ABSTRACT

This interpretation, which would carry its own justification with it, finds confirmation in addition through several products of Anglo-Saxon authors, who give the myth no other significance.

[Müllenhoff turns to Kemble’s Latin genealogies from 1837: iv, vi, which he sees as confirming his theory, though he rejects the ‘nine eponyms’ as ‘not of popular origin’. The myth must be seen as ‘an exclusive property of those peoples who once inhabited the North-German peninsula, and later England’. Pp. 417-18.]

We hear of it only in Anglo-Saxon sources, and if Sceaf according to Ethelwerd is supposed to have landed first in Scani, that means nothing else than the old homeland [i.e. Angeln in Schleswig]. After the migration and the capture of their new seats there appears to have spread quite generally among the German peoples the strange belief that they collectively came from the Scandinavian island as a vagina gentium [‘womb of nations’], and so it came about that this name, as Gothic, Lombard and Anglo-Saxon legend shows, was also transferred to the real and actual homeland, and this was now called Gotiscandza, Scathenauge, or Scedenigge (see Leo 1839:48). A later witness than Ethelwerd, William of Malmesbury, even seems to know that Sceaf, chosen as king by the inhabitants of Scandea, had his residence in the town of Schleswig. That Scild’s name was also known in the North does not by

characteristically Anglo-Saxon one, then according to the evidence produced above the old inhabitants of the North-German peninsula believed at one time that culture was first and directly planted among them by a divine power, and then spread further across the whole race to their neighbours in North and East, indeed over the whole of Germany. Kemble was already close enough to this interpretation of the myth, all that escaped him was the connection between the single names and reports.