Gallicenae, IX, 1.
Gratillonius defies the Gods of Ys by sparing a defeated challenger but is too successful and popular as King of Ys for any (human) action to be taken against him. Even the fanatical Speaker for Taranis is relieved when he must accept that that is how things are.Time passes between chapters so that new stories could be written to fill the intervals. Chapter IX begins in winter when three Romans enter an Ysan alehouse. Two Christian soldiers, Adminius and Budic, bring their new clergyman, Corentinus, to meet Ysans. Characters interact: the three Romans; Herun of the navy; the prostitute, Keban; the fisher captain, Maeloch. A spin-off series could be written about such subsidiary characters. Corentinus provokes Maeloch but then buys him a drink and tells stories and all is well.
Section 2 introduces some Franks and I have not reread that far yet.
12 comments:
Even for barbarian Germanii, the Franks had a bad rep. Take a look at the Merovingian court, and you'll get an idea why...
Note that, for example, a spring rite involving sexual intercourse was common to many Germanic pagans.
In most of them, being the Spring Queen was an honored position, involving a single act of sex.
Among the Franks settled near Ys, they use a slave who's gang-raped...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, anyone who has read St. Gregory of Tours HISTORY OF THE FRANKS would have to conclude the Merovingians and the Franks were murderous, treacherous brutes. Not all, mind you, but many of them.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Highly successful murderous, treacherous brutes...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha!!!!! It's true the Merovingians founded the most stable of the barbarian kingdoms squatting in the ruins of the fallen Western Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Unless you count the kings of Wessex.
But Britain was a different case; the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were the result of genuine mass migrations, not just a thin layer of Germanics on a Romanized population.
France was actually sort of a median case -- there were quite a lot of the Franks, and they did push the Romance-speaking 'line' a ways south and west.
Northern French has a massive freight of Germanic loan-words from Frankish, about 1000 of the words in the 'core' vocabulary, and is grammatically rather eccentric in relation to other Romance languages, for the same reason. Frankish stayed current in much of central and northern France for several centuries after Clovis.
Charlemagne spoke Germanic as his first language, for instance.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Actually Wessex was, for a long time, one of the minor kingdoms of the Heptarchy, beginning its real rise to power only during the reign of Egbert (AD 802-37). And came very near to being destroyed during the wars with the Vikings.
Yes, the Anglo/Saxons destroyed the Roman/Britannic culture of Britain. Barbarians, IOW!
Yes, I have noticed how some of the lands of the West Bank of the Rhine were Germanized. I had not known the Latin of what became French absorbed so many Frankish words. I was reminded of how Holger Danske puzzled over the language he spoke in THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, a kind of Old French with Germanic mixed in.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yup. And much of the very northwestern part of France spoke Flemish (a descendant of Frankish) until very recently.
Modern French is a northern dialect, but from around Paris and south of there to the middle Loire valley -- not the most Frankish-influenced of French dialects, but still substantially so. 10% of the vocabulary is traceable to Frankish loans, for example.
French doesn't just have a lot of Germanic/Frankish loan words, the syntax and intonation were heavily influenced by Frankish too. It's why French is an eccentric outlier among Romance languages, compared to say Italian or Spanish or Romanian.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I thought Flemish was more like Dutch than anything else.
Got it, French was, unusually, heavily influenced by Frankish German, unlike other Romance languages.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Flemish is very like Dutch -- Dutch is a Frankish derivative too.
Sean: Specifically, the language of the Salian Franks is ancestral to Dutch. As opposed to the Ripuarian Franks (in the Rhineland).
In the 5th-8th centuries, all the West Germanic languages (including Old English and proto-Frisian) were still quite easily mutually comprehensible.
But the High German consonant shift, which began in this period, made the southern German dialects quite distinct.
Once the English were converted to Christianity, the Church recruited missionaries there to evangelize the continental Germans, particularly the Old Saxons, the ancestors of the Dutch, etc.
They did that because the languages were still very close and mutually comprehensible, as were a lot of social customs.
Post a Comment