THE last but one, and the last wave of peoples of Nordic blood were the Kelts and the Germans. Philology and prehistoric research have shown western Germany up to the Rhine and central and southern Germany to be the original home of the Kelts. The early Kelts are seen from their graves and from the descriptions of Hellenic and Roman writers to be thoroughly Nordic. Keltic literature in Ireland, too, at a late period, when non-Nordic blood must have already risen into the upper class, calls the free Kelts always fair, the bondmen dark. The dominion of the Kelts in central and western Europe had its first beginnings about 900 B.C., and reached its height 500-400 B.C., coming to an end about 200 B.C. Internal strife among the leaders, and the collapse of the currency, preceded the Keltic downfall in Gaul -- a downfall finally brought about for all the western Kelts by the Romans on the one hand, and the Germans on the other. The details of the Keltic rise and fall, the gradual denordization of the Kelts which was inevitable with a dominion spread so wide over non-Nordic subject classes, have been examined by me from the racial standpoint in the Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes. Here only a short examination will be made of the course of the wave from which that Nordic blood comes which is found in European nations to-day: the last, the Germanic wave. This last wave of Nordic blood is known under the name of the 'Wandering of the Peoples.' This 'wandering of the peoples,' however, should be more exactly called the last of these wanderings, or the 'wandering of the Germanic peoples.' It is because the bright light of history falls on this last wandering that it has taken on a special importance; and also because it laid the foundations for the European state-system of to-day.

Map XVII The area of unbroken German settlement about 2000 B.C. The Germans, however, had already in Neolithic times advanced beyond the unbroken area of settlement into Finland, the Baltic coastlands, central Germany, and along the Vistula into Poland and Galicia. In language the Germans separated (through the first phonetic changes) about 1000 B.C. from the other peoples of Indo-European speech. Between 120 B.C. and A.D. 600 German tribes spread over the whole of central, west, and south Europe. In language the Germanic tribes separated from one another in the fourth century A.D.
Map XVIII I. Southern boundary of the unbroken area of settlement of the Germans, 1750-1400 B.C. (after Kossinna) II. The same boundary, 1400-750 B.C. (after Kossinna) III. Advance of the Swabian-Erminian tribes of the Germans up to about 600 B.C. (after Kossinna) IV. Advance of the same tribes up to about 100 B.C. (after Kossinna and Wehla)

The time of the Germanic wanderings is best laid (with Arldt¹) between 120 B.C. and A.D. 600, after which a further Nordic wave -- that of the Normans -- is to be recorded A.D. 700-1100.²

But the settlement of North America from the seventeenth century must also be looked on as a Nordic wave, as a mighty spreading, indeed, of Nordic blood, which down into the nineteenth century has been at work bringing mainly men of predominantly Nordic race into North America. The United States of America, as also Canada, belong racially to the number of the Germanic states that not only (like the Southern European German states) have sprung from Nordic upper classes, but had Nordic blood in all classes. It was not till the nineteenth century that North America experienced a heavy immigration from non-Nordic regions, and at the same time a sharp fall in the birth-rate among the old, predominantly Nordic families. It stands to-day at about the same stage of denordization as Germany or England.

Wanderings, coming from the original home of the Germanic tribes, are already to be seen in Neolithic times. The details of these matters are examined in my Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes. Here we only show on Maps XVII and XVIII the prehistoric spread of Germanic tribes. The spread of Germanic power, so full of significance for all Europe, began with the wandering of the peoples, and had as its result that, throughout central, western, and southern Europe, Germanic states arose, after all Europe had seen the passage of Germanic tribes. Since among the Germans from about the beginning of our era body-burial had taken the place of body-burning, the fact that the Germans belonged to the Nordic race can be seen from the remains themselves. The Germanic graveyards (Reihengräber) confirm the evidence of the writers of antiquity as to the Nordic look presented by the Germanic tribes of the time of the wandering of the peoples.

In Merovingian times central and western Europe were perhaps as Nordic as the Sweden of to-day, if not more so. Through the spread of the Germanic tribes the whole of Europe once more acquired a Nordic ideal of beauty.³ The ideal is taken always from the appearance of the upper classes, and throughout the West, and indeed almost everywhere in Europe, these were of Nordic-Germanic descent. The nobility of all countries was originally Nordic. Equality of birth meant equal purity of the Nordic blood. From the racial standpoint there is but one equality of birth: that based on the equal purity of Nordic blood. Racially the nobleman of mixed race is not of equal birth with a Nordic peasant girl. If, then, nobility is to receive a racial meaning again, this can only come about through the attainment of Nordic racial purity.⁴

The Germanic tribes were in possession of certain traditional eugenic customs, and of a traditional but more unconscious, aversion to mixture with the blood of the dark European races. The Germanic father recognized a newborn child, which was laid before him on the ground in solemn form, as fit for bringing up by lifting it. Deformed and sickly children were set out. The criminal was looked on by the Germans as a degenerate, from whom his clan cleansed itself through the death penalty. 'By the public death penalty the society wished as energetically as possible to rid itself of something which had been untrue to its kind. The public death penalty, therefore, was born of the effort to keep the race pure.'⁵ The penalty for deliberate injury to the sexual powers was death; abortion was punished with slavery.

Fig. 243 - Praying (?) German, Roman bronze statue in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Just as the exposing of children and the death penalty favoured eugenic practice, so there were laws among the tribes settled in southern Europe over non-Nordic populations which served to prevent the mixture of races. A freewoman who married a bondman, or had intercourse with him, might be punished with death by her clan. Arianism, the Christianity with Germanic forms, and its strict Germanic conception of the ethical life 'worked in the direction of keeping its people, as the ruling warrior caste, pure'⁶ from any mixture with the subject populations belonging to the Roman Church among the south German kingdoms.

When the Roman Church through its political skill in the seventh century destroyed the Arian belief, a strong check on race mixture had gone. In Christianity itself there were already lurking dangers for the maintenance of racial purity, for a saying like that referring to the future life -- 'Here is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free'⁷ -- could be misunderstood as a denial of all racial boundaries in this world. In Southern Europe, with its thin upper layer of Germanic rulers, the mixing of the races could not be indefinitely avoided. The denordization, the loss of the Nordic element, began; in the south it made rapid progress, in central Europe its progress was slower.

The individual Germanic tribes had already been fighting with one another; and throughout the Middle Ages it was always those classes of the European peoples richest in Nordic blood, and they alone, that carried on the wars. In their thousands after many a fight in the Middle Ages the Nordic masters lay slain on the field. The Crusades thinned the ranks of the nobility in every land. The struggle against the Moors (mainly of Oriental race), who had come into Spain out of Africa, was waged by the Gothic and Swabian nobility of Spain. The English nobility had to fight in the Hundred Years War, so called, against the French nobility; and after the peace which shut England out from the Continent, the Civil Wars of the two Roses led two sets of nobility into a bitter struggle against one another. The German nobility suffered many heavy losses through the expeditions of the German emperors against Italy, where it was the Nordic descendants of the Lombards that made the most stubborn resistance. The internal fighting of the Middle Ages, the endless feuds, destroyed Nordic blood all over Europe.

In southern Europe, and even in north Africa, where the Vandals ruled till A.D. 534, there was also the contra-selection due to malaria and other sickness, which most attacked the Nordic classes, less fitted for southern life. Thus in the south the Germanic tongues disappeared -- a sign of the disappearance of the Nordic classes, and a sign of racial mixture. In Burgundy the language of the 'seven-foot Burgundian giants,' of whom Sidonius Apollinarius speaks (Book viii., Letter 9), seems to have vanished at an early date. In Spain West Gothic was spoken into the eighth century. After the Visigoth king, Leowigild (568-586), had withdrawn the prohibition against marriage between the Goths and the inhabitants of Romance speech, but, above all, after Chindaswinth (642-653) had brought in one law for both these orders, the mixture of races could no longer be prevented. In Italy, East Gothic seems still to have been spoken in the ninth century, and perhaps still later, the Lombard as late as about 1000. At the end of the seventh century in the Lombard territory the Lombards and the Romans had been put on the same legal footing. In Moesia (on the lower Danube) Gothic (according to Walafrid Strabo, d. 849) was still used for preaching in the ninth century. In the Crimea an East Gothic dialect survived into the seventeenth century.

Figs. 244 and 245 - German Man

Figs. 246a, 246b - German Woman (?)

Figs. 247a, 247b - German Man

Nordic blood, however, had as yet not vanished with the speech. The creative gifts of the Nordic race now found expression in southern Europe and in France, in the early history of all peoples of Romance speech. Albrecht Haupt, in his work, Die älteste Baukunst (1923), has described the great examples of Nordic-Germanic art which are to be found all over Europe. After the conquests during the wandering of the peoples there began at once among the Germanic tribes the creation everywhere of a culture, leading in the end to the lofty structure of the medieval world. The words written by Jordanes (sixth century) in his account of the Gothic nature -- 'It was indeed a joy to see how the bravest men, when they rested awhile from the business of arms, gave themselves up to the sciences' -- these words are symbolical for those works of the spirit which now arose wherever Nordic blood had penetrated. After the disappearance of the Germanic tongues in the Romance area of to-day, Nordic creative force flowed into the languages now taken over. It is indeed highly significant that the Romance tongues which slowly split off from the so-called Low Latin developed their full independence and special forms in the same centuries when Germanic tribes took over these tongues in their territories.⁸ Now it was that the truly Nordic poetry of the Old French 'Song of Roland' arose (eleventh century). Now arose the 'chansons de geste' (geste, family), handed down in Old French in the traditions of the Germanic families, and also the heroic poetry in all languages of the Middle Ages, which always show a Nordic nature, just as they describe tall, fair, blue-eyed men. The close spiritual kinship between the heroic poetry of all the Western tongues of the Middle Ages, and the spiritual kinship between the medieval heroic poetry and the Homeric has been strikingly shown by W. P. Ker in his Epic and Romance (1922). The soul of the Nordic race speaks forth in all these poems. In all the Western nations there were the beginnings of new literatures, but 'the breath of life of the new literatures was Germanic.'⁹ The great culture of the Middle Ages arose, in which Renan has recognized a 'Germanic period.'¹⁰

Figs. 248a, 248b - 'Thusnelda' in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence

Figs. 249a, 249b - Wounded Bastarn. The Bastarns, a Germanic tribe, near akin to the Goths, dwelt on the lower Danube, and as early as 169 B.C. were fighting in the Macedonian army, and later on Mithridates' side against Pompey. The tribe was probably later absorbed by the Goths.

Fig. 250 - German Woman

Fig. 251 - German Man

Footnotes for Chapter IX Part One

¹ Die Völker Mitteleuropas u. ihre Staatenbildungen, 1917.

² The best account of the Viking movements, that spread Nordic blood far and wide, is given by Nordenstreng, Die Züge d. Wikinger, 1925.

³ Günther's Adel und Rasse, 1926, goes to show that in the West, down to the Middle Ages and beyond, only persons of Nordic race were looked on as handsome.

⁴ In my Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes I wrote: 'It will do much towards rousing an interest in questions of blood, if that section of the nobility qualified to help in attaining Nordic racial purity should for the first time give a really sure foundation to its views on equality of birth by defining this equality as a racial one, and correspondingly so modify its views and wishes for the future as to enjoin on its sons in its family regulations the choice of an equally Nordic, or more Nordic, bride. In this case the equality or want of equality of birth of the bride, in the sense of rank, would, of course, be of no importance, for only her racial and eugenic endowment (whether she is Nordic, healthy, and capable) would be taken into account. Such a change in the views on equality or birth, founded, as they would be, on inherited blood, would not fail to lead to the building up of model families, nor to have its effect on circles outside the nobility. In the aims of the Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft ('Union of German Nobles') we can see the beginnings of attention being paid to questions of race.' Cp. Günther, Adel und Rasse, 1926.

⁵ Amira, 'Die german. Todesstrafen,' Abhandl. d. Bayer. Akad. d. Wissensch., philos.-philol. u. hist. Klasse, Bd. xxxi. 3 Abt., 1922. For the Romans, too, the criminal had been a monstrum to be removed, a degenerate; and the Hellenes likewise had looked on crime as the expression of an evil disposition.

⁶ Cp. Reallex. d. germ. Altertumsk., under 'Arianismus.'

⁷ St. Paul, in the Epistle to the Galatians, iii., 28.

⁸ Cp. on this the section 'Rasse und Sprache' in the Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes.

⁹ Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, vol. i., 1874.

¹⁰ Journal Asiatique, vol. xiii., p. 448.