{Color, Pictures & Annotations { … } Added. EXCERPTS FROM}

The Mysteries of the Goths

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Edred

Limited First Edition

© Runa-Raven Press, 2007

ISBN: 1-885972-31-8

Runa-Raven Press

P. O. Box 557

Smithville, Texas 78957

USA

www.runaraven.com

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Abbreviations

ch. chapter

OHG Old High German

OS Old Saxon

Go. Gothic

Lat. Latin

OE Old English

ON Old Norse

PGmc. Proto-Germanic

PIE Proto-Indo-European

pi. plural

sg. singular

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Introduction

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In the annals of great mysteries, in the annals of mythic greatness, (there is no people in the history of Europe of greater mystery combined with tragic greatness than the Goths. They are a folk shrouded in a dark mystique linked to a noble past. Their name has continued to evoke mystery and greatness centuries after they disappeared from political history. This book is intended to explore the Gothic mysteries— of which there are many — and bring to their mist-filled {Mistik, Mystic) world the light of illumination. In the end we will discover that the Goths were themselves a people of light surrounded by darkness— a darkness which eventually enveloped them. …

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When we hear the word “Gothic” a number of connotations probably spring to mind — Gothic architecture, Gothic romance, Gothic horror — just to name a few. How did the name of an ancient Germanic tribal group become attached to all these cultural and literary features centuries after the Gothic language and people had vanished from the stage of European history? By the end of this book you will have some kind of answer.

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Johannes Bureus (1627)

Certainly this is not the first book or study to attempt a deeper reading of this mysterious history. But it is the only one to focus almost entirely on the Gothic tribes and the Gothic times (pre-711 CE) and not on the later 16th and 17th century obsession with the idea of the Goths especially prevalent in Scandinavia and England. This obsession even has a name— Gothicism, “Gothicism” or Storgoticism, “Megleoi-Gothicism.” This movement and its chief esoteric exponent, Johannes Bureus, is the subject of a fine study by Thomas Karlsson, Adulruna and the Gothic Cabbala. These early modem Gothic enthusiasts felt they had discovered the font of all civilization in the ancient Goths. Later in the 18th and 19th centuries Romantics throughout Europe
began to identify themselves as “Gothic.” The word was applied to all
Germanic peoples— Germans, Anglo-Saxons, as well as all
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Scandinavians.

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The Name “Goth“

The name of the Goths is shrouded in mystery. This mystery is only enhanced and deepened by the long history of the name. … One of the main problems is that there were in antiquity a number of different groups and subgroups of whose names were similar, but not identical, to the name of the Goths.

Tradition has it that they are named after their most distant ancestor, Gaut(s). Some might agree that this eponymous name ws projected back to a myth, however, the probable meaning of the name Gauts issomething like “father.” There is an Icelandic heiti, or byname, of O∂inn— Gautr. This element also occurs in the Old Icelandic Rune-Poem in the stanza for áss ([god]= O∂inn): Ass er aldin-gautr, “God is the ancient father.” For more on this poem, see The Rune Poems (Runa-Raven, 2002). This does not necessarily mean that Gauts is identical with Wo∂anaz, because the name only means “father,” in the etymotological sense of of “he who pours out,” i.e. the generations or offspring.

From ancient times the name of the Goths appears in a grammatically strong and weak form, Gut- and Guton- respectively. [17] Beyond this there is also the fact that the name appears in Greek and Latin as well as Gothic orthographies. Tradition would hold that this name and that contained in the name of Gotaland (Gotland) in present day Sweden and the island of Gotland stem from the same source and that these are identical to the Geatas (ON Gautar) in Beowulf.

This name later became confused with others. The principal confusion came in connection with the name of a Dacian tribe, the Getae, who inhabited present-day northern Romania at the time the Goths settled there for a short while in the 4th century. These names were then confused by Latin and Greek writers. Through the centuries, as the fame of the Gothic name spread, any similar sounding name came to be identified as “Goth,” including the Jutes [yootes] of the North Sea and even the Judaei [yood-ah-ey], “Jews.” … The link between the name of the Goths and that of the Jews will play a part in some medieval mysteries surrounding the Goths.

… This can be demonstrated with the description of a single well-known word: PGmc. tiwaz, the name of the sky-god and the name of the 17th rune in the Older Fupark. In EGmc. (Gothic) this is teiws, in NGmc. tiwaR and in SGmc. we find Old High German ziu or Old English tiw. … These technical linguistic details may seem tedious, but they provide some [18] important clues for determining the interactions of various tribes in ancient times and help us to identify certain artifacts of esoteric Importance.

In the tribal histories of the Germanic peoples these linguistic designations are also important because they show which tribes shared deep common roots. The East Germanic tribes were, besides the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Gepids and the Rugians. The original homeland of the Burgundians was the island of Bornholm in the Baltic. The Erulians, or Heruli, have also sometimes been classified with the East Germanic “tribes,” but their classification remains problematic. Runic inscriptions in the Older Futhark show that rune-carvers identifying themselves as “Erulians” did not use East Germanic linguistic form, e.g. ek erilaR. It is most likely that the Hrulians were an intertribal band of oath-bound warriors made up of members of various Germanic tribes.