The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

The exact degree to which Jornandes confounded the German invaders with the original Goths is uncertain. Some of his facts are unequivocally Getic, as his notice of Zamolxis. Others are as truly Germanic. The name Hermanric is this.

Each, however, is an extreme instance, and it is only at its extremities that the question is easy. In my own mind, I think that Getic legends and Getic history is the rule, Germanic the exception; in other words, that the so-called Gothic history is the history of the indigenæ rather than that of the invaders of the soil. It is even likely that Hermanric’s empire was German only as the present Austrian empire is German, i.e., German in respect to its chief. Zengis-Khan’s was Mongolian in the same way, the mass of his subjects and major part of his area being Turk. What leads to this is the likelihood of even the names of the royal families amongst the Ostrogoths and Visigoths—Amalung and Baltung—being Lithuanic. They have every appearance of having arisen out of eponymias. At any rate it is a strange coincidence to find one of the localities of the amber-district called sometimes Abalus, and sometimes Baltia—the latter name being connected with the Belt and Baltic. Pliny (writes Prichard) “in giving an account of the production of amber says, that, according to Pytheas, there was an estuary of the ocean called Mentonomon, inhabited by the Guttones, a people of Germany. It reached six thousand furlongs in extent. From this place an island named Abalus was distant about one day’s sail, on the shore of which the waves throw up pieces of amber. The inhabitants make use of it for fuel, or else sell it to their neighbours the Teutones.” Pliny says that Timæus gave full credit to this story, but that “he called the island not Abalus, but Baltia.”

Out of this Abal-, and this Balt-, I believe the eponymic names of Abal-ung (Amal-ung and Balt-ung) grew, just as Hellen did out of Hellas. And that they were other than German is shown by Tacitus, since the amber country was the country of the Æstyii, whose language was Britannicæ proprior—Britannicæ meaning Prussian, as I have shown elsewhere.

In bringing within the same class all the population denominated Gothini, Gothones, Guttones, Gothi, Gautæ, Gaudæ, Getæ, Jutæ, and Vitæ, I only do what nine out of ten of my predecessors have done before me. I differ, however, from them in determining the character of the class by that of the Guttones of the amber country, instead of that of the Goths of Alaric and Theodoric—these last being Goths only as the English are Britons, or the Spaniards, Mexicans. At the same time I am fully aware that any evidence whatever showing that the Germans of the Lower Danube were called Goths anterior to their arrival in the land of the Getæ, would shake my doctrine, and that unexceptionable evidence would throw it to the ground altogether.

The theory of the Scandinavian populations is different for the three different kingdoms.

1. Norway.—Norway agrees with Sweden in the likelihood of its earliest population having been Ugrian—Ugrian of the Lapp type, and continued southwards from Lapland or Finmark. Upon these the ancestors of the present Norwegians encroached.

2. Sweden.—In Norway the Germanic population came in immediate contact with the Ugrian; in Sweden it was, to a great extent, preceded by one from Courland and Prussia—the Goths. Hence, the ethnological elements in Sweden are one degree more complex.

3. Denmark.—Denmark differs from both Norway and Sweden in respect to its primary population; inasmuch as it is bounded on the north by the sea, so that its relations to the Ugrian area of the aboriginal Scandinavia are those of an island.

Does this prevent us from assuming a continuity of population? I cannot say. Although the north of Jutland is separated by a considerable breadth of water from the south of Scandinavia, Sealand is within sight of the southwestern coast of Sweden, and the south-western population of Sweden might easily have been extended into Denmark. On the other hand, however, the population which occupied the neck of the Chersonesus may with equal, if not greater reason, be considered to have been continued northward. But this population is itself complex, for instead of belonging to a single stock, we find, at the beginning of the historical period, Germans on the western, and Slavonians on the eastern half of Holstein. Which of these populations was continued into the Cimbric Chersonese? Or was there a third stock different from either? Or did each fill up a portion of the area, and if so, in what proportions? My own opinion in respect to these complexities is, that originally the southern half (at least) of the Cimbric Chersonese was Slavonic, even as the Mecklenburg and Lauenburg frontiers were Slavonic; and that, subsequently, a twofold displacement set-in—the Vitæ having invaded the islands and the north-eastern parts of Jutland from Prussia and Courland by sea, and the Frisians having pressed forwards from the Lower Elbe by land. Still, it would be hazardous to assert, that, during those primitive periods, when the whole of Norway and Sweden were Ugrian—as they, once, unquestionably were—the Danish Isles and the Cimbric Chersonese were not Ugrian also. It would be hazardous even to pronounce that the whole of the southern coast of the Baltic was not Ugrian also—since both the Slavonic populations of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, and the Lithuanians of Prussia and Courland belonged to the encroaching divisions of our species. That a Ugrian population extended as far southward and westward as the Elbe is a doctrine that may be maintained without going to the full recognition of the so-called Finnic hypothesis; which carries the populations akin to the Ugrian as far south as the Pyrenees, and sees in the Basques of Biscay and the Lapps of Lapland, the fragments of a vast population once continuous, but, subsequently, broken up and displaced by the Keltic and Germanic occupancies of Gaul and Germany respectively.

The history of the present Scandinavians, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians—must be considered in respect to (1) the line of conquest; (2) the date of the invasion; (3) the amount of foreign blood introduced.