Tacitus, Old English heroic poetry, and ethnographic preconceptions

Tacitus’s Germania resonates in the background of our studies of Old English heroic poetry, and chimes with our sense of how the anglo-Saxon mind functioned. ¹ This short tract affects profoundly our perception of early medieval customs, notably the notion of the comitatus structure of anglo-Saxon society – and the Germania even for some initiates this concept – and our vision of women in Germanic society as prophetic. ² That Tacitus was writing in AD 98 about a land he had probably never visited and for a specific political purpose with respect to Roman society of his day is left out of our equation. That his sources were many and suspect, his depiction of the Germanic tribes intentionally overblown almost to the level of tabloid news coverage, is apparently unknown. ³ The parallel, so frequently drawn, to Tacitus’s Germania as a kind of analogy for or even explanation of the ethical code of the anglo-Saxon warrior is a great deal more tenuous that it might appear. Indeed, if Tacitus’s writings were considered solely on these terms, as a parallel to or an analogue for Old English poems such as The Battle of Maldon, Battle of Brunanburh, or even Beowulf there would be little difficulty; often, however, his ethnographic study of German tribes and beliefs is taken as a source for and blueprint of what scholars see as the Old English heroic code, when it manifests itself in a few poems and prose works. This paper attempts to delineate the circumstances in which Tacitus created his short ethnography of the Germans, to consider when his information is trustworthy and when it is not, to review briefly the reception history of this document (described by the eminent historian A.D. Momigliano as being among ‘the most dangerous books ever written’), and to reconsider the question of how the Germania can be a useful lens to turn on the surviving poetry and prose of anglo-Saxon England.