Like "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth," "Star of the Sea" deserves to have been read in a volume where we did not know from the outset that it was a new Time Patrol story. After Section I (Roman numeral), about the mythology of Niaerdh, Section 1 (Arabic numeral) presents historical fiction as Germans led by Claudius Civilis, besiege a Roman camp on the Rhine. This section ends as a barbarian prisoner prophesies that Rome is doomed because the goddess has announced its destruction through her sibyl, Veleda. The barbarian threat is a problem for the Romans at the time but why should it be a problem for anyone else centuries later? Because this is a time travel story. Section 2 begins by informing us that Manse Everard's timecycle appears in the Amsterdam office of the Time Patrol near the end of the twentieth century. At last the narrative becomes science fiction.
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Note that the Germanics had been expanding steadily across Europe well before the Roman period -- they'd already pushed the Celts out of Central Europe when Caesar conquered Gaul, and he probably prevented them from doing likewise there.
And during the Roman period, the easternmost fringe of the Germanic world went from being around the lower Vistula river to extending all the way to the Sea of Azov and the Danube River.
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