"'...Ermanaric is a historical figure, prominent in his era. The date and manner of his death are a matter of record. What came immediately afterward shook the world." (p. 450)
I am still not quite sure what shook the world although:
"'...- the Volkerwanderung was under way.'" (43, p. 462)
"Ermanaric" means "universal ruler." See here. Reading the Wikipedia summary shows how much of the historical record Poul Anderson has incorporated into this Time Patrol instalment, as he did with Veleda in "Star of the Sea" and as he and Karen Anderson did with the King of Ys in their Tetralogy.
3 comments:
The victory of the Huns over the Ostrogoths set the Volkerwanderung in motion; it destroyed the Western part of the Roman Empire, weakened the Eastern, and completely rearranged the ethnic-linguistic map of Europe in ways that have largely lasted until the present.
THAT is the connection that I was missing: the Hunnish victory kicked off the Volkerwanderung.
Note that titles and names tend to exchange places.
Genghis Khan means "universal ruler" too, but we use it as a name for the man actually called Temujin (which means "Smith", btw.)
Conversely, Caesar was a family name, but it came to mean "emperor" -- Kaiser, Czar.
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