Goths and Huns 559process (Wolfram and Pohl 1990). He was well aware that Jordanes’ narrative was deeply
entangled with ethnographic constructions. Still, he tried to reconstruct elements of
anorigo Gothica, as he called it, an origin narrative of the Goths, based on traces of
“pre-ethnographic” Gothic tradition: that is, elements not otherwise attested in classical
ethnography. For instance, theGetica(1882, ca. 14, 76f.) contains a genealogy of the
Ostrogothic royal dynasty, the Amals, including names of Scandinavian gods (such as
Gapt); and Jordanes also explains that the Huns were descended from Gothic witches,
whom he callsHaliurunnae, an interesting hint that he regarded Goths and Huns as
related. Such elements may be traces of an oral tradition that could help explain the
extraordinary prestige of the migration-age Goths. Wolfram thus created a model for the
integration of successful barbarians in the late Roman world, and for the way in which
they symbolically asserted their difference. The book was widely acclaimed and is still
fundamental in many respects, in spite of its complex narrative that is not always easy to
understand.
The label “ethnogenesis” stuck, but it could in fact be understood in rather different
ways. On the one hand, for conservative scholars, the new term simply provided a more
elegant way to express the old ideas about common ethnic origins (García Moreno 1998:
29). Some argued that many thousands of Goths must have shared common descent, not
only small “kernels of tradition” (Heather 1996). On the other hand, and that is how
research in Vienna developed in the 1980s, it became clear that ethnic change was not
limited to “ethnogenesis” in the strict sense of the word, the origin of a people, but rather
was a continuous process that was accentuated by periods of more dynamic change and
phases of slower development. In that sense, there was not one Gothic ethnogenesis but
many; and consequently, the term became marginal (Pohl 1994). Wenskus’ view that the
“constitution” of the new kingdoms was essentially Germanic was also abandoned; the
institution of kingship was Roman in many respects (Dick 2008; Wolfram 2009). Studies
on the Avars, the Huns, and other steppe peoples showed that ethnic processes in the
period could follow rather varied trajectories (Pohl 2002b). It could also be shown that
the clear ethnic differences in language, “national” costume, and many other aspects
of culture that had always been taken for granted were relatively rarely attested in the
sources, so that consistent ethnic distinctions could not simply be presumed (Pohl 1998).
New approaches to the construction of identities in other disciplines also proved fruitful
for the study of late antique ethnicity. Patrick Geary, for instance, delineated ethnicity as
a “situational construct” and studied the immense ideological load that the “migration
age” had acquired in the age of nationalism (Geary 1983; 2002).
It was, perhaps, not least this load that increasingly motivated many scholars to down-
play the role of ethnicity in the period. An influential monograph by Patrick Amory on
the Ostrogoths in Italy (1997, critique: Heather 2007) argued that Gothic ethnicity was
a mere “ethnographic ideology,” a Roman construct that allowed ambitious warriors to
enjoy social privilege. The well-presented argument was based on a prosopography of
the Goths in Italy which showed that relatively few of them were individually defined as
Goths, for instance, in funerary inscriptions. Of course, not even at the height of nation-
alism did tombstones indicate the nationality of the deceased, so the absence of ethnic
labels does not prove that they did not matter—it may in fact be the opposite: only where
identities are doubtful or challenged do they need to be underlined. However, there is,
of course, a general problem with our evidence, which only in exceptional cases attests