Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 2.djvu/108

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NOTES AND QUERIES. iras.ii. Ai:,5,i9i&.

TACITUS AND THE JUTISH QUESTION.

" Reudigni deinde et Aviones et Angli et Varini et Eudoses et Suardones et Nuithonea fluminibu aut silvis muniuntur." Cornelii Taciti 'Germania, cap. xl., ed. Henry Furneaux, 1900.

In Dr. Chambers's ' Widsith ' (Appx. D, ' The Jutes,' pp. 237-41) the oscillations of opinion respecting the trustworthiness of the reports made by the Venerable Bede about the Jutes are recorded and examined. Bede reported that the Angli sive Saxones " aduenerunt de tribus Germaniae populis fortioribus, id est Saxonibus, Anglis, lutis." " De lutarum origine," he continues, " sunt Cantuarii et Uictuarii . . . . " (I. xv. p. 31). Of the Angles Bede says that they came " de ilia patria quae Angulus dicitur et ab eo tempore usque hodie manere desertus inter prouincias lutarum et Saxonum perhibetur."

Dr. Chambers gives a list of sixteen scholars who have studied the questions evoked by Bede's statement, and, with his accustomed diligence, he tells us in which category these scholars are severally to be found : i.e., whether they accept Bede's authority, or reject it, or are doubtful and unconvinced. Apart from historians, six philologists accept, viz. : Kaspar Zeuss, Jacob Grimm, Bernhard ten Brink, Rudolf Much, Otto Bremer, and Karl D. Bulbring. Three are doubtful, viz. : W. H. Stevenson, Gregor Sarrazin, and Axel Erdmann. Seven regard Bede's statement as incredible, viz. : J. C. Jessen, Herman Moller, Karl Miillen- hoff, Ludwig Weilftnd, Theodor Siebs, Wilhelm Heuser, and Gustaf Kossinna.

Dr. R. W. Chambers's own opinions are that,

" whilst the- evidence upon which Bede based his statement that the lutae dwelt north of the Angles may have been insufficient, the evidence by which it is sought to refute this statement indubit- ably is insufficient Bede's statement accordingly

holds the field." P. 240.

The chief reasons for rejecting Bede's testi- mony are to be found in the exaggeration of the value and importance of certain insufficiently corroborated coincidences be- tween Old Kentish (of the ninth century) and Old Frisian (of the fourteenth) ; and in the contingent objection that the connexion postulated between the O.E. " lutae " and the O.N. " Jotar " is phonetically im- possible.

The general reader who is in search of common knowledge might be forgiven if he were to express great dissatisfaction with the readiness shown to reject the plain state- ments of so truthful and scholarly a writer as

the Venerable Bede ; and if, in view of the- willingness displayed by not a few scholars to assert that Bede was wrong, he were also to inquire whether any scholars at all had endeavoured to prove Bede right. More- over, he might also, and not unnaturally, ask : What does Tacitus, who knew so much about the Germanic tribes of the second century, tell us about the Jutes ? The fitting reply would astonish him. It is just this : Nobody knows.

In my little note on ' Widsith, 11. 4, 5 r (11 S. ix. 161), I asserted that editors of ' Widsith ' had not given the necessary amount of time to the study of the palaeo- graphical peculiarities of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon script. This assertion of mine has been resented by Dr. Chambers, and in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society for 1915 (p. 157) I have been takea to task for setting myself against the " whole school of Anglo-Saxon philology during the past eighty years." I had no intention of displacing myself so egregiously, and palaeo- graphy is not philology. Dr. Chambers had " Philologie" in mind, and that is a science which excludes nothing from its purview, according to the Continental Doctores- Gloriosi Omnium Scientiarum who profess it..

Now there is just the same general in- dictment to be brought against the editors of Tacitus's ' Germania ' as that which I have already brought against the editors of ' Widsith ' they have not studied scribal errors sufficiently to enable them to recover the true text in cap. xl. of the ' Germania.'' This chapter, as I shall show, deals with the Jutes as well as with the Angles.

As an instance of scribal error let us take the beautiful name of "Aurinia" in th& ' Germania,' cap. viii. This form is im- possible : no Germanic cognate has ever' been found for it. Tacitus undoubtedly wrote Aliruna. That not only has Germanic significance, but has become "Alraun" in New High Dutch, according to rule. In the ' Getica ' of Jordanes this word appears as " Alyrumna," and that represents Alyruna, in which the length-mark was mistaken for the ra-stroke. The word means a spae-wife, but many editors of the ' Germania,' and some lexicographers, have treated the ghost - word " Aurinia " as a real feminine name. This scribal error should teach us two things : first, that there was a form of I so like the minim that it was liable to be confused with it ; secondly, that a group of minim.-* might be distributed erroneously in transcription ; e.g., tin (uri) might be transcribed as^ ^ 11 1 (ini), and the converse.