The barbarian and pagan chieftains and kings retained power not only through their ability to meet the economic needs of their followers. It was also a widespread practice among such leaders to provide themselves with a noble pedigree. This typically meant that they would not only demonstrate an ancient lineage that linked them back to the world of the ancestors (as in the case of Raedwald's Wuffinga dynasty in the Anglo-Saxon sphere), but also claim descent from mythical figures (such as Mannus among the ancient Germanic people that Tacitus encountered, or the Gothic cultural hero Filimer). Fact, legend and myth became inexorably intertwined in the fluid oral traditions of the barbarians.
Such traditions were transformed when the barbarians began to write down their own history. What had once been mercurial was now fixed in the form of the written word. When Jordanes wrote his book Getica he not only recorded the origin and history of his own Gothic people as he saw it; he also partly created it. He moulded his own people's vision of themselves and their past – he was literally making history. This is even more explicit in the Christianised vision of Bede and his history of the English people. These were not attempts to give largely impartial accounts of the past; they were part of the act of creating a past for a barbarian people and thereby, to an extent, creating that very people by trying to make solid the fluid material they were working with – the earlier orally transmitted lineages and legends.
Archaeology, our third source of information concerning the Dark Ages, provides us with another form of solid evidence. The presence of objects does not always indicate the presence of their makers. There are artefacts that can be identified broadly as originating with a particular ethnic group – Saxon pottery and brooches, for example – but we cannot be sure that the discovery of such objects at British sites necessarily demonstrates a Saxon presence (though it certainly proves a Saxon influence). In other words, while there is no simple correlation between people and objects, the characteristic artefacts of the different barbarian cultures have allowed us to trace migrations and other movements across the continent of Europe and, in the case of the Huns, beyond. They provide frameworks not only across space but also across time: artefacts can provide a chronological sequence in the absence of sufficient historical documents.
The work of archaeologists also provides a different kind of evidence concerning the values and customs of barbarian peoples from that given by written accounts. Objects speak to us: the jewellery made by barbarians on the Danube startles with its beauty and sophistication, the Anglo-Saxon sword tells the story of the remarkable technological achievements wrought in the forges of the Dark Ages, and the vestiges of a golden bow testify to the military prowess of the horse archers of the Huns. When such important objects are found together with many others in an assemblage (as is often the case with burials), a multi-faceted view of a barbarian world emerges; we have seen this in, for example, the Sutton Hoo burial. This in turn links in with other assemblages far away from it in both space and time. We can see a great Germanic cultural tradition expressed in the form of ship burial throughout the northern European world: in the marshland home of the Saxon chieftain of Fallward in Germany, in the lavish burial of Sutton Hoo, in the Oseberg and Gokstad finds, and among the immigrant population of the Icelandic fjords.
The interplay between the Roman (and subsequently Christian) 'civilised' world and the barbarians (who later became more often known as pagans) was the essence of the Dark Ages. There are underlying patterns in the way in which these two worlds interacted. Typically, we first hear of the barbarians as violent raiders who suddenly appear – hordes of Huns or Vandals, Saxon pirates, Viking looters. After this initial phase more permanent relations are forged out of necessity, and often reluctantly. Dangerous barbarian tribes are paid off with gold or with the promise of land. The Romans employ them in the army and follow a divide-and-rule policy by pitting one barbarian force against another. Barbarians make their permanent settlements inside the 'civilised' world – Goths enter the Roman Empire, Vikings stay in Anglo-Saxon England. The barbarians were transformed from being outsiders and were assimilated first into the Roman Empire and second into the Christian faith.
Barbarian cultures were dramatically transformed by their encounters with 'civilisation', but so too was the Roman empire radically altered by their presence. The pressure of the barbarians within its boundaries caused the empire to implode, and the provinces to take the first steps towards becoming the countries that we see today on the map of Europe. In the regions beyond the reach of empire, the emergence of national kings would occur later and largely under the auspices of the Church. The barbarian societies of the Dark Ages were to provide the fertile soil from which the nation states of today were eventually to grow. And this very soil continues to yield up artefacts that testify to the great cultural achievements of the barbarians.
Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages Page 27
