I was searching the web looking for any info I could find on this "fictitous"country and found nothing. I could have sworn that somewhere in my not so distant past, I ran across some article somewhere that stated this country actually exists somewhere. Does anyone here know anything about this? Does Cimmeria actually exist,…(or did it ever)?
There was a country named “Cimmeria”, once. Back in the days of the Roman Republic.
But the author of Conan, Mr. Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas, created his own world history, anthropology & mythologies (sp?) for his syorylines, which often had little to do with reality. And some of his views are based on what is today seriously dated information, much of it non-PC.
But Howard was and is a hellava fine read. He loved a well-told tale, & damn the English Majors & their artsy-fartsy ideas.
Also, Homer makes several references to the “fog-bound Cimmerians” in the Odyssey. Scholars now believe that he may have been referring to Norway / Sweden.
Hope that helps.
There was a historical people known as the Cimmerians, a Indo-European-speaking steppe people somewhat similar to the later Scythians. They first appeared on the steppes of the Ukraine and ( probably pushed by the Scythians ) exploded out across the Caucasus, invading the regions around Lake Van and later Asia Minor, where a portion of them settled for a time and continued to cause havoc ( in much the same locale and way the later Celtic Galatians would ) until they were finally broken by the kingdom of Lydia in the late 7th century B.C.E…
There were a few areas that might conceivably have been referred to as “Cimmeria” in various periods, including the the Russian steppes, the enclave in Asia minor, and the Crimean penninsula ( supposedly named for the Cimmerians and hence probably the the best choice ), which some maps show as a relictual redoubt of the western branch of the Cimmerians as their territory shrunk in the face of Scythian pressure.
However there is nothing to indicate they were a race of mighty-thewed, exclusively black-haired, blue-eyed folk from the frigid north. Howard’s Cimmerians, like most of his creations, consisted of a dollop of historical reality leavened by plenty of fiction.
- Tamerlane
Homer knew about the Scythians - why would he have called them"fog-bound", and stated that they lived in the “far north”… The Crimea is quite far south - even if you live in Greece. And surely he would have mentioned “the east” if he was referring to the steppes ?
Any thoughts ?
Well, Homer may not have existed ;), but otherwise…
You certainly get freezing fogs in the Ukraine, it is definitely colder than Mediterranean Greece ( not Crimea, but the original somewhat more northerly territory they would have occupied in “Homer’s” time ) and it is probably about as far north as Greek contact ran, so it probably fits. Besides first-hand Greek knowledge of the region was likely spotty at best.
I suppose I should amend the thing about the Cimmerians not being from the “frigid north”. If you view things from a Greek perspective ( which perhaps Howard was going for in a sense ), I guess they qualify as far northern. But they weren’t, really, in an absolute sense :).
- Tamerlane
Tamerlane - I know about the dubious nature of the “person” who wrote the Illiad & the Odyessey. However, whoever wrote them down was refering almost certainly to an area far further north than the Steppes. (Again, my point that the Greeks would almost definately have refered to the Steppes as East, rather than North). Also, the implication of the phrase “fog-bound” (repeated with each utterance of the word “Cimmerians”, as per oral-epic tradition, cf. “wine-dark sea” etc. etc.) definately implies that the fog was not just occasional, but rather of a permanent nature - perhaps more recognizable in the Fjords of Norway (at least to the Greeks), than the wide open spaces of Central Eurasia.
Finally, IIRC there was quite extensive trade between the mediterranean and the north of Europe as early as the Hallstatt Period and maybe even back as far as the Urnfield Culture. Although the Hallstatt Period is significantly later than the supposed 1200 - 1000 BC date of the Trojan War, the epic was most certainly not written down before this date - hence knowledge of Northern Europe would have been available to the Poets that recited this epic.
Thus I still think that the original Cimmerians were far further north than the Steppes - much more likely was that Homer was refering to a Nomadic people living on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
How about “Cymru” for “Cimmeria” - in the classics, that is, not Conan? Wales would look kinda dark, cold and fog-bound to anyone used to a Mediterranean climate.
Not impossible, I suppose, but IIRC Wales wasn’t called Cymru in Old Welsh, so that puts paid to that…
Howard’s antedeluvian stories staring Conan the mighty (along with King Kull of Atlantis and a few other mighty conquerors who defeated evil wizards) borrowed more or less randomly from legendary places and peoples, using names with no real intent to depict anything of what they really were ethnologically. This emphatically includes the Cimmerians.
The real-life Cimmerians known to the Greeks were a tribe, probably Celtic (compare Cymry, Wales in Welsh), or the Cambrii, the tribe inhabiting Gwynedd and Clwyd in Roman times, which lived along the north coast of the Black Sea. How far north of that they ranged, and what their cultural system actually was, is more theorization than actual known fact, but it appears that they were “range-nomadic,” settling in particular areas for years at a time, then moving on. They were overcome by the Scythians some time during the later years of the First Millennium BC, and incorporated into the Scythian kingdoms, where they gradually lost their cultural identity.
That sounds about right - is that from the Oxford Classical Dictionary ? I only ask because it seems v. familiar.
Tamerlane got it right… I read about Cimmerians living near scythians and being wiped out. I suppose Howard chose the name due to its obscurity.
From what I have seen most of the nations in Conan’s world come from real world historical sources or names.
I don’t see why. The steppes are north of Greece. Northeast, to be sure, but still north. When speaking about a group about which they had probably a somewhat vague notion of, some imprecision is to be expected. Note this pasage:
There has always been some trouble in locating on a modern map where the Hyperboreans were likely situated according to the Classical Greek mindset. The contemporary sources are of little help here, since all roads point vaguely to somewhere north of the Black Sea region, the northernmost point of certainty in ancient Greek geography. In spite of such problems, there are subtle clues in the sources that provide some direction. Herodotus mentions the midnight sun allegorically in association with the regions of the Hyperboreans (Herodotus, 4.24-25), a concrete fact that arctic geographers could use in plotting the range of territory in Northern Europe that the midnight sun likely overshadowed. Problematically, Herodotus and his successors tended to distort the distance between the Black Sea region and Northern Europe from a northeastern vantage point toward Russia and Central Asia. In the absence of fact, the Greek geographers often inserted fiction to compensate for the lack of certain knowledge. Further still, the Cimbri (Germanic tribe living on the Jutland peninsula) and Cimmerians (Eastern European Celts) in later sources tended to be confused with each other since linguistically they sounded similar in nature, not to mention the vagueness in locating their respective northern homelands and lack of ethnographic detail concerning both peoples.
Additional empases mine. From here:
http://www.anctil.org/users/eric/hist205.html
Hmmm…still somewhat unconvincing, to my mind, given the discussion above. YMMV, obviously. "
There was trade, yes. But my understanding is that in the classical period it was overwhelmingly indirect, at least in terms of the the non-Phoenician seaborne trade - i.e. there weren’t many, if any, Greek merchants that regularly trekked overland to the Baltic, but rather trade proceeded increments from one region to the next. Given that geography can easily get garbled.
Perhaps. But AFAIK there is no archaeological evidence to support that theory ( though as Poly noted, there isn’t tons anyway, at least outside the areas of the Near East eruption ).
- Tamerlane
Not true. After he had some success writing historical fiction, Howard determined that it was too time consuming, so he would return to pure fiction, but kept vestiges of the real world in his work to keep his universe internally consistent (something that had done Kull in, at least according to the below source).