The nordic migration period

The migration saga of the Goths, as Jordanes heard it, makes them emigrate from Scandinavia under the leadership of Berig. (Ex hac igitur Scandza insula quasi officina gentium aut certe velut vagina nationum cumn rege suo Berig Gothi quondam memorantur egressi— De Goth. Orig., c. 4. Meminisse debes, me de Scndzæ insulæ gremnio Gothos dixisse egressos cum Berich suo rege—c. 17.) The name Berig, also written Bench and Berigo, is the same as the German Berker, Berchtung, and indicates the same person as the Norse Borgarr. With Berig is connected the race of the Amalians; with Borgar the memory of Hamal (Amala), who is the foster-brother of Borgar’s son (cp. No. 28 with Helge Hund., ii.). Thus the emigration of the Goths is in the myth a result of the fate experienced by Borgar and his people in their original country. And as the Swedes constituted the northernmost Teutonic branch, they were the ones who, on the approach of the fimbul-winter, were the first that were compelled to surrender their abodes and secure more southern habitations. This also appears from saga fragments which have been preserved; and here, but not in the circumstances themselves, lies the explanation of the statements, according to which the Swedes forced Scandinavian tribes dwelling farther south to emigrate. Jordanes (c. 3) claims that the Herulians were driven from their abode in Scandza by the Svithidians, and that the Danes are of Svithidian origin—in other words, that an older Teutonic population in Denmark was driven south, and that Denmark was repeopled by emigrants from Sweden. And in the Norse sagas themselves, the centre of gravity, as we have seen, is continually being moved farther to the south. Heimdal, under the name Scef-Skelfir, comes to the original inhabitants in Scania. Borgar, his son, becomes a ruler there, but founds, under the name Skjold, the royal dynasty of the Skjoldungs in Denmark. With Scef and Skjold the Wessex royal family of Saxon origin is in turn connected,, and thus the royal dynasty of the Goths is again connected with the Skjold who emigrated from Scandza, and who is identical with Borgar. And finally there existed in Saxo’s time mythic traditions or songs which related that all the present Germany came under the power of the Teutons who emigrated with Borgar; that, in other words, the emigration from the North carried with it the hegemony of Teutonic tribes over other tribes which before them inhabited Germany. Saxo says of Skjold-Borgar that omnem Alamannorum gentem tributaria ditione perdomuit; that is, "he made the whole race of Alamanni tributary ". The name Alamanni is in this case not to be taken in an ethnographical but in a geographical sense. It means the people who were rulers in Germany before the immigration of Teutons from the North.

From this we see that migration traditions remembered by Teutons beneath Italian and Icelandic skies, on the islands of Great Britain and on the German continent, in spite of their wide diffusion and their separation in time, point to a single root: to the myth concerning the primeval artists and their conflict with the gods; to the robbing of Idun and the fimbul-winter which was the result. The myth miiakes the gods themselves to be seized by terror at the fate of the world, amid Mimir makes arrangements to save all that is best and purest on earth for an expected regeneration of the world. At the very beginning of the fimbul-winter Mimner opens in his subterranean grove of immortality an asylum, closed against all physical and spiritual evil, for the two children of men, Lif and Lifthrasir (Vafthr., 45), who are to be the parents of a new race of men (see Nos. 52, 53). The war begun in Borgar’s time for the possession of the ancient country continues under his son Halfdan, who reconquers it for a time, invades Svithiod, and repels Thjasse and his kinsmen (see Nos. 32, 33).