Europe: A History (48 page)
The Germanic peoples were on the move throughout the imperial period. The Gothic federation left its resting-place on the lower Vistula in the second century
AD,
drifting slowly south-eastwards against the main migratory current. Two hundred years later, the Visigoths were established on the Black Sea coast north of the Danube delta. The Ostrogoths lay further east, in the Crimea and on the Dnieper steppes, precariously close to the advancing Huns. In that fourth century, some of the Frankish tribes may have been invited into the Empire as imperial
foederati
, and charged with the defence of the Rhine.
The Slavonic peoples pressed hard on the heels of their Germanic neighbours. Their prehistory is less well documented, since they had fewer contacts with the
Empire, and has become the subject of many modern musings. The ancient ‘Slavonic homeland’ has often been viewed as a fixed reservation. The Polish ‘aboriginal school’ of prehistorians insists that it extended over the territory between the Oder and the Vistula
ab origine
, although it is more convincingly designated to a wooded zone further east, on the slopes of the Carpathians. For some inexplicable reason Western scholars love to relegate the proto-Slavs to the least likely and least comfortable of locations, in the middle of the Pripet Marshes. Whatever its bounds, the Slavonic homeland straddled the main prehistoric trail. It must have been overrun, and probably subordinated, by each of the great nomadic incursions. A Scythian chieftain was buried with all his treasures at Witaszkowo on the western Neisse. The memory of the Sarmatians lingered for 2,000 years, so that Polish nobles would claim Sarmatian pedigree, [
CRUX
] The migrating Goths and Gepids drifted slowly past, to no known ill effect. In the fifth century
AD
the passage of the Huns left few traces except for a tantalizing phrase in an Anglo-Saxon poem, the
Widsith
, which tells how ‘the Hraede with their sharp swords must defend their ancient seat from the people of Aetla by the Wistla wood’.
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The Huns’ successors, the Avars, created some sort of Slavo-Avaric confederation that first enters the historical record from Byzantine sources in the sixth century.
It is doubtful whether the proto-Slavonic language could have been deeply differentiated until the main migrations began in the middle of the first millennium. It is only known from scholarly reconstructions. Like Greek and Latin, it was marked by highly complex declensions and conjugations and by free word order. The Slavonic tribes are often thought to have developed a characteristic social institution, the [
ZADRUGA
] or ‘joint family’, where all the relatives of the chieftain lived together under fierce patriarchal discipline. They worshipped numerous deities such as Triglav, the Three-Headed One, Svarog, the Sun-Maker, and Perun, the God of the Thunderclap. Interestingly enough, much of their religious vocabulary, from Bog (God) to
raj
(Paradise), is Sarmato-Iranian in origin; just as many of their words relating to primitive technology, such as
dach
(roof in Polish) or
plug
(plough in Russian) is Germanic. Isolated though they were, they had clearly benefited from contact with their neighbours. (See Appendix III, p. 1223.)
A taste of the shaky sources, and of the scepticism, of Western historians may be drawn from the following description of the Slavs, which was compiled, with some poetic licence, ‘from the evidence of Procopius and of the Emperor Mauritius’:
The Sclavonians used one common language (it was harsh and irregular) and were known by the resemblance of their form which deviated from the swarthy Tartar and approached, without attaining, the lofty stature and fair complexion of the German. Four thousand six hundred villages were scattered over the provinces of Russia and Poland, and their huts were hastily built of rough timber… We may, not perhaps without flattery, compare them to the architecture of the beaver…
FUTHARK
R
UNES
or ‘matchstick signs’ form the basis of an alphabet which was used by the Vikings and which, from its first six letters, was known as ‘Futhark’. Runes were chiselled into wood or stone, often in long, snakelike inscriptions. There were two main variants—Common or Danish Futhark, and Swedo-Norwegian, each with sixteen basic signs:
Runic inscriptions have been found in great numbers, especially in central Sweden and in Denmark. They record voyages, legal agreements, and deaths, sometimes in skaldic verse. A silver neck-ring from Troons in northern Norway tells how the silver was won:
| Forum drengia Frislands a vit | We went to the lands of Frisia |
| ok vigs fQtum ver skiptum | And we it was who split the spoils of war. |
At Gripsholm in Sodermanland, a mother mourns her sons, Ingmar and Harald, who perished on an expedition to the Mediterranean:
| peir fóru drengila fiarri et gulli | Like men they journeyed for gold, |
| ok austarla ame gáfu | And in the east they feasted the eagle, |
| dóu sunnarla á Serklandi | And in the south they died in Serkland. |
There is a runic graffito in a gallery of St Sophia’s in Istanbul, and another on one of the lions of St Mark, brought to Venice from Athens.
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Runes, however, were not just used for writing. The 16-sign Futhark of the Vikings, which dates from
ad c.350,
had been condensed from the much more extensive
Hallristningar
or ‘Rune Hoard’, which was used from the Bronze Age onwards for the purposes of occult divination:
The
Germania
of Tacitus describes the reading of the runes:
They break off a branch from a fruit tree, and slice it into strips; they distinguish these by certain runes and throw them, as fortune will have it, onto a white cloth. Then the state priest… or the family father… after praying to the gods … picks up three of them, one at a time, and reads their meaning from the runes carved on them.
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In later times, among many variants, the 33-sign series found in Anglo-Saxon England and the 18-sign series of Armanen Runes found in the German-speaking world had much in common (see Appendix III, pp. 1234–5). Runes provide a gateway to the mysterious and strangely beautiful aesthetic world of the vikings.
Ogham, or Ogams, were a Celtic counterpart of Scandinavian runes, being used both for writing and for divination, especially in Ireland. Each sign consisted of simple vertical staves cut against a horizontal or slanting baseline. Each was primarily associated with a tree and with a letter corresponding to the tree’s name, but also, by alliteration, with birds and animals, with colours, with periods of the year, and with days of the week:
Europe’s native writing systems were an essential adjunct to pagan religion. Ogam and Runes, like the North Italic and the Etruscan, were rooted in times when the divination of Nature lay at the heart of all knowledge and understanding. Even so much of the associated lore and magic has survived the advent of classical and Christian civilization.
The fertility of the soil, rather than the labour of the natives, supplied the rustic plenty of the Sclavonians … The field which they sowed with millet and panic afforded, in the place of bread, a coarse and less nutritive food … As their supreme God, they adored an invisible master of the thunder…
The Sclavonians disdained to obey a despot… Some voluntary respect was yielded to age and valour; but each tribe or village existed as a separate republic, and all must be persuaded where none could be compelled … They fought on foot, almost naked … They swam, they dived, they remained under water, drawing breath through a hollow cane. But these were the achievements of spies or stragglers. The military art was unknown to the Sclavonians. Their name was unknown, and their conquests obscure.
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The Baltic peoples lived in still greater isolation. The Prussians to the east of the Vistula delta, the Lithuanians in the valley of the Niemen, and the Letts on the western Dvina spoke languages that scholars regard as the least evolved of all. They were once thought, erroneously, to form part of the Slavonic group, but are now judged closer to proto-Indo-European even than Sanskrit. Like all Indo-Europeans, the Baits must surely have migrated from the East at some point in prehistory, but nothing is known of their movements. They settled on the morainic debris of the last Ice Age, and stayed there among the dark pines and the shimmering lakes. Like the Finns and the Estonians, they seem to have been left alone until the tide of the peoples turned in the opposite direction in the first half of the second millennium, [
LIETUVA
]
LIETUVA
T
HERE
is no shortage of authorities to confirm that the Lithuanian language is ‘the most archaic of all Indo-European tongues,’
1
or that ‘it has better preserved its archaic forms … than have other contemporary Indo-European languages’.
2
Ever since Karl Brugmann published his
Grundriss
, or outline, of comparative Indo-Germanic languages in 1897, Lithuanian has been a favourite among etymologists of the Romantic persuasion.
It is true that the Lithuanian lexicon contains a core of words that any classicist would recognize:
vyras
‘man’,
saulē
‘sun’,
mēnuo
‘moon’,
ugnis
‘fire’,
kalba
‘language’. Lithuania has kept dual as well as plural number, long vowels of nasal origin, seven-case declensions, and a verb system of tenses, conjugations, and moods not dissimilar to Latin’s. On the other hand, the Slavonic element in the Lithuanian lexicon is also very large:
galva
‘head’ (Russian
golova), ranka
‘hand’ (Polish
ręka), paukŠtis
‘bird’,
žiema
‘winter’, and
sniegas
‘snow’ (Polish
ptaszek, zima
, and
śnieg)
. Polish, too, has plural number, nasal vowels, and seven cases. Unlike Lithuanian (or French), most Slavonic languages have not lost the neuter form. In reality, Lithuanian is mainly characterized by features common to both the Baltic and the Slavonic language groups. Anyone who imagines that it is a close relative to Sanskrit is in for a disappointment.
None the less, the survival of Lithuanian is remarkable. It remained a local peasant vernacular throughout the long centuries of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (see p. 392), and was never used as a language of high culture or government. The Lithuanian Statutes, written in
ruski
or ‘Ruthenian’ were translated into Latin (1530) and Polish (1531), but not into Lithuanian. Starting with the Catechism (1547) of M. Mazvidas, however, Lithuanian was used for religious purposes. In the nineteenth century, Russian educators tried printing it in Cyrillic. But the Polish bishops of Wilno (Vilnius) successfully countered the ploy by supporting Lithuanian primary education in the Roman alphabet, thereby cementing Lithuania’s deep attachment to Catholicism. This makes it entirely appropriate for amateur linguists to cut their teeth on a scriptural text:
Ir angēlas
tare jiems:
‘Nesibijokties!
Štay!’
Apsakau jums didj dźaugsma
kurs nusidůs
vissiems źmonems. (Luke 2:10)
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