There is barely a country in Europe that cannot look back on Germanic roots. The term ‘Germanic’ actually refers to a number of tribes and clans that lived in Central and Northern Europe from the 6th century BC. Gaius Julius Caesar is said to have used the word when talking about the Gallic war. However, the Romans were full of contempt for the Germanic peoples, Tacitus calling their home a hideous blood-curdling place full of dark woods and swamplands. But who were the Germanic Tribes? And how did they leave their mark on Civilization?
On the Germanic Peoples
by Revilo P. Oliver
IF YOU ARE interested in the history of our unique race, you have a special interest in the Germanic peoples who, though called “barbarians” in the standard histories, assured the survival, and eventually the revival, of our civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire, and you have probably read such works as Francis Owen’s The Germanic People (1960; reprinted, New Haven, Connnecticut, College & University Press, 1966) and Earnest Sevier Cox’s Teutonic Unity (Richmond, Virginia, privately printed. s.a. [1951]; reprinted, s.l.,s.n.t. [Torrance, California, Noontide Press], s.a. [c.1967]).
As you know, in the kingdoms of the Germanic conquerors their native laws supplanted or greatly modified the Roman law as it had been codified in the later Empire by jurists who were not Roman. The celebrated Gaius, who was a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, and his successors, Papinianus, Ulpianus, et al., all came from the Hellenized provinces of the Roman Empire and probably from Asia Minor, but we know nothing about their race: they may have been the descendants of Greek colonists or natives (e.g., Syrians) who had acquired Greek culture. Their foreign origin neatly accords with the fact that under the Empire, Roman law, although retaining much of the terminology, became quite different from what the law had been under the Republic.
If your studies have taken you this far, you will wish to consult an admirably concise article, “Another Look at the Origins of the Middle Ages: a Reassessment of the Role of the Germanic Kingdoms,” by Professor Katherine F. Drew, in Speculum, LXII (1987), pp. 803-812.
The article treats an aspect of the subject that is seldom noticed, that the Germanic laws, whether they simply supplanted the Roman law, as did the Anglo-Saxon code (which was the source of the Common Law that was the acknowledged basis of American jurisprudence until the Jewish mentality took over), or they were superimposed on the Roman law, as in the Visigothic Kingdom, were based on a conception of the family as the unity to which an individual naturally and unalterably belonged by birth. The Germanic laws therefore reflected an organically cohesive society in which the family (parents, children, and both agnate and cognate kin) formed the basic unit, as is natural for Aryans. This conception differed radically from the conception that is natural to Semitic peoples and was foisted on us by Christianity and “democracy,” according to which an individual is an isolated unit, having no necessary relation to any other human being. (A conception so alien to the Aryan character inevitably produces psychological stress and the terrible sense of loneliness that afflicts so many of our contemporaries.)
As the learned authoress points out, the Germanic conception of the family also determined the institution of slavery in the Germanic nations, often in conjunction with the Germanic code of what we would call criminal law, for here again we meet the native Aryan idea that the function of the state is not to punish crimes of violence, such as robbery and murder, by imprisoning or executing the guilty, but to give to the victim or his family such compensation as is possible in the circumstances, assigning to each crime a monetary value and obliging the criminal, if unable to pay the proper compensation, to work out the assessment by becoming, temporarily or permanently, according to the gravity of the offense, the slave of the victim of the crime or his heirs.
In the Germanic kingdoms the institution of slavery reverted to what it had been in the Roman Republic, as is obvious from the Latin word familia, which designates a man’s household, i.e., all the persons subject to his authority: his wife, his children (including adult sons who live at home and their wives), his free retainers, and his slaves. Likewise, in the Germanic kingdoms, slaves were no less members of a man’s household (‘family’ in the limited sense) than the others.
(1. Thus slaves differed little from other domestic servants, while in agriculture they were rendered unnecessary by the serfs and villeins, who continued, with Germanic modifications, the system of coloni and adscripti glebae of the late Roman Empire. In the Tenth Century…
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