---
x99lynx@... wrote:
> George wrote:
> <<The river list of Historia Naturalis IV.100
> roughly parallels the people
> list of IV.99, so we must seek the "Guthalus" in the
> land of the "Vandili".
> Only the Oder fits....Even those investigators who
> thought that "Guthalus"
> might be "Goet(a)lv" looked
> for it on the southern shores of the Baltic, usually
> opting for the
> Oder.******>>
>
> Hardly compelling. The Guthalvs is on the wrong side
> of the Vistula if we are
> going to try to be objective.
*****GK(new): It definitely is! And I argued as much
on another list. Pliny's information about the land
and rivers east of the Elbe was confused and
fragmentary. He had heard something about the recent
exploits of the Goths (we know from archaeology that
they were expanding their territory noticeably in the
years subsequent to ca, 50 AD) and wrongly included
them among the "Vandals" whose lands the Goths had
just captured. He heard something about the "Guthalus"
and probably concluded that it must have something to
do with the Goths, shifting it east of the Vistula
because of the sound similarity and because the Goths
were the easternmost of the "Vandili" to his mind. But
I don't think his information came from mariners,
basically. Rather (as did Tacitus') it came from
people involved in the amber trade (which he describes
a bit later on). And again, meager as his information
was about the south shores and adjacent interior areas
of the Baltic (absolute zilch about the areas Tacitus
called "Aestian" and Ptolemy called "Venedic" for
instance), it was still infinitely more than he knew
about the Scandinavian lands to the north. And the
situation wasn't much better for Tacitus or
Ptolemy.****
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