How much is concretely known of the pre Christian religion of the various Germanic tribes of Europe? The Goths, Vandals, Longobards, Saxons, Angles, etc.
I’m thinking, are there any texts of their religion, gods, myths, etc. like we have of the Nordic mythology? They also worshipped Odin/Woden, Thor, Tyr, Frej, Freja etc. but how closely related were the beliefs of the German tribes, to each other and to their Scandinavian counterparts (half a millennium later)?
Apparently the Goths in the Goth-Roman wars had a rather nasty habit of hanging their captives up in a tree and chopping off one arm, as a sacrifice to the God of war Tyr. Tyr in Nordic mythology also has one arm (having the other bitten off). Is there a relation?
My understanding is that the relationship of Germanic and Germanic/Scandanavian is fairly close. Northern europe during its pre-Christian times and christian/pagan overlap was a busy and trade-friendly place. Although some of that trade was unsavoury, slaves and the like.
There is a reasonable body of surviving literature, which preserves the sentiment of the times. The Icelandic Sagas, the Finnish Kalevala and; the best known in English, Beowulf and Grendel, is a picture of the Angles and Saxon’s culture.
The Goths and Vandals by contrast moved South and East, to places like Ukraine and Bulgaria and their culture is preserved in artifacts more than narratives that have survived. However given their movement into and towards Roman power, there is a lot of commentary on them by the Romans. Try the later historians.
The early Deutsch, along with the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, were known to worship the same pantheon as the Scandinavian Germanic peoples, albeit with different emphases (specific tutelary gods for individuals) and different names for them: Diu vs Tyr, Wotan vs Odin, Dunarr vs Thor, etc. Nerthus, a minor Vala among the Norse, was the Gaia equivalent as Earth Mother among some of the Germanic tribes. IIRC, adherence to this pantheon was also true of the Frisians, but I can’t confirm that.
Jordanes seems to indicate that the Goths originally subscribed to the same group, with Tiwaz (=Tiu, Tyr) as their chief god. However, by the time they start to play a significant role in history, they seem to have converted to Arianism for the most part.
I wasn’t able to find anything quickly about the beliefs of the Langobardi, Vandals, etc.
Minor nitpick to Sevastopol’s post, otherwise quite good: The Finnic peoples who adhered to the pantheon described in the Kalevala were a quite distinct group ethnically, religiously, culturally, and linguistically. They need to be “included out” of this discussion.
I would be willing to bet that it was. Most of the Continental immigrants to and raiders of Britain came from Northern Germany, and IIRC there is a region there today called ‘Angeln’…a German Anglia if you will. The Frisians, too, obviously came from the North Sea region, from the islands bearing their name.
As for Odin/Wotan, we seem to have yet another variant in “Wedne”, or “Weden”, remembered in the name of fourth day of the week. I’d be interested to know whether “Weden” actually is a variant, or if it became that only in the name of the day due to context driven changes in the vowel. I don’t remember my historical linguistics well enough to say.
My impression is that the Angles or the Saxons used “Woden” as their variant on Ol’ One Eye’s name, and that the conversion of “Wodenes Daeg” into “Wednesday” was simply a transition of a “fossilized” usage into a more “modern” style.
More or less, but what I’m wondering is how “Wodenes”=>“Wedenes”. Now there was a sound change in the early Middle English period whereby /a:/->/o:/, but which did not occur in Scotland–that’s why Scots dialect English has ‘laird’ and ‘stane’ rather than ‘lord’ and ‘stone’. However, this change did not happen in most polysyllabic words. So today we have “ghost” which does reflect the change, and “ghastly” which does not. Could there have been something that would have caused a /o/->/e/ change?