On 2008-11-01 23:05, Erik Smit wrote:
> And a Scandinavian origin of the Goths and Vandals is a disputed
> matter. For example Wibold Mazczak wrote that the Goths came from
> the south of the ancient DDR, went to Bavaria and Austria and arrived
> in the Ukraine via Hungary. The Gudones mentioned by Tacitus were
> the Baltic tribe of Galindoi.
Witold, not Wibold. He arrived at that conclusion by comparing Biblical
translations in various Germanic languages and counting lexical
correspondences to determine the subdivisions of Germanic. This branch
of his activity is _not_ serious scholarship. Alas, Prof. Man'czak is a
sworn old-school Polish autochthonist: there are evidently no lengths he
wouldn't go to to prove that Poland is the homeland of the Poles at all
time-depths. That necessarily makes the present (!) territory of Poland
the Slavic and the IE Urheimat :)
Not that the Scandinavian theory of Gothic and Vandalic origins is
consistent with the evidence. All relevant historical sources and
archaeological findings place the earliest people whom we have any right
to term "the Goths" in what is now Northern Poland and "the Vandals" to
the south of them. Of course they hadn't lived there since the dawn of
time. Arrivals from other places (very possibly including Scandinavia)
probably mixed with the locals to form the proto-Gothic ethnos. As they
migrated to new places, they absorbed still more admixtures and
eventually got themselves absorbed into other ethnic units.
> And what about the origin of the Angli and Saxones? Did the Angli
> come from the Angerland in Sweden and were the Saxons Scandinavians
> too?
According to their own traditions, the Angles came from the Angeln
Peninsula in South Jutland (Southern Schleswig), the Saxons (I mean
those Saxons who took part in the colonisation of Britain) from an area
roughly coinciding with what is now Holstein, and the Jutes more or less
from what is today the Danish part of the Jutland Peninsula. They were
surely accompanied by smaller numbers of miscellaneous other Germanic
auxiliaries (such as Frisians and Franks) during their migration to what
was to become England.
> And who do live in Jutland and north Germany before the
> arrival of the Germanics?
A good question, but we have too little reliable information to be able
to answer it.
Piotr