Eodan remembers not only a hawk but also:
"...great rolling heathery hills...";
"...storm-noisy oaks...";
"...the far bright blink of the Limfjord." (p. 9) (see image)
For fifteen years,"His folk, angry with their gods, had wandered...to the world's edge." (ibid.)
They were forced to wander because, as they saw it, their gods had let them down? Major secular events are marked by changes in religious allegiance - or by, e.g., the alliance between Aesir and Vanir. (Eodan will be deified as the chief of the Aesir.)
He thinks that he might grab land:
"...on the Raudian plain, beneath the high Alps." (p. 10)
"The Cimbri had reaved from many folk, until their wagons were stuffed with wealth." (ibid.)
Was reaving the only way to survive? They have arrived in Italy and are about to fight a Roman army.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But the Cimbri and their allies and recruits were Iron Age barbarians who, at best, lived with a very narrow margin on subsistence agriculture. If I recall correctly from THE GOLDEN SLAVE, years of stormy, wet weather ruined their crops and forced them to leave Jutland. I can see a tribe, with only a primitive level of agricultural technology, feeling compelled to leave their old homes.
And the Cimbri found themselves wandering thru lands held by too many tribes in Gaul and what became Germany who resented these strangers trying to muscle their way in. So, it was either fight or die. It ended with their leaders deciding they would try to conquer northern Italy.
In "Delenda Est" we see mention of how the Cimbri and Teutones were able to seize northern Italy after Carthage had defeated and destroyed Rome in the Second Punic War. In OUR 101 BC, of course, that was not the case!
Ad astra! Sean
'twas climate change, basically.
In this period the Germanics were pressing south and west and east, mainly against the Celts, who had a higher material culture (loan-words show that the Germanics adopted iron technology from the Celts) but were not as good at political organization.
In this period, much of what's now southern Germany was still Celtic, and the Germans were just pressing over the Rhine -- Caesar records how they were increasingly intervening in Gaulish politics.
If it hadn't been for the Romans, the Germanics would probably have displaced the Celts all over Europe -- even with the Romans keeping them out of the south and west, they eventually dominated the whole of central and eastern Europe, as far east as the Ukraine, by the 4th century (when "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" takes place).
Incidentally, study of things like personal names among the Cimbri indicate that their language (early Proto-Germanic) was just then undergoing the sound-shifts that distinguished it from other branches of the Indo-European family.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And of course it was pressure from invaders from the east, such as the Huns, which again pushed the Germanic tribes into forcing their way over the Danube and Rhine rivers in the late fourth century!
Ad astra! Sean
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