Life and Land in Anglo-Saxon England
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
These online subscriptions just do not make sense if you don't want to read everything they've ever written. And it's the price of a book every month!
> I love Proto-Germanic
Is there something specific (aside from noticing these kinds of similarities in vocabulary) you love about proto-Germanic? Maybe its syntax, or grammar? Or sounds?
Possibly peafowl? They were kept in medieval England. There is some bright decoration on the head. The head and legs are too long, but other things in the picture are not to scale either.
I'd say a crane is a pretty good guess though, given it's a falconry picture; Wikipedia says
> The common crane (Grus grus) is generally believed to have been a breeding bird in Britain in the Middle Ages. English people prized cranes as the "noblest quarry" for a falconer, and gladly ate them. In December 1212 King John flew his gyrfalcons at cranes at Ashwell, in Cambridgeshire, and killed seven, and on another occasion in Lincolnshire in February 1213 he brought down nine.
https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/news/the-great-crane...
DQ was written in like 1600 but based on chivalric romances from 200-400 years earlier, where it turns out ostriches also come up from time to time, even in heraldry of some characters.
Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures including asia minor and northern africa where ostriches were present. And these seafaring cultural and trade spheres also extended into nothern europe and the british isles.
So ultimately I don't think they were going off the bible for it. It's no more unusual than someone from that area being aware of lions or crocodiles and their general appearance. It would probably be very unusual to have seen one, but they would appear in puppet shows and travelers tales for sure. Literate people may have seen them in manuscript illuminations as well.
There were people in England in Anglo-Saxon times. who had been as far away as Alexandria, or Constantinople.
Icelandic sagas in the late 1000s, wrote about William the Conqueror in England, and noted that many of the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Byzantium. So, even in Iceland they knew about Constantinople, and probably ostriches too, and that these were real things and places, which you might travel and see, even if they were basically at the other end of the known world. At the other end of the world, Byzantine records mention Anglo-Saxon warriors being recruited at that time.
People got around even back then.
It's much less likely there were live ostriches in Anglo-Saxon times but the rich have always enjoyed mangeries and exotic animals. I wouldn't be surprised. And there would be traveller accounts and stories, increasingly mythical to be fair, as large population movements from places where people had actually seen them declined in the post-Roman era.
England was never part of the roman world. It was the collapse of the roman world that allowed the anglo-saxons to settle and create england. England was a post-roman world creation. Heck it was part of the destruction crew of the roman world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Britain
USAmericans tend to say "England" interchangably with "United Kingdom", "Great Britain", and "The British Isles". Possibly more.
Also, people very commonly use the name of modern day countries to refer to their territory, such as "most of Germany was frozen over in the last Ice Age". I suspect this is what is happening here.
EDIT: I think even 2,000 years is enough.
Both had their language replaced (or taken away) but the people are still Celts going back to the Beaker culture, aren't they?
Of course it does help to be on the far edge of Europe
Most of these completely disappeared (though they obviously left genetic material in the local populations, their culture/language was entirely replaced and mostly forgotten)!
Take the Vandals... they seem to have originated in Poland, migrated south pushed by the Mongol raids and later the Goths (themselves coming from Northern Germany or even Scandinavia), ended up in the Iberian Peninsula, then somehow moved even further to Northern Africa... They got their reputation which lives on today (in the word vandalism in case you didn't know) by sacking Rome when the Western Roman Empire had already lost most of its glory, coming from Northern Africa and a few Mediterranean islands, the most import of which was probably Sicily.
More recently, the Lithuanian people lost almost all of their territory when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania disappeared (it was subdued by the arch-rivals Russia, Sweden which at the time was nosing around in the area, occupying places like today's Estonia, and the Austrians)... Lithuania only became a country again, and a tiny one at that, after the USSR collapsed, something like 300 years later.
In the last couple of centuries the history is even more complex!! We don't notice in a lifetime but the map keeps changing and the previous century was no exception. Where are Yougoslavia and Checkoslovakia now? :D ... did you know that Kyiv changed countries dozens of times over its history? It was capital of the Rus, invaded by the Mongols, incorporated by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then Poland, the Russian Empire, then it really went crazy and switched back-forth between the earlier "rulers" and short-lived Ukrainian states multiple times (like 10 times, seriously), was captured by the German army not once, but twice (in WWI and WWII), before kind of stabilizing as part of the USSR, and then finally, a proper Ukrainian state.
I was in the area some time ago and it was mind blowing to learn all that.
Possibly the Armenians are another example. And Georgians if you lump the Caucasus in with Europe. Albanians maybe also, as they are proposed by some to be descendants of the Illyrians.
Balts, Slavs, Germans, Celts, and maybe Italic speakers seem to have moved around a lot more.
Uhhh, no. Europe as we know it today is primarily a tripartite congregation of its first hunter-gatherers (such as Cheddar Man), Proto-Indo-European pastoralists from around the Caspian, and agriculturalists from Anatolia and the Levant, with further minor contributions from Central and North Asian peoples such as the Magyars, Huns, and the people who would give the Finnish the language they speak (Finnish not at all being an Indo-European language but an Uralic language, having a Siberian origin). Their varying combinations were only established within the last 4 - 8K years.
The Germanic languages are a branch of Indo-European, and this offshoot shares common words for those sea-related things, and also words for many dozens of species of plants and animals (all the tree species, for example, native to the region.) These words have similar properties, and were almost certainly borrowed from an earlier, unrelated culture already living there.
The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.
I don't think that a piece of land the size of the Iberic Penninsula could have spoken a single language in prehistory. Even in the modern day, in places that didn't have a concerted effort to impose a single language, we see a huge diversity. Dagestan for example has 14 different official languages, in a region with 3 million people, and an area almost half the size of Portugal.
Even in the Italian peninsula in the times of Caesar, there were at least 4 major languages spoken - Latin, Umbrian, Venetic, and Etruscan (which is not even indo-European).
Europe has been inhabited by various groups of people over hundreds of thousands of years, starting from early human ancestors like Homo erectus, followed by Neanderthals, and eventually Homo sapiens. The idea of a singular "original" group of Europeans doesn't align with our understanding of prehistoric migrations and the genetic mixing that occurred over time.
Modern populations, including Germans, are the result of these extensive, multi-directional movements and interactions, making any one group not "original" but rather a product of ongoing historical processes.