From Germania to Europe: The Evidence of Language and History

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My first obligation, one which fills me with pleasure, is to thank you for the honour you have done me in inviting me to be President of the MHRA for I997 and to address you this evening. The honour concerns not just myself, but also the branch of studies for which I stand, medieval German language and literature. When my predecessor in the Schroder Chair of German at Cambridge addressed you nearly twenty years ago he pointed out that he was the sixth British Germanist to be President. Amongst his predecessors, however, there is no medievalist, in either language or literature, so that by your present choice you have demonstrated, I like to think, your tacit disagreement with an article in the FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung in I995, lamenting the death of 'Altgermanistik' in this country. Like the novel, however, it is happily a long time dying. Outside German studies your Presidents have included eminent medievalists such as W. P. Ker and Damaso Alonso and philologists such as OttoJespersen and Kenneth Jackson. In choosing as my topic not a theme of literature but one of language, I join them in all modesty, particularly the last mentioned, since what I have to say emerges from a book on which I am engaged whose title, if not its approach, is based on Jackson's Language and History in Early Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, I953). I am concerned with language and history in early Germania, a topic I shrink down to manageable proportions by looking at the linguistic evidence for three aspects: Germanic society and its contacts with the worlds of Rome and of Christianity. To-day, even more drastically, I restrict myself to three words to illustrate these aspects. My aim is not to inflict linguistic technicalities upon you, but rather to show how necessary it is for language and history to work together on shared problems, as KennethJackson well saw. My first word, to illustrate an aspect of Germanic society, is Gothic reiki, OHG r7chi, surviving in modern German Reich, 'empire'. Its origin lies in Celtic, from which it was borrowed as part of a wider Celtic influence on Germania, but I am concerned with its function within Germanic, where as an adjective it meant 'powerful', as a noun 'authority', and as a verb 'to rule'. An early use of this word was in compound personal names of rulers, both in Celtic (for example, Dumnorix; dare I mention Asterix?) and in Germanic, especially East Germanic (Ermanaric, Theoderic). Such names have all the signs of an onomastic fashion: Germanic rulers decked themselves out with the trappings of authority by adopting an outlandish mode from the Celts, just as they also took on Latin names for themselves. The stem *rkwas applied in Germanic to the larger groupings of political power resulting from the conquest of new territory in the course of the migrations. These were quite new to Germanic experience and therefore aptly designated by a word borrowed from a culture that had evolved a large-scale political structure. Whereas traditional Germanic kingship had been tied to the tribal assembly, from which it derived its