Re: The "Lesser Goths" of Jordanes

--- In cybalist@..., x99lynx@... wrote:

> George wrote:
> <<The only archaeological evidence in line with the Jordanes

account is

> Wielbark moving southeastward from the later 1rst c. AD.>>
>
> Although I agree with George that a 1500BC date does not seem very

likely for

> a "Gothic migration," I think that there is other evidence that

might

> indicate a southward movement in later times. I'm not saying that

any of

> these movements validate Jordanes. Some are "material cultures"

that show

> signs of Jastorf influence. Poienesti-Lukashevka for example often
> identified with Bastarnae (for absolutely no good reason I can see)

apppears

> to be the southward movement of elements associated with what are

thought to

> be Germanic northern cultures (i.e., through specific artifact

categories

> like "Feuerbocke" and "Kronenhalsringe", as I understand it.)
>
> I myself of course don't think that archaeological evidence can

validate

> Jordanes. When crosses and Christian burials, iron poles and

certain kind of

> wine jugs start appearing in new early English settlements, it does

not

> signal a migration. The appearance of Japanese cars, sushi plates

and audio

> equipment in Boston do not signal a Japanese invasion. So, there's

really no

> reason to be sure that material change means a migration. And that

applies to

> Wielbark as well as any other evidence of southern movement into

the area.

>

Using that reasoning, you can't disprove Jordanes archaeologically
either. And then anything goes.

>
> The problem with the 1500BC date is how Jordanes could possibly

have

> remembered such an event.

Remembered?

> Currently anthropologists don't believe that
> understandable oral history lasts for more than three generations
>or so. I
> think they may be wrong.

But what about the recurrent flood myths all over the world? It is
just possible that they refer to the disastrous melting of ice caps
as the last Ice Age ended, events that happened within a human life
span.

>But 2000 years is a long time for someone to even
> recognize what the original words even meant. If I sang an Anglo-
>Saxon
> ballad to a modern English audience, neither I nor they would have
>the least
> idea of what I was talking about.

It doesn't work that way. Oral tradition, also in the form of poetry,
is handed from generation to generation. Therefore there is never a
gap between mutually unintelligible languages. The form of the poem
changes with the form of the language. Example: The loss of
unstressed final in Germanic in the first millenium CE meant that
poem had to be rewrought. And the English language is atypical in
that it suffered a major disaster: loss of tradition (with the native
elite gone) and creolization after the Norman invasion (but the
Gothic tradition, in Jordanes version, would be in similar
circumstances: two changes of language).

>
> Steve Long

Torsten