Neue Ergebnisse der Jordanes-Forschung und die Namenkunde

Zugleich Besprechung von: Arne Soby CHRISTENSEN, Cassiodorus Jordanes and the History of the Goths. Studies in a Migration Myth, Kopenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen 2002, 391 Seiten

Abstract

Apart from the Germania of Tacitus, Jordanes´s History of the Goths is the preeminent source for Germanic history. Many opinions of nowadays scholars are based on his accounts. Of the utmost significance are the effects in the field of onomastics. In the end the idea developed by R. Much that the names of various Germanic tribes are nicknames can be tracked down to Jordanes´s explanation of the name Gepids. In a similar way modern scholarship took his narrative of the migrations of the Goths as a veracious description of remote realities in the past, Christensen's book unsettles the prevailing opinion of early Gothic history. This essay deals with the consequences of these findings on onomastics.