The Byzantine historian Procopius, of Cæsarea (ob. after 562), became in 527 legal assistant, “assessor,” to the general Belisarius, and accompanied him on his campaigns until 549, amongst others that against the Goths in Italy. In his work (in Greek) on the war against the Goths (“De bello Gothico,” t. ii. c. 14 and 15), written about 552, he gives information about the North which is of great interest. He tells us of the warlike Germanic people, the Eruli, who from old time[140] were said to have lived on the north bank of the Danube, and who, with no better reason than that they had lived in peace for three whole years and were tired of it, attacked their neighbours the Langobards, but suffered a decisive defeat, and their king, Rodulf, fell in the battle (about 493).[141]
“They then hastily left their dwelling-places, and set out with their women and children to wander through the whole country [Hungary] which lies north of the Danube. When they came to the district where the Rogians had formerly dwelt, who had joined the army of the Goths and gone into Italy, they settled there; but as they were oppressed by famine in that district, which had been laid waste, they soon afterwards departed from it, and came near to the country of the Gepidæ [Siebenbürgen]. The Gepidæ allowed them to establish themselves and to become their neighbours, but began thereupon, without the slightest cause, to commit the most revolting acts against them, ravishing their women, robbing them of cattle and other goods, and omitting no kind of injustice, and finally began an unjust war against them.” The Eruli then crossed the Danube to Illyria and settled somewhere about what is now Servia under the eastern emperor Anastasius (491-518). Some of the Eruli would not “cross the Danube, but decided to establish themselves in the uttermost ends of the inhabited world. Many chieftains of royal blood now undertaking their leadership, they passed through all the tribes of the Slavs one after another, went thence through a wide, uninhabited country, and came to the so-called Varn. Beyond them they passed by the tribes of the Danes [in Jutland], without the barbarians there using violence towards them. When they thence came to the ocean [about the year 512] they took ship, and landed on the island of Thule [i.e., Scandinavia] and remained there. But Thule is beyond comparison the largest of all islands; for it is more than ten times as large as Britain. But it lies very far therefrom northwards. On this island the land is for the most part uninhabited. But in the inhabited regions there are thirteen populous tribes, each with a king. Every year an extraordinary thing takes place; for the sun, about the time of the summer solstice, does not set at all for forty days, but for the whole of this time remains uninterruptedly visible above the earth. No less than six months later, about the winter solstice, for forty days the sun is nowhere to be seen on this island; but continual night is spread over it, and therefore for the whole of that time the people are very depressed, since they can hold no intercourse. It is true that I have not succeeded, much as I should have wished it, in reaching this island and witnessing what is here spoken of; but from those who have come thence to us I have collected information of how they are able [to count the days] when the sun neither rises nor sets at the times referred to,” etc. When, during the forty days that it is above the horizon, the sun in its daily course returns “to that place where the inhabitants first saw it rise, then according to their reckoning a day and a night have passed. But when the period of night commences, they find a measure by observation of the moon’s path, according to which they reckon the number of days. But when thirty-five days of the long night are passed, certain people are sent up to the tops of mountains, as is the custom with them, and when from thence they can see some appearance of the sun, they send word to the inhabitants below that in five days the sun will shine upon them. And the latter assemble and celebrate, in the dark it is true, the feast of the glad tidings. Among the people of Thule this is the greatest of all their festivals. I believe that these islanders, although the same thing happens every year with them, nevertheless are in a state of fear lest some time the sun should be wholly lost to them.
“Among the barbarians inhabiting Thule, one people, who are called Skridfinns [Scrithifini], live after the manner of beasts. They do not wear clothes [i.e., of cloth] nor, when they walk, do they fasten anything under their feet, [i.e., they do not wear shoes], they neither drink wine nor eat anything from the land, because they neither cultivate the land themselves nor do the women provide them with anything from tilling it, but the men as well as the women occupy themselves solely and continually in hunting; for the extraordinarily great forests and mountains which rise in their country give them vast quantities of game and other beasts. They always eat the flesh of the animals they hunt and wear their skins, and they have no linen or anything else that they can sew with. But they fasten the skins together with the sinews of beasts, and thus cover their whole bodies. The children even are not brought up among them as with other peoples; for the Skridfinns’ children do not take women’s milk, nor do they touch their mothers’ breasts, but they are nourished solely with the marrow of slain beasts. As soon therefore as a woman has given birth, she winds the child in a skin, hangs it up in a tree, puts marrow into its mouth, and goes off hunting; for they follow this occupation in common with the men. Thus is the mode of life of these barbarians arranged.
“Nearly all of the remaining inhabitants of Thule do not, however, differ much from other peoples. They worship a number of gods and higher powers in the heavens, the air, the earth and the sea, also certain other higher beings which are thought to dwell in the waters of springs and rivers. But they always slay all kinds of sacrifice and offer dead sacrifices. And to them the best of all sacrifices is the man they have taken prisoner by their arms. Him they sacrifice to the god of war, because they consider him to be the greatest. But they do not sacrifice him merely by using fire at the sacrifice; they also hang him up in a tree, or throw him among thorns, and slay him by other cruel modes of death. Such is the life of the inhabitants of Thule, among whom the most numerous people are the Gauti (Göter), with whom the immigrant Eruli settled.”
Erulian sources of Procopius
Common source of Procopius and Jordanes
This description by Procopius of Thule (Scandinavia) and its people bears the stamp of a certain trustworthiness. If we ask whence he has derived his information, our thoughts are led at once to the Eruli, referred to by him in such detail, who in part were still the allies of the Eastern Empire, and of whom the emperor at Byzantium had a bodyguard in the sixth century. There were many of them in the army of the Eastern Empire both in Persia and in Italy; thus Procopius says that there were two thousand of them in the army under the eunuch Narses, which came to Italy to join Belisarius. Procopius thus had ample opportunity for obtaining first-hand information from these northern warriors, and his account of them shows that the Eruli south of the Danube kept up communication with their kinsmen in Scandinavia, for when they had killed their king “Ochon” without cause, since they wished to try being without a king, and had repented the experiment, they sent some of their foremost men to Thule to find a new king of the royal blood. They chose one and returned with him; but he died on the way when they had almost reached home, and they therefore turned again and went once more to Thule. This time they found another, “by name ‘Datios’ [or ‘Todasios’ == Tjodrik ?]. He was accompanied by his brother ‘Aordos’ [== Vard ?] and two hundred young men of the Eruli in Thule.” Meanwhile, as they were so long absent, the Eruli of Singidunum (the modern Belgrade) had sent an embassy to the emperor Justinianus at Byzantium asking him to give them a chief. He sent, therefore, the Erulian “Svartuas” (== Svartugle, i.e., black owl ?), who had been living with him for a long time. But when Datios from Thule approached, all the Eruli went over to him by night, and Svartuas had to flee quite alone, and returned to Byzantium. The emperor now exerted all his power to reinstate him; “but the Eruli, who feared the power of the Romans, decided to migrate to the Gepidæ.” This happened in Procopius’s own time, and may therefore be regarded as trustworthy; it shows how easy communication must have been at that time between Scandinavia and the south, and also with Byzantium, so that Procopius may well have had his information by that channel. But he may also have received information from another quarter. His description of Thule shows such decided similarities with Jordanes’ account of Scandza and its people that they point to some common source of knowledge, even though there are also dissimilarities. Among the latter it may be pointed out that Jordanes makes a distinction between Thule (north of Britain) and Scandza, while Procopius calls Scandinavia Thule, which, however, like Jordanes, he places to the north of Britain, and he does not mention Scandia. It may seem surprising that Jordanes’ authority, Cassiodorus (or Ablabius ?), should have known Ptolemy better than the Greek Procopius. The explanation may be that when Procopius heard from the statements of the Eruli themselves that some of them had crossed the ocean from the land of the Danes (Jutland) to a great island in the north, he could not have supposed that this was Scandia, which on Ptolemy’s map lay east of the Cimbrian peninsula and farther south than its northern point; it would seem much more probable that it was Thule, which, however, as he saw, must lie farther from Britain and be larger than it was shown on Ptolemy’s map; for which reason Procopius expressly asserts that Thule was much larger than Britain and lay far to the north of it. As it was not Procopius’s habit to make a show of unnecessary names, he keeps the well-known name of Thule and does not even mention Scandia. It may even be supposed that it was to west Norway itself, or the ancient Thule, that the Eruli sailed. If their king Rodulf was a Norwegian, as suggested above, this would be probable, as in that case many of themselves would have come from there too; besides which, we know of a people, the Harudes or Horder, who had formerly migrated by sea from Jutland to the west coast of Norway; there had therefore been an ancient connection, and perhaps, indeed, Horder from Norway and Harudes from Jutland may have been among Rodulf’s men, and there may also have been Harudes among the Eruli whom the Danes, according to Jordanes, drove out of their home (in Jutland ?). There was also, from the very beginning of Norwegian history, much connection between Norway and Jutland.
Another disagreement between the descriptions of Procopius and Jordanes is that according to the former there were thirteen tribes, each with a king, in Thule, while Jordanes enumerates twice as many tribal names in Scandza, but of these perhaps several may have belonged to the same kingdom.[142]
A remarkable similarity between the two authors is the summer day forty days long and the equally long winter night among the people of Thule as with the Adogit, and the fact that in immediate connection therewith the Scrithifini and Screrefennæ, which must originally be the same name, are mentioned. The description in Procopius of festivals on the reappearance of the sun, etc., points certainly to information from the North; but, as already pointed out, the statement in this form, that the summer day was of the same length as the winter night, cannot be due to the Norsemen themselves; it is a literary invention, which points to a common literary origin; for it would be more than remarkable if it had arisen independently both with the authority of Procopius and with that of Jordanes. An even more striking indication in the same direction is the resemblance which we find in the order of the two descriptions of Thule and of Scandza. First comes the geographical description of the island, which in both is of very great size and lies far out in the northern ocean; then occurs the statement that in this great island are many tribes.[143] Next we have in both the curious fact that the summer day and the winter night both last for forty days. Then follows in both a more detailed statement of how the long summer day and winter night come about, and of how the sun behaves during its course, etc. Immediately after this comes the description of the Skridfinns, who have a bestial way of life, and do not live on corn, but on the flesh of wild beasts, etc., with an addition in Jordanes about fen-fowl’s eggs (perhaps taken from Mela), while Procopius has a more detailed description of their mode of life, which reminds one somewhat of Tacitus. Finally, there is a reference to the Germanic people of Thule or Scandza; but while Procopius mentions their religious beliefs and human sacrifices, and only gives the name of the most numerous tribe, the Gauti, Jordanes has for the most part a rigmarole of names.
Even if the method of treating the material is thus very different in the two works, the order in which the material is arranged, and to some extent also the material itself, are in such complete agreement that there must be a historical connection, and undoubtedly a common literary source, through a greater or less number of intermediaries, is the basis of both descriptions. One might think of the unknown Ablabius, or perhaps of the unknown Gothic scholar Aithanarit, whom the Ravenna geographer mentions in connection with his reference to the Skridfinns, if indeed he did not live later than Procopius. It is striking also that the passage about Thule in Procopius gives rather the impression of having been inserted in the middle of his narrative about the Eruli, without any very intimate connection therewith, and it may therefore be for the most part taken from an earlier author, perhaps with alterations and additions by Procopius himself; but it is not his habit to inform us of his authorities.
The Eruli are Norsemen