Charles Kingsley - The Roman and the Teuton

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 primæval 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?