An embryonic feeling among western Germans that kinship transcends tribalism might be inspired by the prophetess, Veleda, so Everard and Floris have travelled ten years further back in time and will travel further if necessary in order to find out where she came from geographically, psychologically etc. She might change history by causing Western civilization to begin in northern instead of in southern Europe. See A Northern Civilization. Poul Anderson states that Western, like Classical, civilization was born on the shores of the Mediterranean. SM Stirling suggests in the combox that it was born in France.
In another Anderson series, Technic civilization is born in the O'Neill colonies because of:
space-based industries;
a thorough-going revival of free enterprise;
new ways of living, thinking and conducting economic affairs;
the merging of Terrestrial cultures.
Heidhin had told Everard in 70 AD that Veleda and he were of the Alvarings but the Patrol agents' informant in 60 AD, Gundicar, says that Veleda's place of origin is unknown. She came to the Ampsivarii from the Cherusci and before that was with the Langobardi. The agents follow the trail back through space and time.
John Grisham's new legal thriller, The Widow, has arrived from the Public Library and will compete for reading time.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But such a Northern civilization would not be or become Western civilization. Without the unique mixing of many factors occurring because of Christianity and Gallo-Roman culture, that Northern civilization was unlikely to amount to much.
Ad astra! Sean
I would note that the Germanics supplied a number of things to Western Civ -- and one was the principle of dynastic legitimacy, which drastically reduced the incidence of civil war over who'd occupy the throne.
Rome and its Byzantine offshoot never managed that.
I think the reason was that Germanic concepts of politics had come from -mythic- time, not a rationally-organized recorded history.
The Church kicked in an important part, though: primogeniture, the eldest (male) child getting the throne.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the stress placed by the Church on primogeniture would correct a weakness inherited from the Germanics: all the sons of a king had an equal claim to succeed their father, youngest as well as the eldest. That led to either disputed successions or two or more co-kings, leading frequently to quarrels settled by violence among the brothers. A problem which afflicted both the Merovingians and Carolingians (and the Scandinavian kingdoms).
Ad astra! Sean
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