Goths and Huns 561own approach, and that of his pupils, have developed further. As a consequence, what
came to be called the “Vienna school” (which includes the author of this chapter) has
come a long way since the 1960s and 1970s. Still, where the debates became most polem-
ical, they have been least productive and most misleading. From the mid-1990s onward,
Walter Goffart and his school (Gillett 2002b; Goffart 2006) have directed their critique
not against any current views, but against the old Wenskus “kernel of tradition” model:
according to them, it was only a more sophisticated way to maintain German nationalist
claims of ethnic continuity. The only way out of nationalist myths was to show that eth-
nicity was irrelevant in the migration age, as were the barbarians altogether. Therefore,
Goffart’s approach is a vigorous attempt to prove Roman continuity after the “fall of
Rome,” and to deny any barbarian impact on the end of the Western empire. It is in
fact reasonable to assume that the Gothic kingdoms owed much more to Roman than
to Germanic statecraft (Goffart 1989; Pohl 2008). However, that does not necessarily
imply that ethnicity did not matter in them—why were so many sources of the period
full of ethnic names? What made debate difficult was that “ethnogenesis theory,” as the
Goffart school called it, was based on old works and did not represent the current posi-
tion of the Vienna school at all. This has led to a number of misunderstandings. It is
also a weakness in the valuable work on the Goths by Michael Kulikowski (Kulikowski
2007), who tends to downplay the achievements of others in the field. He has, however,
brought some new perspectives into the study of early Gothic history (e.g., ideas from
post-colonial theory), indicating that there is still space for improving our knowledge
even in a field as intensively studied as the history of the Goths.
There was less controversial debate about the ethnicity of the later Visigothic kingdom,
although there certainly are some issues here. Suzanne Teillet (1984) has labeled the
seventh-century kingdom “une nation gothique,” a definition that not many scholars
would follow. However, it is remarkable that, in the elites of the kingdom at that time,
the integration of Gothic and Roman nobles had already made considerable progress,
and aristocrats of Roman origin could well be regarded as Goths. “Goth” had come
to denote social status, but that does not mean that it had lost its ethnic implications
(Ferreiro 1999; Collins 2004).
The question of Hun ethnicity has been debated in a rather different context, mostly in
the field of research on the Eurasian steppes. Attila’s Huns are only one of many groups
known by that, or by analogous, names, for instance the Kidarites, the Chionites, or
Hephthalites in Inner Asia. Where did all these Huns come from? Already, Deguignes in
the eighteenth century had traced them back to the Xiong-nu (formerly transliterated as
Hsiung-nu), who had dominated the Inner Asian frontiers of China in the first centuries
BCEandCE(Di Cosmo 2002). However, a pedigree of different Hunnic groups is diffi-
cult to establish (Haussig 1983). Due to the mobility of steppe warriors, the formation
and decomposition of ethnic groups in the steppe can happen very quickly. Empires rise
and fall, and every political upheaval leads to an ethnic rearrangement as many clans
and tribal groupings join the winners. Some of them maintain their ethnic diversity,
whereas others transfer their allegiance to the leading group with greater ease. The out-
side perception of such a process is another thing again, and tends to differ more from
self-identifications than in the sedentary sphere. At least outside observers, but sometimes
also newly emerged groupings themselves, tend to use already-established, prestigious
ethnonyms, especially when broad inclusive terms such as “Huns” (or later, “Turks”)