12
Arms and the Man
Armed conflict has been a prominent feature of human history for many
thousands of years. Indo-European peoples have done their share. Their
extraordinary record of expansion may suggest that they have done rather
more than their share at some periods. In the last fifty years or so there has
been a scholarly reaction against the old idea of militant hordes swarming out
of Eurostan with battle-axes held high and occupying one territory after
another. It has been fashionable to deride this model and to put all the
emphasis on peaceful processes of population and language diffusion. But
when we consider the processes by which Arabic or the Turkic languages
spread across vast areas in historical times, or by which Latin, starting from
a small region of Italy, came to be the dominant language of half a continent;
or how Celtic tribes in the last centuries , and Germanic tribes from the
fifth century , grew multitudinous and poured across the length and
breadth of Europe; then it appears by no means implausible that similar bouts
of aggressive migration in earlier eras played a large part in effecting the
Indo-European diaspora.
After all, we saw in Chapter 10 that fame won in battle was a major pre-
occupation of Indo-European poetic and narrative tradition. There are con-
stant references to battles and descriptions of fighting. They are especially
extensive in the Homeric poems and the Indian epics. We have nothing
comparable from ancient Iran, where only sacred literature was preserved,
but even in the Avesta there are reminiscences of martial episodes such as
the battles of the Kavi Vı ̄sˇta ̄spa and others (Yt. 5. 109–18; 9. 29–32; 19. 87).
From the Old English corpus we may refer to pieces such as the Finnsburh
Fragment, the Battle of Brunanburh, and the Battle of Maldon, besides passages
in other poems such as Genesis 1982–2095. We shall find further illustrations
of the narrative conventions in the other Germanic literatures, for example in
theHildebrandslied fragment and the Eddic Hunnenschlacht, as well as in
the Irish sagas, Y Gododdin, the Sha ̄h-na ̄ma, Sassountsy David, the Serbo-
Croat oral epics, and elsewhere.