting that the cups held "houma," the same as Indic "souma," a drug that supposedly "was to them life in health, strength in weakness, medicine in sickness, the restoration of youth in old age" (Korolkova). Sounds like von Eisenbach's Parsifal! hock:

What we have here is the same type of bear-oriented cup first mentioned by the Breton monk Waleran (c. 700). But it's actual name is first mentioned in Gothic as the ritual "dails, small portions of something greater," then in subsequent etymology as the cup itself-- gradalis, gradale, graal, grele-- the Grail. It was no coincidence that the Breton monk lived just above the Taifali in France, or that other Taifals were (most likely) stationed in Briton where the bear was carried on 500 Taifali Senior shields. I would call the bear nearly a universal symbol, straight across connected cultures-- Britons, Gauls, Goths, Taifals, Alans-- west to east, in an unbroken sequence of mutual recognition.