Footnote 183:[ (return) ] See Grimm's "Deutsche Heldensage", 341.
Of the thousand and one details contained in the foregoing narrative, there are not more than three or four which correspond with the life of the real Theodoric, He was, as the Saga says, of Amal lineage. His father's name, Theudemir, is fairly enough represented by Dietmar. He was for some years of his life (but not his middle or later life) a wanderer more or less dependent on the favour of a powerful sovereign. His life during this period did get entangled with that of another Theodoric, even as the life of the hero of Saga becomes entangled with the life of Theodoric of Russia. After subduing all his enemies, he did eventually rule in Rome, and erect statues to himself there and at Verona. Ravenna and Verona were the places of his most frequent residence. In his mature years, when his whole soul was set on the maintenance of civilitas, he might very fitly have spoken such words as he is said to have used to Witig in his boyhood, "I will establish such peace in my father's realm and mine, that it shall not be in the power of every wandering adventurer to challenge me to single combat". Moreover, throughout all the wild vagaries of the narrative, character, that mysterious and indestructible essence, is not wholly lost. No two books can be more absolutely unlike one another than the "Wilkina-Saga" and the "Various Letters of Cassiodorus", yet the same hot-tempered, impulsive, generous man is pourtrayed to us by both.
As for the other names introduced, they are, of course, brought in at the cost of the strangest anachronisms. The cruel uncle, Hermanric, is really a remote collateral ancestor who died nearly eighty years before Theodoric was born. The generous host and ally, Attila, died two years before his birth, and the especial gladness of that birth was that it occurred at the same time with a signal victory of the Amal kings over the sons of Attila. To take an illustration from modern history, the general framework of the "Wilkina-Saga" is about as accurate as a romance would be which should represent Queen Victoria as driven from her throne by the Old Pretender, remaining for thirty years an exile at the court of Napoleon, and at length recovering her kingdom on the Old Pretender's death. [184]
Footnote 184:[ (return) ] Possibly we have in the career of Witig, the craftsman's son, successively the sworn friend and the deadly foe of Theodoric and his house, some remembrance of the life of the low-born Witigis, in his youth a valiant soldier of Theodoric, in his old age the slayer of Theodahad, and the hated husband of Amalasuentha.
But, as has been often and well pointed out, the most marvellous thing in these old German Sagas is the utter disappearance from them of that Roman Empire which at the cost of such giant labour the Teutonic nations had overthrown. The Roman Imperator, the Roman legions, even the Catholic priests with their pious zeal against Arianism, count for nothing in the story. Just as the knightly warriors prick to and fro on their fiery steeds to the court of Arthur of Britain, with no mention of the intervening sea, so these German bards link together the days of Chivalry and the old barbarian life which Tacitus paints for us in the "Germania", without apparently any consciousness of the momentous deed which the German warriors had in the meanwhile performed, full of significance for all succeeding generations of men, the overthrow of the Empire of Rome.
COIN OF WITIGIS WITH HEAD OF ANASTASIUS (?).
