CLASS: BONE DEEP GOTHIC
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Periodically throughout this discussion, I will invite guest bloggers to take on a subject of in their field of expertise. In this first aside, John Pendell, a medievalist and lecturer at University of Michigan — Flint discusses the historical Goths.
There were Goths before Robert Smith or Siouxsie Sioux ever thought of a dour lyric or a dyed-black and powdered-white aesthetic. There were Goths before Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, or a vogue for the vampire tale. There were Goths even long before Gothic architecture sprung up across Europe in the Middle Ages, all pointy-arched and soaring up to the heavens. In fact, the historical Goths, who left us no “Gothic” buildings or literature, were already a distant memory by the time of such monumental projects. They’ve left us relatively little, however, of anything material that might help us better answer the question of who they really were. Mostly they’ve left a reputation. The prototypical “barbarians at the gate” of the Roman Empire, they broke through, sacked and conquered Rome, and did little else that seems to have stuck in the collective imagination. There’s no reason to assume that the historical Goths were any more dark, mysterious, and brooding than any other peoples of late antiquity, but perhaps the very fact that the reality of the Goths is hard to find, and that they seem to have completely vanished from history, provides an empty vessel for later cultures to fill with their own fantasies of the “Dark Ages.”
The historical Goths were just one of the players in a fascinating period that reshaped the balance of power in Europe at the end of the Roman Empire. A number of Germanic tribes, long bottled up to the north and northeast of the empire’s frontier, began in the fourth and fifth centuries to methodically push their way into new territories in what is sometimes called the Migration Period. Vandals, Saxons, Angles, Franks, Lombards, and many less-well known groups were on the move, and some found just as much success as the Goths at smashing through decaying imperial defenses. Goths—at least some of them—converted to Christianity at an early date, entering into a social and religious relation with Rome and thus being recognized as a people by Roman writers and authorities. This conversion and subsequent acknowledgment by the Empire provides at least a few more solid moments to base a Gothic history on than many of their Germanic neighbors have. The Goths had a fourth-century bishop, in fact, named Wulfila, who translated the Bible into the Gothic language. His work is highly valued as the only surviving example of any East Germanic language. Much like the Goths themselves, Wulfila’s work is now fragmented and scattered, a few pieces here and there in European libraries. The Goths also had one giant of a military and political hero, Theoderic the Great, who in the 470s began a long reign over much of the remnants of the old Empire, eventually bringing Gothic rule to much of Italy, the Balkans, and Spain. Theoderic’s kingdom wouldn’t last long after his death, however, as Bavarians, Vandals, Lombards, and Greeks dismantled it from different directions.
All contemporary sources locate the first appearance of the Goths in the area north of the lower Danube and along the Black Sea, in modern-day Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania. Later Goths, however, told an origin story that linked them firmly with northern Europe, along the Baltic Sea and in Scandinavia. Perhaps this is true. We find today such place-names as Gotland, Gotaland, and Vastergotland in Sweden. Relocating the Gothic homeland that far north, however, complicates our search for their origins. The area was home to many peoples with similar-sounding names—Gutes and Gauts, Geats (ruled by a certain hero named Beowulf); even the name of the Jutes, said to have migrated to Britain in 449 alongside the Angles and Saxons, could plausibly be related. The superabundance of “G” names in the region might hint at a common origin in the distant past, but Gothic claims of northern provenance are backed only by legend, not archeology or language.
It is especially in the work of Jordanes, a Gothic-Roman official of the early sixth century, where the historical meets the legendary, and the Norseman meets the Easterner. Jordanes, in his Getica, essentially tacks the Gothic history of the recent past onto the story of the Getae (yes, another “G” people), a non-Germanic group well-known to classical Greek and Roman writers, whom Jordanes quotes from liberally. He conflates Getae and Goth, which provides plenty of ancient stories for the combined group, and grants a Scandinavian homeland to the entire lot. Jordanes’s tale is fanciful and filled with detailed stories of feuds and ancient battle scenes, but unfortunately tells us very little about his subjects’ way of life (unless it is Getae, not Goths, you want to know about).
A series of maps in The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History presents a striking dramatization of the Goths’ wanderings, and particularly their conquests, in the Migration period. The maps propose to identify the location of various peoples, but do so primarily as a record of conquest and rule. If you’re in charge, in other words, you rule the map; if not, you vanish. As such, the maps track the “success” of the Goths, and what a success it was. The first map depicts the year 362—following the model of Jordanes, the Ostrogoths (“Eastern Goths”) are shown stretching from the Crimean peninsula all the way back to the Baltic, and situated behind lines of Germanic tribes massed along the Alps and Carpathians like divisions of an army waiting to strike at Rome. From there, successive maps show one Gothic group or another majestically swooping first south and then east across the crumbling Empire, picking up bits of territory small and large, sometimes casting them aside to move on and at other times occupying whole sections of Europe—Gaul and Iberia by 476, Italy by 528. But by 565 the last ones discernible are the Visigoths (“Western Goths”), ruling in Spain. Intriguingly, the maps covering the following century show the Visigoths pushing northward, as if attempting to return to their ancestral homeland and complete a nearly circular continental journey. Alas, there is no sign of any Goth on the map for 737, their vanishing point. The Gothic moment was over, and what efforts they made to assimilate with other peoples, or not to, is mostly unknown.
There are some things we do know: the Goths, as their language shows us, were a Germanic people. Until they converted to Christianity, they would have practiced a polytheistic religion like their Germanic cousins, worshiping Odin, Thor, Freya, and Loki, and probably sending off their fallen warriors to Valhalla. Remnants of that belief system would still have been in place in their Christian phase. Their culture arose in the Iron Age, which means the prominence of a forge and a blacksmith in every community. Gothic metalworking shows the presence of elaborate hammering of designs into jewelry, weapons, and utensils, a truly artistic cultural aspect. Their conversion was to Arian Christianity, which seems to have always been a marginal sect in Europe.
Perhaps the most intriguing recent approach to Gothic history depicts the Goths as a not-quite-ethnic group, less rigidly defined by matters of blood and language than is typically considered. As Gothic armies moved throughout Europe, according to Herwig Wolfram, they attracted members of the local lower classes to their cause, people who were looking for advancement in the Gothic military system. The Goths closely linked their military to a larger sense of group identity. Gothic identity was, then, openly available to all who were willing to fight. One could become Goth without marrying into a Gothic family. By the late Gothic period, societies ruled by Gothic leaders must have been thoroughly multi-ethnic and Gothicness must have been less and less distinct from other regional identities. Perhaps this partially accounts for their seeming disappearance from history, and for the way future societies and individuals could pick up bits of Gothic identity, real or imagined, and try them on as they pleased.
References and further reading:
Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths. University of California Press, 1988.
Colin McEvedy, The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History. Penguin, 1992.
Peter Heather, The Goths. Blackwell, 1996.