Teutonic Mythology: The Gods and Goddesses of the Northland (Vol. 1-3). Viktor Rydberg

they who, according to the former resolution, were doomed to die, should seek new homes beyond the sea. Accompanied by their female friends, they embarked, and they had not sailed far before they were attacked by a violent storm, which carried them to a Danish harbour near a place, says the author, which is called Slesvik. Here they went ashore, and to put an end to all discussion in regard to a return to the old dear fatherland, they hewed their ships into pieces. Then they wandered through the country which lay before them, and, together with much other booty, they gathered 20,000 horses, so that a large number of the men were able to ride on horseback. The rest followed the riders on foot. Armed with weapons, they proceeded in this manner through the country ruled by the Danes, and they came to the river Alba (Elbe), which they crossed; after which they scattered themselves along the coast. This Swabian narrative, which seems to be copied from the Saxon, tells, like the latter, that the Thuringians were rulers in the land to which the immigrants came, and that bloody battles had to be fought before they got possession of it. Widukind's account attempts to give the Saxons a legal right, at least to the landing-place and the immediate vicinity. This legal right, he says, was acquired in the following manner: While the Saxons were still in their ships in the harbour, out of which the Thuringians were unable to drive them, it was resolved on both sides to open negotiations, and thus an understanding was reached, that the Saxons, on the condition that they abstained from plundering and murder, might remain and buy what they needed and sell whatever they could. Then it occurred that a Saxon man, richly adorned with gold and wearing a gold necklace, went ashore. There a Thuringian met him and asked him: "Why do you wear so much gold around your lean neck?" The youth answered that he was perishing from hunger, and was seeking a purchaser of his gold ornaments. "How much do you ask?" inquired the Thuringian. "What do you bid?" answered the Saxon. Near by was a large sand-hill, and the Thuringian said in derision: "I will give you as much sand as you can carry in your clothes." The Saxon said he would accept this offer. The Thuringian filled the skirts of his frock with sand; the Saxon gave him his gold ornaments and returned to the ships. The Thuringians laughed at this bargain with contempt, and the Saxons found it foolish; but the youth said: "Go with me, brave Saxons, and I will show you that my foolishness will be your advantage." Then he took the sand he had bought and scattered it as widely as possible over the ground, covering in this manner so large an area that it gave the Saxons a fortified camp. The Thuringians sent messengers and complained of this, but the Saxons answered that hitherto they had faithfully observed the treaty, and that they had not taken more territory than they had purchased with their gold. Thus the Saxons got a firm foothold in the land.

      Thus we find that the sagas of the Saxons and the Swabians agree with those of the Longobardians in this, that their ancestors were supposed to have come from a northern country beyond the Baltic. The Swabian version identifies this country distinctly enough with the Scandinavian peninsula. Of an immigration from the East the traditions of these tribes have not a word to say.

17.

      THE FRANKISH MIGRATION SAGA.

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      We have already stated that the Frankish chronicles, unlike those of the other Teutonic tribes, wholly ignore the traditions of the Franks, and instead present the scholastic doctrine concerning the descent of the Franks from Troy and the Mœotian marshes. But I did not mean to say that we are wholly without evidence that another theory existed among the Franks, for they, too, had traditions in harmony with those of the other Teutonic tribes. There lived in the time of Charlemagne and after him a Frankish man whose name is written on the pages of history as a person of noble character and as a great educator in his day, the abbot in Fulda, later archbishop in Mayence, Hrabanus Maurus, a scholar of the distinguished Alcuin, the founder of the first library and of the first large convent school in Germany. The fact that he was particularly a theologian and Latinist did not prevent his honouring and loving the tongue of his fathers and of his race. He encouraged its study and use, and he succeeded in bringing about that sermons were preached in the churches in the Teutonic dialect of the church-goers. That a Latin scholar with so wide a horizon as his also was able to comprehend what the majority of his colleagues failed to understand—viz., that some value should be attached to the customs of the fathers and to the old memories from heathen times—should not surprise us. One of the proofs of his interest in this matter he has given us in his treatise De invocatione linguarum, in which he has recorded a Runic alphabet, and added the information that it is the alphabet used by the Northmen and by other heathen tribes, and that songs and formulas for healing, incantation, and prophecy are written with these characters. When Hrabanus speaks of the Northmen, he adds that those who speak the German tongue trace their descent from the Northmen. This statement cannot be harmonised with the hypothesis concerning the Asiatic descent of the Franks and other Teutons, except by assuming that the Teutons on their immigration from Asia to Europe took a route so far to the north that they reached the Scandinavian peninsula and Denmark without touching Germany and Central Europe, and then came from the North to Germany. But of such a view there is not a trace to be found in the middle age chronicles. The Frankish chronicles make the Franks proceed from Pannonia straight to the Rhine. The Icelandic imitations of the hypothesis make Odin and his people proceed from Tanais to Saxland, and found kingdoms there before he comes to Denmark and Sweden. Hrabanus has certainly not heard of any such theory. His statement that all the Teutons came from the North rests on the same foundation as the native traditions which produced the sagas in regard to the descent of the Longobardians, Saxons, and Swabians from the North. There still remains one trace of the Frankish migration saga, and that is the statement of Paulus Diaconus, made above, concerning the supposed identity of the name Ansgisel with the name Anchises. The identification is not made by Paulus himself, but was found in the Frankish source which furnished him with what he tells about the ancestors of Charlemagne, and the Frankish source, under the influence of the hypothesis regarding the Trojan descent of the Franks, has made an emigration leader mentioned in the popular traditions identical with the Trojan Anchises. This is corroborated by the Ravenna geographer, who also informs us that a certain Anschis, Ansgisel, was a Teutonic emigration leader, and that he was the one under whose leadership the Saxon tribes left their old homes. Thus it appears that, according to the Frankish saga, the Franks originally emigrated under the same chief as the Saxons. The character and position of Ansgisel in the heathen myth will be explained in No. 123.

18.

      JORDANES ON THE EMIGRATION OF THE GOTHS, GEPIDÆ, AND HERULIANS. THE MIGRATION SAGA OF THE BURGUNDIANS. TRACES OF AN ALAMANNIC MIGRATION SAGA.

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      The most populous and mighty of all the Teutonic tribes was during a long period the Gothic, which carried victorious weapons over all eastern and southern Europe and Asia Minor, and founded kingdoms between the Don in the East and the Atlantic ocean and the Pillars of Hercules in the West and South. The traditions of the Goths also referred the cradle of the race to Scandinavia. Jordanes, a Romanised Goth, wrote in the sixth century the history of his people. In the North, he says, there is a great ocean, and in this ocean there is a large island called Scandza, out of whose loins our race burst forth like a swarm of bees and spread over Europe. In its capacity as cradle of the Gothic race, and of other Teutonic tribes, this island Scandza is clearly of great interest to Jordanes, the more so since he, through his father Vamod or Alano-Vamut, regarded himself as descended from the same royal family as that from which the Amalians, the famous royal family of the East Goths, traced their ancestry. On this account Jordanes gives as complete a description of this island as possible. He first tells what the Greek and Roman authors Claudius Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela have written about it, but he also reports a great many things which never before were known in literature, unless they were found in the lost Historia Gothorum by Cassiodorus—things which either Jordanes himself or Cassiodorus had learned from Northmen who were members of the large Teutonic armies then in Italy. Jordanes also points out, with an air of superiority, that while the geographer Ptolemy did not know more than seven nations living on the island Scandza, he is able to enumerate many more. Unfortunately several of the Scandinavian