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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Germanic peoples article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

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Germanic peoples are recognized as a collection of ethnic groups throughout Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Germanic_ethnic_groups. The recent edit that replaces "Germanic ethnic group" with "Germanic tribe" is biased and politically motivated. -- 13:23, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

In the intro paragraph the first sentence states: "The historical Germanic peoples are a category of Northern European ethnic groups...", I don't think historians view the Germanic peoples in terms of ethnicity, but rather tribes. Perhaps, the sentence should read: "The historical Germanic peoples are a category of ancient Northern European tribes..." --E-960 (talk) 16:49, 15 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm fine with "tribes", but capitalized "Northern Europe" did not exist in antiquity, so I suggest "northern Europe" and remove the link to Northern Europe. The link makes it look more thingish than it actually is. –Austronesier (talk) 16:55, 15 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. --E-960 (talk) 11:51, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I have no personal issue, but I know in the past some editors have expressed concerns about the term tribes.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:02, 17 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Tribal societies, than? --E-960 (talk) 12:16, 19 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Tribes" comes with a bunch of problems: Namely, the ancient Germanic peoples were organized in groups that need not necessarily fall within the parameters of "tribes". The term has broadly fallen out of favor in anthropology since the 1970s. See Tribe#Controversy_and_usage_depreciation. :bloodofox: (talk) 22:49, 29 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Does it give you a hard-on to transform European history? To adapt it to your ideology? Sonnenrage (talk) 14:38, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ethnic group: A group of people who share a number of civilisational characteristics, including language and culture.

The Germanic tribes do not share a common language, culture, religious rhythms, practices, customs and beliefs ? Sonnenrage (talk) 15:07, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The change from ethnicity to tribe has only one objective: to adapt reality to its ideology. Sonnenrage (talk) 15:08, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Could you give further explanation of your problems with the usage of "ethnic group" in this context? Do any academics disagree with classifying Germanic peoples as ethnic groups? Looking at the past edits, it seems that reference to Germanic peoples as "ethnic groups" in the opening paragraph was only removed immediately following this edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Germanic_peoples&diff=prev&oldid=1017816564 I mention this because I was also going to ask why the article isn't titled "Ancient Germanic peoples" or something similar, given the article is specifically focused on ancient Germanic history. 188.141.88.155 (talk) 15:45, 5 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the article should be re-named, but OTOH indeed it is quite simply a fact that there was never a single ethnic group which we could call "Germanic" in any straightforward way, with the possible exception of whoever spoke proto-Germanic. Putting aside that linguistic definition, the historical Germanic peoples, who are the most obvious real "Germanic peoples", were discussed by Roman and Greeks and quite a concrete topic but they were never described as anything like what we would now call an ethnic group. Writers such as Tacitus went out of their way to say the name was a new invention, and that the Germani were not a single collective entity.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:50, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That's why it was written in plural, 'ethnic groups'? Avilich (talk) 02:18, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

To avoid continuing the editing back-and-forth, I post here. Here is a comparison of the current article to one from about a day ago before the current round of edits by what I take to be less experienced editors. [2]. I don't think we are going anywhere? But differences we now seem to be stuck with include:

• The article title in the opening line is now italic instead of bold.
• Northern European is now capitalized.
• These words are being insisted upon, although they clearly do not parse logically: "the inhabitants of modern day Germany, including the modern German people and language".
• Repeated removal of the word "historical", and insertion of the word ethnic.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:05, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've undone these changes made without consensus. Carlstak (talk) 11:46, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Several of us recently developed Proto-Germanic folklore, which should have a substantial presence somewhere on this article. But where? :bloodofox: (talk) 22:30, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What would a substantial presence look like? It seems difficult to summarize, because list-like? Also consider Early Germanic culture, which seems more directly relevant, but seems to need a lot of work. [Just musing. I suppose it depends how we define the main focus of this article. I still think it the logical core topic, which all other disciplines are implicitly claiming to also connect to somehow, is the Roman-era Germanic peoples as such, rather than their predecessors or successors, or the language family now known as Germanic. Sometimes I wonder whether we need to re-name this article.] --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:50, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Considering folklore—myth, legend, ritual, foodways, folktale and so forth—play such a crucial role in every aspect of any group of peoples eveyday life, the topic deserves substantial attention. And it's pretty remarkable how much of this is reconstructable in early Germanic society, all things conisdered. However, what this would look like in the article's present state is a good question.

I do think this article should be split and renamed. Modern era academics—who wield tools alien to the Romans—don't use the exonym Germanic at all as the Romans did, of course, and right now the article is really talking about two different things. I think we'd be doing readers a service by way of splitting the article into something like Ancient Germanic peoples (linguistic and ethnic group) and Germani (Roman exonym). (For that matter, I think figures like Goffart making essentialy fringe claims are still receiving way too much attention in this article.) :bloodofox: (talk) 23:17, 6 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

My apologies for a long answer but I think there are a lot of topics connected...

• FWIW, I've learned this while working on this set of Wikipedia articles for several years, but did not realize it before, and it did not match any previous ideas or preferences I had: while Goffart's style of argumentation is controversial he is certainly not seen as a fringe writer by historians, and many of his positions are now widely accepted. WP policy tells us what to do. In any case, we can look at specific concerns. I don't really know which bits you think are controversial. Honestly it seems his name triggers people, but in most/all cases we could quote multiple historians.
• I think your specific article name proposals raise confusing issues (even for scholars) involved with the way philologists and linguists continue to not only use the name of a real "Roman exonym" for a specific reconstructed language, but also to make implicit/explicit claims that they are in fact writing about those historically attested Roman-era peoples. Scholars clearly don't agree about whether the two concepts should be seen as two ways of studying one topic, or just two related topics with confusing names. Lay readers of those scholars are even more confused, and generally think they are 100% talking about the same topic. So we agree we need to try to unentangle them it seems, but it is going to be interesting to see how we can do that.
• In your proposal you demote the real historically-attested Germanic peoples to be a side topic which does not even have the normal English term in its title. I find that problematic, because even the linguists seem to believe that they are writing about those historically-attested people, and lay readers clearly think they are writing about them. So the historically attested peoples (Ambiorix, Arminius and Marobodus etc) are the "real" Germanic peoples, surely? They are the physical "things" everything is really thinking of. Looking at other similar topics on WP, we often have both an article on the proto language reconstructions, and sometimes a separate one concerning proposals for the "Urheimat". Currently most of that is jammed here, and that is a problem, because it is anchored to language studies. My own thinking about how to possibly re-name and split the content currently in this article has been changing over time but I am starting to think that we need (1) article about the concept "Germanic", which is a big scholarly topic that connects to debates about ethnicity and other types of "identity", plus an article (2) about the historically attested Germanic peoples (and that is their English name). (1) and (2) are both have their main article here for now. (3) I also continue to feel that we need to move the massive discussion about Germanic languages out to several language articles, and (4) potentially an Urheimat/"early culture" article, and replace it with shorter summaries in this article.
• Anyway, sorry for bringing that bigger topic into your call for feedback on this new work you've done. We should perhaps come back to it in another section, unless we find that there is no way to handle your proposals without a complete rearrangement of articles? But can you please explain your proposal though? What would "substantial attention" look like? The new article is itself not a normal running text but a list of linguistic reconstructions, so clearly we can't just insert it, and it is difficult to imagine a summary. Perhaps it would look at bit like the types of commentary Dennis H Green made? I think in the past it was foreseen that such attempts to reconstruct an original pre-Roman and/or Proto-Germanic-speaking culture was what Early Germanic culture was for? Maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. FWIW I am unsure of what that article should really cover, and IMHO much of it probably needs to be scrapped. I had been thinking that something like Dennis Green's work might be a good thing to have there, so it would be an article about attempts to reconstruct a very early shared culture connected to speakers of the earliest and proto Germanic language(s). Maybe others do not agree, but honestly I've not seen any clear vision for what it should be about.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:14, 7 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, I've wondered what has been wrong with this mess of an article for a while now, and I think I see what the issue is now. Andrew, do you have a formal background in Germanic studies? As in, academic? As, in, perhaps, from any of the world's many Germanic studies departments? Given your frankly strange and impenetrably long-winded comments all over this talk page and given very poor state this article is in, I have to suspect that the answer is no and that you, unlike the field that handles this topic, have some kind of particular fixation on the works of Walter Goffart. If you did, you'd be very well aware that Germanic studies departments continue to exist all over the world, despite Goffart's complaints. In fact, term Germanic remains quite widely used throughout academia, including in the historically high volume of papers produced by scholars active in the field of ancient Germanic studies. Repeatedly highlighting Goffart's generally ignored and often polemic opinions—which have to date had next to no influence—in the lead is definitely WP:UNDUE.

Before today, I had no idea Goffart was so extensively highlighted in this article. Before my recent round of edits, I note that Goffart—ultimately a comparatively minor scholar who is best known in this field for his extreme minority opinions, if he's mentioned at all—was cited no less than 15 times in this article and was directly quoted, by name, throughout (even after the several particularly obvious examples I've removed). Meanwhile, well-known and highly influential scholars in the field, like Rudolf Simek, receive not a single mention, the field's historically most influential scholar, Jacob Grimm, gets mentioned only a couple times, and the tremendous amount of comparative discussion from Indo-Europeanists goes almost entirely ignored. Red flags everywhere. Given the numerous individuals who have procuced and continue to produce scholarship on this topic, Goffart's essentially fringe takes deserve maybe a single mention in the article, if that, yet the article reads like the field rotates around Goffart's complaints about, as he calls it, "the g-word". No wonder this article is in such a confused, garbled, and rambling state.

Next, I'm going to have to ask you to keep your responses concise. Flooding this talk page with essay after essay is not helping the state of this disastrous article. At the end of the day, this article needs to be a central point for the numerous ancient Germanic peoples-related topics all over Wikipedia and for me to even have to explain to you why an article like Proto-Germanic folklore is crucial for an article like this is mind-boggling. Any reasonable individual can describe how academics use this term today, particularly philologists (who have produced and continue to produce the vast amount of academic discussion on this topic), and how the Romans used it in the past—this is not difficult. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:52, 7 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Alcaios:, @Berig:, @Ermenrich:, @Haukurth:, @Yngvadottir: — what is your take on the state of this article? Is all this fixation on controversial historian Walter Goffart—whose opinion has historically been inserted into every nook and cranny of this article and directly quoted wherever and whenever possible—solely coming from @Andrew Lancaster:? :bloodofox: (talk) 00:21, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Bloodofox: Just recently noticed this thread and your similar misgivings (which I share as a student of Wolfram)) with the attempt to un-Germanize the Germanic people from their very existence ala Goffart. Your contention to create an Ancient Germanic peoples (linguistic and ethnic group) and a separate Germani (Roman exonym) page is spot on and very much akin to what I suggested some time back. Unfortunately, the extensive dialogue and bickering between a couple of editors on the Talk Page made it near impossible to maintain interest in pursuing that goal and so I made an exodus therefrom. Some of that same dialogue spilled over into the Goths page as well, something you've likely noticed. Nonetheless, I want to commend you for very accurately summing up what has been bothering me for some time about this page. Not sure who has the time or inclination to take the entire article to task, since most of us academics have professional lives that keep us very busy. --Obenritter (talk) 01:14, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking as a mere layman on this subject, who's been trying to follow the various arguments (without much success) on the talk page, made previously by various editors who know more than I about it, may I say again that the habitual excessively long comments made by certain editors over the last year are distracting and confusing to say the least. The discussions here have led nowhere, so may I suggest that someone forgo the endless discussion and start making some bold edits. The article badly needs a jolt of new energy. Carlstak (talk) 01:54, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Since I was pinged, I agree that the article is extremely convoluted and hedging, with far too much attention given to the position that the only justifiable use of the term would be a reconstruction of or even more circumscribed than the usage of Classical authors. And in particular that Goffart's views should be presented as his alone. I bowed out of the discussion at Talk:Goths after repeatedly requesting that Andrew Lancaster provide citations in support of his assertions regarding scholarly consensus, and I believe that is the way forward here, too: it may well be that Andrew Lancaster is not alone in his view that Goffart's position is broadly accepted, it may well be that there is division over the matter among scholars (perhaps regional, perhaps a matter of schools, who knows); let's see evidence. Otherwise I concur with Bloodofox that while there are skeptics in multiple areas of Indo-European and Germanic studies, in my experience they do not dominate the field and the skeptical viewpoints should be summarized in their own section of this article as minority positions. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:48, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Andrew Lancaster's general strategy is bludgeoning and other editors give up after a while. I have given up trying to reason with him, because I have a private life.--Berig (talk) 04:19, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, I suppose the basic principle of writing about the content and not about editors is out the window? While there was a burst of editing by me in early 2020, I agree with Carlstak that it would be better for people to just edit, and then we can discuss CONTENT. I thought the proposal to discuss future changes to the way the articles were divided was promising. I can see a lot of the focus is upon how to balance the Goffart positions which is fine by me. But one topic we need to come back to is clearly the topic of whether this article is about linguistics, and can ignore what historians write. I think it is clearly a HISTORY article and NOT a linguistics article? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:22, 8 July 2021 (UTC) Secondly, are the speakers of PROTO Germanic, the same as the "Germanic peoples" of history? Despite what you say Bloodofox I did not question the relevance of proto Germanic to this topic. I asked what you were envisioning, after you asked for feedback.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:26, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Bloodofox: in answer to more specific points.

• I suppose Simek is relevant to discussions of mythology etc which have not been worked on by me. Based on past discussion I honestly think that this has been seen as a topic for Early Germanic culture. At least two editors have mentioned their intention to work on that article and I understood this was among the topics.
• I do not understand why this particular article would need more than a couple of mentions of Grimm, whose is part of the history of ideas especially concerning languages, but no longer taken as a serious source for the historical Germanic peoples? However, if we find a way to divide this article in the future it sounds like there might be one which focuses more on the concept, and therefore also probably on the history of ideas?
• Please also remember that on WP we are all volunteers and as long as each of our edits is an improvement that is considered good. We don't have to answer to other editors about things which we have NOT worked on, and we don't have to explain our qualifications and private lives.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:50, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Maybe I should also respond to another point. I don't think anyone is denying that many people disagree with Goffart and that many of the ideas about the concept Germanic are still present in academia. As WP writers the relevant point is that in any case we may not report a consensus among scholars if there is none. I am personally happy if more editors will help now to get the balance right (and not just complain on the talk page) - unless it goes in an extreme direction. I agree with Obenritter that both the article and talk page have been discouraging, after an awkward period. (We are both participants in that history.) I would however add that it is not that surprising that we've needed to digest the situation and decide on further restructuring ideas etc. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:39, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Given the emphasis placed by other editors upon balancing how we handle Goffart I'll try to make quick notes on recent deletions. If nothing else, we at least then have a record of what is removed,[3] and other editors can see if they have any concerns:

• Lead. Attributed remark mentioning Goffart's famous (IMHO) proposal that we stop using the word Germanic, apart from in the linguistic sense, for discussions about real peoples in the "late antiquity" period (roughly between 3rd and 8th century). (Note those qualifications, which Wikipedians frequently seem to ignore.) However this remains: "the tradition of describing late Roman Germanic language speakers as a single collective enemy of Rome has been criticized by some modern scholars, because it implies a single coordinated group." But we are not mentioning the person who is one of the main people associated with that idea.
• Lead. Removal of Goffart from a footnote about the Traditionskern approach associated with Vienna. Again, this is maybe not a major thing but IMHO this is removing something quite often discussed. Walter Pohl, who is arguably the current main representative of that school of thought, has addressed Goffart's criticism of the approach in articles specifically about that criticism at least twice now, and other scholars have written about the disagreement between the Toronto (associated with Goffart) and Vienna schools on this matter. There are several volumes of articles which have it as a major theme.

ADDED:

• Note. The online version of the Reallexikon gives 140 hits for "Goffart", 39 for "Gillett", 52 for Kulikowski.
• Pohl, Walter (2020), "Gotische Identitäten", in Wiemer, Hans-Ulrich (ed.), Theoderich der Große und das gotische Königreich in Italien, pp. 315–340. 19 mentions of Goffart. Also Toronto associated: 10 mentions of Andrew Gillett, 4 of Kulikowski, 1 of Callandar, etc. The book this essay is part of contains many more such citations.
• Pohl, Walter (2002), "Ethnicity, theory, and tradition: a response", On barbarian identity. Critical approaches to ethnicity in the early middle ages, pp. 221–239, doi:10.1484/M.SEM-EB.3.4490 (Also see all the OTHER articles in this volume.)
• Pohl, Walter (2007), "Review of Walter Goffart. Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire.", The American Historical Review, 112 (3): 912–913, doi:10.1086/ahr.112.3.912-a Complains that Goffart is WRONG to say that he and "a host" of other scholars are "committed to the existence of his subject, a coherent ‘Germanic’ people foreshadowing the ‘Deutsche’ of today" or defenders of the Germanic paradigm. This is "the exact opposite of my real position".

Examples of other works focusing upon the debate between Goffart and Pohl, and the whole related debate about the Germanic etc:

• Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Interrogating the ‘Germanic’, edited by Matthias Friedrich and James M. Harland, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021, https://doi-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.1515/9783110701623-003 . Example from Intro: The blistering criticisms of such scholars as Walter Goffart or Alexander Murray highlight the absurdity of believing that scant traces in later literary sources give us windows into a broader, late antique pan-Germanic ethos for which the late antique source material provides decidedly no evidence, yet in studies ranging from philology to archaeology, such assumptions remain, as we have seen, firmly embedded in contemporary scholarship.
• Halsall, Guy (2018), "Transformations of Romanness: The northern Gallic case", in Pohl, Walter; Gantner, Clemens; Grifoni, Cinzia; Pollheimer-Mohaupt, Marianne (eds.), Transformations of Romanness, De Gruyter

• Deletion from Later Roman Germanic peoples section. At least we keep a quote by Edward James saying the same thing. According to a quick google books search, James mentions Goffart 20 times in that book though so why are pretending Goffart is not a major cited source of such ideas? It almost seems fraudulent?
• Deletion from Jordanes section. Removal of a sentence citing Goffart which mentions criticism of the way modern scholars have leaned on Jordanes. This one does concern me, and I think something needs to be put back here. This type of criticism is certainly mainstream and not restricted to Goffart, but Jordanes is a topic Goffart gets cited for, so it seems petty to remove his name. OTOH maybe Kulikowski's oft-cited remark about a "text-hindered fantasy" is better? (I can give two well-known authors who cite it with some approval: Peter Heather and Florin Curta. [4]) I have placed some citations about this topic here. (Still, Kulikowski is thought of as influenced Goffart's "Toronto school" and here we are arguing that a person with his own "school" is not well-known etc which seems a bit fake?)
• Deletion of summary of Goffart's position from "Modern debates". Personally I find this troubling. Presumably this is part of the position being taken by Wikipedians that Goffart is not notable? That really seems quite incorrect to me. His notability might require another post.
• Deletion of what I think was non-controversial information from the Invasions of 401–411 section, apparently only because Goffart was being quoted. ("four distinct groups of barbarians – different from Alaric's Goths – invaded Roman territory, all apparently on one-way journeys" etc) Personally I find this troubling. The information fitted usefully in the narrative. What is the justification for this?
• Deletion of paragraph citing Goffart from the Invasions of 401–411 section. ("warriors could improve their condition by forcing their existence on the attention of the Empire" etc) Personally I find this troubling. Again a non-controversial part of the narrative is being broken but not repaired. We can find other historians like perhaps Kulikowski or Halsall or Heather saying similar things, but normally we should do that first rather than deleting significant parts of a narrative. (I recall reading Pohl claim that Wolfram is one of the originators of such ideas.)

ADDED:

• In Pohl's 2002 "response" to Toronto critics of his and Wolfram's Vienna school he complained that they are criticizing old versions of their position and stated It was precisely Herwig Wolfram [Vienna school] who underlined the Roman foundations of the Gothic kingdoms, contrary to the views held by Hofler, Schlesinger, and Wenskus. Patrick Geary’s [Vienna school] ‘mantra’ that ‘the Germanic world was perhaps the greatest and most enduring creation of Roman political and military genius’ sketches a new paradigm that is contrary to all that Hofler ever believed.

So I hope other editors will examine the above and make adjustments where appropriate. Where I have note already cited something, I'll have a look to see if I can suggest more sources relating to the parts where I feel something needs to be put back in.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:19, 8 July 2021 (UTC) P.S. If desired I can provide a wide range of sources describing the Vienna school as the current leaders concerning the topic Germanic ethnicity. This is also reflected in Germanic studies, not only in works by historians. There are minorities who find they don't go far enough yet (e.g. Goffart), or that they go too far now (e.g. Liebeschuetz).--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:29, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Nope, and I asked you above to stop with the essays and to keep it concise. We're not inserting Goffart into every nook and cranny of this article. Seriously, knock it off—get a blog or something where you can produce these lengthy essays lawyering for why this discussion should rotate around Goffart. It's truly bizarre to see. :bloodofox: (talk) 12:58, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't give orders, because that is also not going to go anywhere. It was suggested above by another Wikipedian that I should explain the sourcing available. You also made a large number of pointy-seeming deletions very quickly, and these SHOULD be examined. I am happy to be discussing this, but obviously you have no right to write long personal attack posts (which frankly show ignorance of the field), and then declare that no one is allowed to respond or explain the sources. Can we try to work together please? I am honestly happy to have someone looking at this. Much of what you are saying is quite right, but not all of it. The sources provided above prove this.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:19, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Also BTW, the above summary is not a revert request. There are different ways to respond to the concerns I've explained, and in any case you should feel some responsibility to tidy up after a big deletion. Please don't insult what I write unless you actually read it. That is exactly how discussions like this get worse.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:27, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bloodofox, Obenritter can you explain what the boundaries and differences would be between the two articles you propose: Ancient Germanic peoples (linguistic and ethnic group) and Germani (Roman exonym). The titles seem to imply that WP would be insisting absolutely upon a linguistic definition of Germanic peoples, and completely ignoring historians writing about real historical peoples? Am I wrong? What about: Germanic peoples (Roman era) for the historical subject, and Proto-Germanic Urheimat for the linguistic topic? I also honestly think we need an article for The concept of Germanic, for its evolution and debates including discussions about ethnicity etc. Of course these would be interlinked articles. BTW, speaking of good interlinking, regarding the new folklore article, apart from Early Germanic culture I also notice we have older articles such as Common Germanic deities and Germanic folklore.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:59, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If you can't be concise, you're not going to be taken seriously here. The article badly needs to be improved and your obstructionist essays and pet fondness for Goffart's theories have wasted enough time. It's time to move forward. :bloodofox: (talk) 13:01, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am trying to take your proposal seriously, and the post is short and does not mention Goffart (who seems to be your obsession, not mine). Please answer in good faith, and do not distort what I write. I do agree with you on the need to break old circles, but that means not making them worse.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:14, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Judging by the comments on this talk page, there seems to be broad consensus here that this article has serious problems, highlighted in particular by the several editors here who have a formal background in Germanic studies. To resolve these problems, I propose that we split this article into two:

• Ancient Germanic peoples (linguistic and ethnic group), which covers the subject by way of academic handling of this topic in the modern era, with an emphasis on modern tools, like once-revolutionary tools from philology such as the comparative method, and the development of the modern science of archaeology, including discussion from scholars active in Indo-European studies. I recommend we have dedicated sections on each.
• Germani (Roman exonym), handling the matter of how this term was used by the Romans, which differs considerably from how the term is used by scholars active in Germanic studies today.

So we can get an idea of consensus here, please respond with yes or no followed by your reasoning, if you'd like to include it.

The exact titles of these two articles can of course be calibrated as necessary but you get the idea. This I believe would solve most of the issues this article curently faces and allow for logical expansion as necessary. We've also had an issue on the talk page where some users seem tempted to produce expansive essays, so please keep your responses concise.

Pinging: @Alcaios:, @Berig:, @Carlstak:, @Ermenrich:, @Haukurth:, @Obenritter:, @Yngvadottir:. :bloodofox: (talk) 13:29, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Srnec:, @Austronesier:--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:31, 8 July 2021 (UTC) @Dimadick:, @E-960:, @Calthinus:, @Florian Blaschke:, @Joshua Jonathan:--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:01, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Krakkos:, @Thomas.W:, @Dynasteria: :bloodofox: (talk) 14:34, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Opposed to this exact split, but open to splitting. The current article is already about the Ancient Germanic peoples, and there is not much point separating out discussion of the Roman definition because it needs to be discussed in any discussion of modern debates. After a year of discussions and thought on this, and a lot of reading, I believe a more logical split is: (1) An article about the concept "Germanic" (ethnicity, identity etc) as debated in academia (e.g. Vienna school); and (2) A history-oriented article about the historical Roman-era peoples known in historiography as the Germanic (both then and now). (3) I see linguistic topics as separate to BOTH of these but of course related, so there are more articles needed for those. [I also wish to express my opposition to the unpleasant "qualified people" theme. For better or worse that's not how we work on WP, so stop it. Pulling rank when you are an anonymous person on the internet is not very practical. The best approach is to demonstrate that you've read the sources, and that you are trying to understand what other editors are saying.]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:53, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Of course, anyone who has followed this talk page will find Lancaster's response and his constant and intense fixation on the theories of Walter Goffart as no surprise. In reality, scholars in Germanic studies don't sit around all day and discuss Goffart's polemics about what he calls "the g-word" any more than they sit around and discuss the theories of Theo Vennemann. Lancaster's repeated attempt to downplay historical linguistics, philology, Indo-European studies, and folklore studies in favor of injecting Goffart into every nook and cranny of this article points to ideological editing far outside of the reality of the field—it's time to move on. :bloodofox: (talk) 14:13, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to keep things concise, then do not write about other editors and other topics? (Goffart not relevant to this section at all.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:19, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I think this topic is a history topic, not historical linguistics, philology, Indo-European studies, and folklore studies. There HAVE been Rfc's on that. Maybe that is something other editors should also comment upon. Is this not a history article?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:23, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is unquestionably a Germanic studies topic, which includes all these fields. Enough with the lawyering. :bloodofox: (talk) 14:28, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the way you've been writing over the last day or so, apparently you see yourself as someone executing a planned slander attack on me? Please back off and calm down. Life is too short for this BS. Can you please just direct me to the article about the history topic? That's where I thought I was. Apparently you plan to turn this into a sort of Wiktionary article, and that does not sound fun.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:55, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• SUPPORT. The present state is in violation of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section, as I have tried to point out before. The introduction must present a modern and most widely used definition of Germanic, and not the views of a Roman who lived more than 2000 years ago. Moreover, the present state of this article gives too much room to the ideas, agenda and ideology of a single scholar, which is in violation of Wikipedia:Neutral point of view and WP:DUE.--Berig (talk) 14:52, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For better or worse the author who influenced my rewrite more than a year ago the most was Walter Pohl, and Walter Goffart and Wolf Liebeschuetz were treated as opponents from two sides in order to show controversies. Is Walter Pohl not a good representative of the mainstream on these topics in your honest opinion?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:29, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Opposed. The terms "Ancient Germans", "Ancient Germanic peoples" and "Germani" are inextricable. There are several reasons why the modern and the ancient definitions do not overlap perfectly, which should be discussed in this article. That includes errors from ill-informed ancient writers who only had 2nd or 3rd-hand accounts of the peoples and regions they were writing about (e.g. Tacitus never went to Germania), exonyms born out of political and military ambitions (e.g. Caesar), biased accounts of "barbaric" peoples by Romans and Greeks (e.g. Caesar again), complex clusters of tribes with influences from both the Celtic and Germanic spheres (e.g. Gallia Belgica), and so on. The "correct" definition of what an Ancient "German" is should be reached by carefully balancing philological, archeological, genetic and linguistic evidence, with the help of analytical and critical (rather than hyper-critical) methods. Alcaios (talk) 15:19, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am not against having a discussion about that, but does it have to be in the intro?--Berig (talk) 15:26, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

In my opinion, the intro should not go further than summarizing how contemporary encyclopaedias and textbooks (Oxford Classical Dictionary, New Pauly, Reallexikon, etc.) define Ancient Germanic peoples. Alcaios (talk) 15:42, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then we are in agreement.--Berig (talk) 15:43, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Seems an extreme and arbitrary demand. MS:LEDE says that "The lead should stand on its own as a concise overview of the article's topic. It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies." WP:TERTIARY sources, especially ones with short entries by "big names" (who are normally people involved in the controversies) are not suitable for that when depended upon in isolation. The idea that we must ignore good sources when writing a lead seems to make no sense to me, and not to match the policies of WP, to be honest.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:41, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• SUPPORT. For the reasons mentioned by Berig and the reductionist view of Germanic peoples used throughout the current version. This article spends far more effort telling the reader about the Germani exonym and informing them what the Germanic people were not than explaining the general concept of Germanic peoples from an encyclopedic perspective. Look at Germanic peoples/tribes in other encyclopedias as an example to follow, and you'll note that this article (much like the Goths page) reads like a scholarly journal article, which unjustifiably spends far too much effort representing a particular school of thought and de-ligetimizing the term Germanic altogether. While Alcaios's points are well made here, they still indicate the need for a Germani exonym page in my estimation than they do to a general article about Germanic peoples.--Obenritter (talk) 15:53, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not against a short article about the term Germani per se; however, based on the discussions held on this talk page over the last years, I'm quite sure that we're going to quickly face WP:POVFORK. Perhaps a dedicated article about the definitional debate (like Who is a Jew?) would be better suited. Alcaios (talk) 16:10, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes "Germani exonym" would be a doomed to be become a POVFORK. The explanations give already show this. The rationale seems to be that the Roman definition is a distinct topic that is only of interest as a "history of ideas topic" (whereas Grimm is not, tellingly). That is clearly a very controversial position coming not from good 21st sources, but from WP editors with an opinion that they know is controversial, as betrayed by their attacking posts. The idea that linguists can still correct the classical writers about ethnicity (as they did in the 19th and early 20th century) is maybe popular with Wikipedian enthusiasts, but to say the least it is not a scholarly consensus. The mainstream ideas about Germanic ethnicity now revolve around people like Walter Pohl. I gave some useful sources above in the Goffart sub-section.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:03, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose I do not relish involving myself in these debates yet again. However, I must oppose this split for the simple reason that if you search for "Germanen" at Germanische Altertumskunde Online, you'll find this sentence: Der im 19. Jh. entwickelte moderne Germ.-Begriff beruht also auf dem ant. (caesarischen), der seinerseits Ausweitung eines als Selbstbenennung gebrauchten Einzelnamens zu einem ethnographischen Ordnungsbegriff durch Subsumtion vor allem sueb. Gruppen und Stämme (aus nicht völlig klaren Motiven und auf nicht ganz durchsichtigen Wegen) darstellt. In English, roughly, this means that the modern term derives from the ancient term, with all its problems. For this reason, I do not think splitting the articles would be beneficial.

Some further thoughts:

1. while the current article perhaps goes overboard, it is not true that Goffart represents a fringe position. While he may be somewhat extreme, many scholars now question the usefulness or appropriateness of the label "Germanic" in at least some instances, as you can see by getting an account at the Wikimedia library, going to the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde, and searching Germanen. The one area where everyone agrees it is appropriate is linguistics. In other areas, there is considerable disagreement.
2. at the same time many scholars, including those who find the term problematic in various ways, continue to use the term Germanic, and find it useful for various things.

Whether the article is split or not, we need to cover this disagreement in some way (including to some extent, in summary style, in the lead). The Reallexikon's article "Germanen, Germania, Germanisch" discusses this at some length, for instance - others have suggested we follow what other encyclopedia's we do, and the Reallexikon does this and cites Goffart in some instances (though he's not mentioned by name), although it defends the continued use of the term. The article "Nachbarvölker der Germanen" even begins Der Name „Germanen“ steht eher für eine Sprachgemeinschaft und ist weniger ethnisch oder kulturell zu verstehen. (The name "Germani" stands rather for a language community and is less to be understood ethnically or culturally).--Ermenrich (talk) 16:42, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ermenrich: If you are concerned that there is an automatic conflation of terms between Germani and the various Germanic people, this can be dealt with in a new article but in abbreviated form (unlike presently), but I cannot help but see the ancient references, at least from a linguistic perspective, as being nothing more than a hereditary tool for describing people from North of the Rhine etc. We do not have to separate them entirely from one another, when the archaeological evidence suggests their material cultures were shared. That's why the Reallexicon defends the use of the term, as you know. (I know this brings to mind Tacitus's Most Dangerous Book and all, but we have to use some term for these people in a general sense.) Whatever fear bifurcation might generate, while understandable, can be dealt with in the text. The problem is that undue weight has been given to the Toronto school, to the degree that the page is now burdened down in academic disputation, making it nearly unusable for a general reader. Parsing it would make it easier for the target audience. --Obenritter (talk) 18:03, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Ermenrich. We have to try to find a good rationale and consensus, and try to understand each other and not caricuture either editors or sources. If an idea is forced through aggressively, then these discussions just go on forever and we'll end up with POV forking and 19th century ideas. Obenritter, many of the ideas being portrayed here in WP as "fringe" are consistent with current Vienna school thinking, which is constantly being described as the leading school of thought concerning Germanic ethnicity. See the sources I've mentioned in the Goffart sub-section above. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:26, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Gee, I wonder who is "constantly" doing this "describing". Could it be you? Otherwise the vast majority of scholars working in the field of Germanic studies, ancient or otherwise, generally use the term without reservation. No attempt to invoke Goffart over and over and over alters this reality. A simple search on JSTOR, for example, offers a glimpse of how things work in the real world. :bloodofox: (talk) 18:44, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Am I allowed to cite sources now? LOL.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:06, 8 July 2021 (UTC) See the Goffart section above for several citations. The Vienna school, whose current leading light is Walter Pohl, are described this way by Peter Heather, Walter Goffart, Michael Kulikowski, Liebeschuetz, and various 21st century articles and books about Germanic ethnicity - both by their critics and by those who agree with them. Incredible that I need to explain this to someone claiming (anonymously on the internet) to be an extremely knowledge expert on this topic. Where are you hoping to go with this approach?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:20, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose splitting or renaming. I agree with Alcaios and Ermenrich: the various uses of the term "Germanic" need to be placed in context in a single article. The changes in how it has been used should be explained to the reader, but with emphasis on the modern use of the term, which is primarily tied to the linguistic. Not only is it ridiculous to base our encyclopedic use of the term "Germanic" primarily on "the real names from written history", by which Andrew Lancaster means (a reconstruction of) what Classical authors (should have) used (note the immediate hedging that Tacitus never set foot in Germania; nor did Caesar except to command a military force), the evidence of Caesar and Tacitus are part of the story, and so is what we now know of and the Romans didn't, such as the Scandinavians and the differences between Germanic and Celtic languages. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:25, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir: I once thought it might be like you say, but after looking around a lot, I honestly don't believe we can say there is a scholarly consensus that the primary modern use of the term "Germanic peoples" is linguistic. I know that some linguists think this way, but when many people, including many historians, talk about Germanic peoples they are talking about those "real peoples". You are right that scholars are now very careful about trusting Caesar and Tacitus on ethnic and linguistic information, but I do NOT think, as you seem to imply, that scholars doubt the existence of the Marcomanni, the Tungri, the Usipetes, and so on, or whether they were called Germanic (even if that was primarily a geographical or even geopolitical term). Some types of information are more speculative than others. In practice, linguists also anchor themselves to those solid facts too, because there is no reason to call a language family "Germanic" unless you think there were people who were called Germanic by someone. This is where the linguistic use of the term becomes, in effect, a claim to know what really happened. It is very confusing. People don't separate the two definitions in their mind. The two competing definitions of Germanic can sometimes be easily distinguished by using language such as "Germanic-speaking" or "inhabitants of Germania" instead of just "Germanic". Does that make sense to you? One of the challenges in practice then is that I believe people expect a historical section in this article, that deals with the Marcomanni, etc. But which definition is being used there? We don't know the languages of many of these peoples, like say the Batavians, whereas for other peoples like the Goths we have no reason to call them Germanic without linguistics. In some ways, I regret that we have to have the narrative history section. It is all handled in other articles. I hope that by explaining why problems I found and tried to resolve, others will find a better way.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:11, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't believe I am implying that "the primary modern use of the term 'Germanic peoples' is linguistic". Rather, that historical linguistics has given us a much broader sense of who the Germanic peoples were and have been than Romans had. I disagree that "there is no reason to call a language family 'Germanic' unless you think there were people who were called Germanic by someone". There is no such primacy of the descriptions published by others. We know more now. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:20, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I certainly agree with the first two sentences. Possibly we aren't quite getting each other's point after that, but I guess you will agree that to begin with the word "Germanic" was chosen by linguists because they thought they were talking about those real named people from narrative history (Ariovistus, Ambiorix, etc). The word is not a randomly-chosen scientifically-neutral term, but more like a subtle exclamation of "eureka". Perhaps we agree that many scholars now say that this was incautious and methodologically problematic, and the claim of certainty implied in the use of that historically important term (Germanic) has led to confusion? So you see some scholars now saying that Germanic has two meanings, which we should separate, while others point out that actually no, the claim is still implied in the way many scholars write, so we can't just separate the two topics. To define one, requires explaining the other at the same time. (I won't post sources here. But if you want more details let me know.) The confusion is avoided by individual scholars when writing carefully, but they all use different solutions (explanatory pre-ambles and footnotes, use of Latin "Germani" in certain contexts, use of "Germanic-speaking" etc), and set the boundaries differently (for example whether to call Goths, or medieval politics, Germanic). We've experienced that it is a challenge for us as a tertiary source working "as a committee" to imitate what the scholars do.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:22, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose splitting or renaming. Neither will solve the actual issue (over-reliance on the views of a singular scholar; undue elaborations in the lede about the scope: every term borrowed from ancient sources has a certain degree of fuzziness—primary historical information is finite). The Germani of historical sources are an essential building block for the scholarly concept of Germanic peoples (in the sense of Germanen, Germains etc.), so this is an essential part of this article and ideally not split out. As for "Ancient...", I consider this an unnecessary addition, since the tenuous concept "Modern Germanic peoples" (who have little in common to the exclusion of other European peoples save their linguistic affiliation) is not reified here in WP (as an outcome of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Germanic peoples (modern) (2nd nomination)). –Austronesier (talk) 10:28, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier:, Maybe it is useful to remark that I find this rationale very reasonable, except that I might misunderstand the "single scholar". I assume it refers to Walter Pohl, who I leaned on to get us to where we are so far. If it is about Goffart then honestly I think you could delete every reference, and you would not really be changing the article much. Some of the references to Goffart, Heather and Liebeschuetz represent the start of an effort to NOT rely too much on one school or scholar. So why did I stop working in that direction? One issue going forward is how we rely less on one scholar or school without making this a very academic article that loses the narrative history part, which I think editors like Obenritter feel have been swamped by academic debate already. (I shortened it, restricted the narrative to Germanic themes, and moved it down.) I guess Obenritter has a point but I think most proposals will push us further in the direction I started, making this article more about a scholarly topic? I think this of whether this article is about narrative history, and if so how much, is one of the questions we don't have a clear vision about yet. The size of the article is relevant to this.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:57, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Rename article: Ancient Germanic peoples?

If I may ask a related though apparently more consensual question, would you agree to rename the article to Ancient Germanic peoples until the current debate is settled? Alcaios (talk) 17:59, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see Alcaios wrote the above. Sorry for not fixing it, but I need to run. I have also been thinking in this direction. However "Ancient" is apparently intended to be fuzzy, and looks like it is going to lead to circular debates about whether linguists know more about this topic than historians. So indeed it does not look like a the long term solution. If this article will be allowed to continue to be the one about history, then maybe "Roman era" would be better?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:48, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Andrew, "Roman-era Germanic peoples" and "Ancient Germanic peoples" mean the same thing. The end of ancient history is traditionally dated to the fall of Rome (476 AD) in the Western world. Alcaios (talk) 18:03, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

True. Maybe my proposal is not the right one, but my concern is that this idea seems to be leading to a linguistic takeover whereby the Proto Germanic LANGUAGE topic takes over the HISTORY topics, involving the peoples who were REALLY known as Germani during the early imperial period. Approximately 50 BCE - 200 CE. Those are still the basis of the Germanic concept, for experts and others. All other fields are only trying to anchor their speculations to the real names from written history. Obviously I am opposed to the idea that this becomes a 19th century style article where linguistics magically explains why the Romans were wrong and the historians are wrong. in reality, linguistics, like archaeology, is slowly learning to be more careful about claiming to know who the people are that the are digging up. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:11, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Linguistic take over", lol. And I thought I had seen everything on Wikipedia. The barely contained resentment toward experts in the field appears to be boiling over. :bloodofox: (talk) 18:48, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No Bloodofox in the context of this topic the concern I mentioned has specific historical precedent. I have no problem with linguistics, but scholars now realize that it was wrong to be seen as the discipline which could over-rule historical evidence of historical peoples. That led to well-known problems. But as a great scholar surely you know that?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:05, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Alcaios, that sounds like a good idea. I was actually about to suggest the same thing.--Berig (talk) 17:52, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Alcaios -- I can get aboard that name change for sure, at least for the time being. Let's see what others think. --Obenritter (talk) 18:05, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

One should note that this renaming would de facto exclude the Viking Age Norsemen as a medieval Germanic people. The Proto-Norse language and Scandinavian archeology would continue be discussed in this framework though. Alcaios (talk) 18:14, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Alcaios, the way I see it, the "Germanic period" in Scandinavian history ended with the Christianization of the Continental Germanics by the 8th c. and the huge linguistic changes that resulted in Old Norse. I believe the Norse art and other expressions of Scandinavian identity were a result of this linguistic and religious separation. So, I have no problem with that.--Berig (talk) 19:08, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If the article is going to guided by linguistics then none of these titles are appropriate. Such an article would need to be entitled in such a way to make it clear it is about reconstructed languages. But obviously the current article is not structured in this way, because it is primarily anchored to an historical topic, involving a whole range of different peoples who were named in historical records that were not written in their own languages. I also believe WP deserves an article about that historical topic, using historians as sources. That's one I want to work one. (Of course linguistics, like archaeology makes many useful proposals about historical peoples, and historical information helps guide linguistics and archaeology.) I'd also be happy to work on an article about the scholarly debates about the Germanic concept and the idea of Germanic ethnicity (which would be a "history of ideas" article).--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:38, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Lol, this guy ranting about linguists and going to lengths to try to insert Goffart into every nook and cranny of this article while excluding philologists, the latter producing the vast majority of scholarship in this field. What a bizarre thing to see. In the real world, anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, folklorists, and other interdisciplinary scholars operate side-by-side in Germanic studies. :bloodofox: (talk) 18:41, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bloodofox, I call bullshit. Stop making things up about me. This is disruptive. And why do you never mention historians?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:01, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Support rename to Ancient Germanic peoples. :bloodofox: (talk) 18:42, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Concern. From responses so far it is clear that support for the idea is mostly connected to an assumption that this proposal will involve aggressively converting this article from being a history article into a linguists article, which will not only avoid historians as sources, but even scholars who currently define the mainstream regarding the concept of Germanic ethnicity, such as Walter Pohl. That gives me the impression that this name change is going to go in a way I can't agree with, and which many editors will find completely unacceptable. I think any reasonable solution HAS TO take these basic things into account: (1) linguistics articles are fine but they should have titles and text which reflect the fact that they are about linguistics (2) there is an important history topic in this article that deserves to remain in WP as a history topic, and there is a history of ideas topic covered here which also deserves to remain in WP; neither of these are primarily linguistics topics. If the real aim of editors here is to change this article to a linguistics article then you should be asking if other editors agree with THAT aim. I for one do not. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:22, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Andrew, nobody here wants to "avoid historians as sources". Archaeology, history, linguistics, genetics, and philology work together. Alcaios (talk) 20:41, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That has been the more-or-less agreed approach, and there has been a good logic to it. But I don't think everyone agrees with you in practice, and I'm sure you can read the posts above just as well as I can. I accept the article is a compromise that makes no one happy, and that's why we keep hovering around these ideas of splitting the article. It seems to remain intrinsically difficult to blend the ideas of the different fields on this article, unless we get clear principles like the above more clearly confirmed. So: Is this primarily a history topic or not a history topic at all? Are the Vienna school seen as defining the mainstream concerning Germanic ethnicity in recent decades or are they no-ones? It is especially difficult to see how this can go anywhere good when attempts to discuss real sources are being attacked by editors who simply keep pointing to each other's own unverifiable and undefined scholarly knowledge as their source of authority. I am sure you have good intentions, but how does this really work? The answer is that it can't. We need a better show of good will and collegiality. If there are better sources than Pohl and the like, for example, who? And what do they say? We can't use Wikipedia editors as sources.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:32, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. See above. This article should set in context the articles we have on individual ancient Germanic peoples, but should not be just about the "ancient world". Historical linguistics, archaeology, the study of literary and religious motifs, and the evaluation of ethnological and historical reports all contribute to the study of the past of the Germanic peoples, and there are also varying schools of thought among scholars; thank you, Andrew Davidson Lancaster, for substantiating one of my good faith suppositions, that it's such a division that molded your rewriting of the article. But the ethnographic and linguistic studies among modern peoples since the 19th century are also a context for this article; origins are not the entire story, and some of the German- and English-language criticisms of Germanic and especially Indo-European studies grow out of engagement with the Nazi-era conceptualization of "Germanic" and redefinition of "Nordic"; the reader needs that background explaining, too. It's not all "This term is no longer being used as Caesar used it!!1" or even "Tacitus probably invented all this because he was a polemicist". The ancient peoples did not all die out, they continued to act, to think, and to leave their own physical and written records, and even the positions regarding Tacitus, and regarding Caesar's statements about Celtic and Germanic religion, and how far Celtic and Germanic were distinct back then, have a context in things we have since discovered (archaeological, comparative linguistic) and become aware of (literary, historical from other sources than Classical historians), as well as in the history of the scholarly theories. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:25, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir: I presume I am the Andrew you mention? Anyway I think your reasoning makes a lot of sense. I absolutely agree that ethnographic and linguistic (and indeed many other types) of evidence are relevant to this article. Despite being quite large, the article is incomplete in some ways. One of the frustrating things going on here is that I am being portrayed as opposed to any type of information I did not place in the reorganized article. I had two main aims: shortening the article so that it mainly handled topics not better handled in separate articles, and giving it a new section at the top which explained why there are different visions of Germanic . The old version was expanding incredibly quickly in late 2019 and early 2020, and the expansions were literally like separate articles, because people were writing in parallel based on different understandings of the topic's basic definition. This is why the top of the article now explains why there are several understandings. But to use clear language it is obvious that this makes some editors literally angry. They hate it. They can't have a friendly discussion about it, because they are absolutely sure their own vision is the correct one. My idea of trying to unify this article by making the controversy about the concept a central organizing principle just doesn't seem to have worked. That's why my splitting idea is quite different to the one proposed above: I was thinking we have to find a way to remove the main discussion of the uncertainties and controversies about the basic concept to a distinct article. But if we do that, then how do we avoid returning to the old problem of having different parts of the article describing a totally different definition of Germanic to other parts, with no explanation about why? I honestly don't have a good answer. But I suspect it will involve splitting into more than two articles. Your comments are helpful. Any more ideas based on what I've just explained?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:52, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Andrew Lancaster: Sorry about misnaming you, I am terrible at names and have now edited my comment above. I'm afraid I think that focusing the article on the conflict between two definitions was a bad idea; it's confusing and loses the big picture. I haven't looked at the history, but if that was your intentional organizing principle, then it may be easiest to rewrite it from either where you started, or from prior to the expansion that you found to be confusing. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:20, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir: "organizing principle" might be the wrong term, but it did (and does) seem to be something we can't avoid handling up front and reminding the readers of where necessary. Or: I think there is a scholarly topic and a narrative topic here, but it is hard to untwine them, partly because different schools of thought connect them so differently. But for better or worse, switching to 19th-century assumptions, where language evolution is more or less totally equated to peoples/ethnicities, just won't work IMHO. I really tried to see how that would work. Too much of the recent literature is totally opposed to the fundamental assumptions of that old approach. Even though yes, language studies give insight, and it is still the basic background assumption of some academics working in specific areas, it is the scholars who are most cited as experts on the concept of Germanic ethnicity who have especially rejected it as a guiding principle. And as a WP writer trying to construct a narrative, there is actually almost no overlap. Our large language section in this article can't be connected to Arminius or Marobod. It is clearly a completely different topic to the rest of the article. That makes sense because just as the historical Germanic peoples disappear from the written record, new configurations and names of peoples appear (new ethnicities, as many scholars now describe it) and we start to get the first detailed linguistic evidence which gives more than a few insights. None of that linguistic evidence can however tell us much about Arminius or Marobod or their followers. We can only make guesses about their languages. The big theme among the scholars of this is "ethnogenesis". In other words they emphasize how these things are not simply continuous, and cultures can't therefore be assumed to evolve in family trees anymore. (Indeed, even though the assumption that languages work this way is increasingly questioned, and even in biology the assumption that speciation works in family trees is now questioned, though this model still seems to be the implicit assumption for many.) Peoples are constantly re-mixed, re-booted, and ethnicities, and more generally the ways people identify with groups, can change in all kinds of non-linear ways. This includes deliberate manipulation. One famous debating point which the Vienna school agrees with is for example that the big "new" ethnicities on the Roman frontier (Goths, Franks etc) can be understood as Roman creations. (I just give it as an example.) No one is saying that Germanic languages don't have some connection with each other somehow back at the proto-language stage, but the assumption that studying the languages equals defining ethnicities is problematic.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:04, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

From unapproachable low-rent Walter Goffart Festschrift essay to ?

Everyone seems to agree that the current state of the article is horrendous yet I'm seeing no agreement on what should be done about it. We need some more suggestions.

A few things to consider: First of all, this article is huge—too huge—and it is certainly unapproachable for new readers. Second, Germanic studies is quite an interdisciplinary field, with the vast bulk of material relevant to the topic produced by philologists (which has always been the case), and while this should certainly be reflected in the article, we need some kind of history of research section that addresses archeaology and comparative studies more broadly. Third, rather than scholastic reception injected throughout the article that makes it read like soemeone's personal essay half the time, I think we need to make sure we're taking an objective approach that reflects how the topic is treated throughout Germanic studies today.

Whatever the case, let's try to figure out what to do with all this in the space below. I'd like to see some proposals. If we can't come to agreement, then someone needs to just go ahead and start getting very WP:BOLD, if only for readers. We can't keep seeing the same defense of the status quo here. :bloodofox: (talk) 22:37, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No that is another misunderstanding or distortion. No one is defending the status quo. What is happening, as in the past, is that people are understandably worried about the proposals of others. I shortened the article, and eventually stopped going any further because I could see we needed more time to process. People are not convincing each other, and perhaps more to the point none of us have a really detailed vision to propose. Anyway,

• I personally agree the article is too big. That seems to imply the article needs splitting, but I accept the difficulties many people see in that.
• I also think it has always been the idea that there should be more about archaeology but no-one seems interested to do it, and with the article already being big... So this is not an area of actual disagreement either. Just work to do.
• The "second" and "third" points you make are unclear to me.
• Concerning bold editing, to some extent I agree but I hope we all edit in a way which is thoughtful of the range of positions both on this talk page and also among scholars.
• Perhaps it is also worth mentioning an old idea I keep repeating which is that I believe it might help this article if people worked first on satellite articles, instead of working here in this over-sized article first. For example: languages, and archaeology, and anything which could obviously be better handled in a distinct main article. And what is going to happen to that Early Germanic culture article?
• From the discussion above, I noticed this question for other editors: what do we think about the historical narrative sections? Is it an essential element of this article? My understanding is that some editors feel that it is.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:55, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect this editor's constant fondness for lawyering and apparent inability to make a concise point is why this article is such a mess in the first place. Looking forward to suggestions from other editors. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:07, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This talk page is not the place for posting suspicions about other editors. Please work on this talk page according to WP's policies and guidelines.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:40, 8 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, if you want to bring us beyond our past failings you should note that the third point is unclear, and concerning the second point, it continues a vague theme since your first posts, implying that there is a body of work out there where Walter Pohl and the Vienna school are nobodies. How can this be serious unless you name at least ONE authority on Germanic ethnicity from this field you want to rebuild the article around? We can't use Wikipedia editors as sources. So far you mentioned Jakob Grimm, and the philological tradition that has "always" dominated. Anyone more recent? (Based on your remarks so far, your sources are mainly relatively old ones, and/or perhaps you rely on asides in works which are not primarily about the question of Germanic ethnicity.) I think people commenting on your ideas should be given an honest explanation of what you really mean.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:01, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Simple: back to structure of the "Obenritter"-version. Wolfram and Pohl represent the mainstream, or better: the necessary "healthy" middle ground of scholarship about the Germanic peoples. This includes the Traditionskern, and therefore also a critical review of things subsumed under "Germanic culture" etc. Very important information has been lost since early 2020, which is a shame. –Austronesier (talk) 10:40, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier:, Can you point to a date when you think the article had this structure? (Or perhaps point to the good bits within a version.) By the time I intervened, the article (and lead) had rapidly doubled and had lost its coherence. Anyway, even if it is not easy to find such a reference point I think I see what you mean. To me it makes sense to build more around the so-called Vienna direction. They are criticized from several directions, but they are a reference point for other authors, and they have engaged with their critics. That is where I think I was headed when I stopped. OTOH Bloodofox claimed above that I am the only person who thinks they are a reference point, so I'm not sure what other people think of this.[5] (Maybe it was a misunderstanding?) It also still raises Obenritter's other concern about whether this article should be so much about scholarly debates. My memory of events is that Obenritter was mainly expanding the narrative history sections, and was annoyed at my shortening of them. (Personally I think one way or another we are going to an article primarily about those scholarly debates concerning "Germanic". Then we can link other articles to that?) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:13, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is my rough pick for a reference point (before things became "crufty"). NB, structurally. There are many redundancies with other articles in that version, but as far as I can see, much information is completely gone without being merged into specialized pages. And splitting out content means that the subtopic should at least leave a significant trace (summary section + hatnote) in the main article. For many subtopics, I don't see this. This is clearly a result of the "Torontoan" approach. A corollary of this is that many subpages (being deattached from the main page) become more Heather-ish in turn. –Austronesier (talk) 14:06, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

While I do think we need to discuss the definitional problem, and in enough detail that our readers understand that the idea that many things are "Germanic"/can be derived from an earlier pan-Germanic culture (the ordeal, "Germanic" kingship, etc.) has come into question in the latter half of the twentieth century (which seems to be missing in the old version), I think Austronesier's suggestion is a good one to start off.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:12, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Putting my comment here for convenience. I concur that rolling back the article and rebuilding it with the challenges of the late 20th century as a subtopic in its own section is the way to go. There it can be related to the argument that Indo-European studies is tainted by German nationalism. And the varying usage of "Teuton" in English, where it long served as a noun for the adjective "Germanic" but has been deprecated, should also be explained and related to these criticisms.

I mentioned above that Andrew Lancaster was saying (my paraphrase) that Germanic peoples should only be regarded as real if they had been described by Roman authors, or as Germanic if classical authors had used that term for them. For me this is a key point of difference, and strikes me as an unwarranted extension of Wikipedia's reliable sources policy back to the time of the Roman Empire. It's presumably the root of his apparent deprecation of usage of "Germanic" by "linguists". It amounts to rolling back everything scholars have learned since, and from my point of view it denies the existence of any group that (preserved) classical writings did not happen to mention. There were many things beyond the ken of Roman and even Greek historians/ethnographers/generals. In particular, it obviously excludes the Scandinavians. A further point related to this is the contrast he draws between language and ethnicity. Ethnicity is a whole scholarly kettle of fish, and rightly so. Of course we should not equate speaking a Germanic language with being of "pure Germanic blood", at any period. The amalgamation of tribes, including in at least one case including a Celtic group, has been established as something that happened (and this is why I personally prefer to continue to use "tribes" for such political/military/cooperative groupings, to distinguish from the primarily ethnic meaning of "peoples", since "nations" has anachronistic implications, not the least of them being size). But while Andrew Lancaster has averred that he is not seeking to deny the reality of peoples/tribes, by representing as problematic identification of groups as Germanic peoples on the basis of information other than statements by Classical writers, and equating such identification with a statement of ethnicity, he is in fact denying their generally accepted Germanic identity, as well as displacing the locus of disagreement among scholars (and is of course excuding the entire realm of medieval and later Germanic culture). I hope this clarifies my position. Yngvadottir (talk) 21:02, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I promised to shut up, but as I am addressed (sort of), a very short answer only: the question in the end is whether there is a modern consensus or not, on each of these issues. Enjoying the discussion, so I'll post on your talk page? BTW I don't think a full rollback is proposed, only the use of that article structure.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:18, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment I concur with Bloodofox that this article has serious issues when it comes to neutrality, reliability and readability. Fixing those issues will require quite a lot of work. I agree with Austronesier, User:Yngvadottir and Srnec that restoring Obenritter's version would put the article on a more solid footing for future improvement. Germanic peoples is the common name for the topic of this article and should in my opinion be kept as the title. I think Bloodofox's proposal to create an article for the name Germani is a good proposal, since that topic is distinct and notable. As usual, discussions at this talk page have become long, repetitive and convoluted. I think the time has come for capable editors to cut through the case and get down to business with making the necessary article changes. Krakkos (talk) 09:52, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for weighing in, Krakkos. Perhaps I am wrong to fear that a separate Germani article would become a POV fork, and it would instead be useful as an introduction to the usages of that term by classical Latin authors, but we need this article to provide the big picture, which is not only terminological debate and not only about the earliest periods. Yngvadottir (talk) 02:29, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Question and reminder. If we go back to the July 2019 structure what happens to Early Germanic culture? That is one of the articles split out of this one in the months after the preferred version of Austronesier. The other was a Germani article. This was very controversial, and it was merged back in, eventually more-or-less ending a dispute which had gone some years. According to everything discussed then, the main topic of this article is the Germani. (I became heavily involved only after the second split when their needed to be a new merge to bring us back to a holding position that was not totally structured on the rejected proposals. Someone had to do it.) NOTE: The current emphasis on defining the article's scope very clearly, and the lack of emphasis on claims of shared culture, stems from that history. It is difficult for me to judge how big that Early Germanic culture article should really be, because it currently remains rather unfinished work. But likely eventually size is presumably one thing to consider if the idea is to merge it back into here. As a practical proposal, it could maybe be an option to work on it in that article first?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:15, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

After rereading all the conversations on this page, I've come to the conclusion that the well meaning Andrew Lancaster is presently an obstacle to progress on the article, mainly because of his rather obsessive attempts to micromanage every aspect of its composition. I respectfully request that he take a break from this talk page for a few days and let invested editors (you know who you are), a very capable set of scholars, discuss the matter without his voluminous input, and let us see what happens. What say ye? Carlstak (talk) 12:56, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

See here.--Ermenrich (talk) 12:58, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but rather than just limiting the number and length of his comments, which he's never been inclined to do, I think Andrew should take a vacation from this page. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I believe it would be good for him, emotionally and spiritually.;-) Carlstak (talk) 13:06, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks guys, for your concern. LOL. I don't say I would trust you as a psychiatrist but I have no problem with that idea - at all. I have also been avoiding the article itself. It needs more people working on it, and trying to really grapple properly with it instead of just dropping by for a whinge. There were a lot of aggressive comments making assertions about the history of the article, and me personally, which I felt were sufficiently misleading to need attention. It would be helpful to this article, and everyone interested in it, if that fantasizing stopped. I then found the comments of Austronesier and Yngvadottir very interesting, and I really wanted to comment on those before backing off to a more minimal participation. Of course if the topic of discussion continues to a fictional version of me, then that makes it difficult. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:30, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad you feel that way, Andrew. I'll send you a bill for services rendered, Venmo is good. I found those editors' comments to be very interesting also; I agree that editors here should not personalize their criticisms and should not discuss personalities. Carlstak (talk) 13:40, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Cheers. People should feel free to ask me stuff, within reason. I like the research. I collected a fair bit of stuff over time, so if anyone is looking for sources on something (e.g. Pohl) I can post information somewhere else if needed.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:52, 9 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Like any period academia, late 20th c. scholarship has to be presented within within the ideological framework it belongs to, and in this case, it is the post WWII-era and the Cold War with the immobilist agendas that appeared. Immobilism/diffusionism is basically the idea that before the advent of modern mass media, and without any movement of larger groups of people, large areas of Europe could change languages like people change any kind of cultural expression. It is a belief in the successful and peaceful transmission over large geographical areas of languages that had incredibly complex patterns of conjugations and declinations, new and unfamiliar pronunciations, complex semantic fields, etc. Moreover, this article is about so much more: linguistics, culture, religion, archaeogenetics, etc. I suggest that there is a section where "immobilism vs. migrationism" is presented and discussed, and that late 20th c. scholars are presented within that framework.--Berig (talk) 07:49, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I feel this could give a wrong impression. Who would be a scholar that is an "immobilist" relevant to this topic? Is the term "immobilist" one which scholars really use? If I understand correctly, aren't you just parodying all critics of the "language = material culture = ethnicity" methodology of Gustaf Kossinna, and treating his position as the neutral modern one without "agenda"? To the extent that this article might be about the history of debate then something about this could be relevant, but I think critics of Kossinna and extreme "migrationism" (the method were all change has to be explained by a mass migration) are mainly writing about archaeological cultures, not language, and their position is NOT that no migration happens. I can't think of any scholar who has ever had that position. Instead positions include (1) that small movements of people can make big changes and (2) that Rome could influence the way people moved around and how they identified themselves. Those would both be typical Vienna school positions for example and are very much 21st century mainstream. One of the most massive ways people moved around was because Rome forced them to, or because they were in the recruiting zone for the Roman military, which was a culture unto itself that clearly came to have its own distinct barbarian languages and fashions that were (so the scholars say) very influential on the material cultures of the recruiting zone. In short: this is a bigger more complex topic than the summary above would indicate. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:04, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not familiar enough with the archaeological debates to comment on that, but I wanted to say that I think that the main reason for the questioning of Germanic nowadays is not directly connected to that, but rather to the ascription of various things to a common Germanic culture that has since been questioned. This is mostly the work of historians rather than archaeologists. Compare introduction to a new work on Theodoric the Great:

• pages 24-28 discusses the history of scholarship on Gothic identity (and by extension, Germanic) identity. It discusses how "older scholarship" thought of the Goths as Germanic peoples with a fixed identity, how the Vienna school challenged that after WW2, and how they were in turn attacked by Anglo-Americans in the late 1990s for "having placed the old ideology of Germanic in new clothes" die alte Germanen-Ideologie in neue Kleider gehüllt zu haben. (p. 26). It then introduces Pohl as providing "the current position of the Vienna school":

"The proposition is defended that ethnicity and ethnic identity are necessary terms if one wishes to understand how social groups in the early middle ages were constituted and reproduced. Pohl rejects the accusation that the modal of ethnogenesis is basically only a new version of the theory of Germanic continuity from Caesar into the late time of the Hohenstaufens." Verteidigt wird […] die Auffassung, dass Ethnizität und ethnische Identität unverzichtbare Begriffe sind, wenn man verstehen möchte, wie sich soziale Gruppen im „Frühmittelalter“ konstituierten und reproduzierten. Pohl weist den Vorwurf zurück, dass das Modell der Ethnogenese im Grunde nur eine Neuauflage der Theorie einer germanischen Kontinuität von Caesar bis in die hohe Stauferzeit sei… (p. 26)

What should be clear from these quotations is that there is virtually no support for the old idea of "Germanic continuity" or that there was some idea of "Germanic identity" at the time. There is no mention of archaeology in any of these considerations. A look at Pohl's actually essay would no doubt make this even more clear and go into more detail.

• There is also a section discussion heroic poetry, wherein it is stated:

"The emphatic affirmation of "Germanicness" has not been any less frowned upon in German(ic) [literary] studies than in historiography since the 1970s." Das emphatische Bekenntnis zum Germanentum ist in der Germanistik nicht anders als in Geschichtswissenschaft seit den 1970-er Jahren verpönt. (p. 35)

The essay goes on to discuss the idea that heroic poetry spread because of mutual intelligibility of Germanic languages, but seems not to have had any role in creating an identity.

My point is, I don't think diffusionism vs. migrationism is necessarily all that relevant to the debate.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:39, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The main difference here may be that we are talking about such long periods of time. What you are saying is very relevant for Medieval Germanic cultures, but this article also covers periods where archaeology and linguistics are the main source of information. When I studied North European archaeology, I had a professor who was a fervent immobilist. Even in a late publication from 2010, he maintains that languages were not spread by speech communities but by people just meeting each other. He was specifically talking about the appearance of the probably Indo-European Corded Ware Culture, and said that linguists have come with some "interesting arguments" against him, but he still did not believe in any c. 3000 B.C. migrations from the Yamna culture into Northern Europe. Since then archaeogenetics have proven that there was indeed a major migration of Yamna people into Northern Europe. Archaeogenetics are bolstering the Migrationist viewpoint, and showing that we are all of mixed origin. I do indeed think that the migrationist vs. diffusionist debate is relevant, at least for the earliest periods.--Berig (talk) 14:36, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that different time periods (and hence different types of evidence) are part of the problem. But also different disciplines (and hence different types of evidence). Linguists are bound to put language front and centre, just as archaeologists will front material culture and historians written records. There is no doubt that communities of native speakers of Germanic languages have existed ever since Germanic languages existed. But what does that mean for speaking about Germanic peoples? Of course, if you define Germanic peoples as "communities of native speakers of Germanic languages", then you have a very clear answer. But that is precisely what, e.g., Goffart et al. are arguing against doing, at least for so late a period as Late Antiquity. I don't really think the "Torontonians" have anything to say about the Proto-Germanic period. Their argument has to do with the modern application of the category "Germanic" well after Caesar and Tacitus. DeGruyter released a volume this year entitled Interrogating the ‘Germanic’: A Category and its Use in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The editors are, I think, archaeologists. Note the subtitle. So it is not a coincidence that a Wikipedia who worked heavily on Proto-Germanic folklore and another who works on the early medieval Low Countries would come at this topic from completely different angles.

I do think this article is in bad shape. Austronesier's suggestion about rolling back to a version by Obenritter seems like a good start to me. The current version has too much Goffart, but I'm not sure why some Wikipedians have such an aversion to him. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but Google Scholar thinks his Narrators of Barbarian History is more cited than Peter Brown's The Making of Late Antiquity. Srnec (talk) 19:25, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That volume is available at DeGruyter online through the Wikimedia library. It's introduction is quite enlightening. It actually points out that the introduction to the Reallexikon already says that the editors did not believe the term Germanic was useful for archaeology or history. It also discusses Walter Goffart by name, saying The blistering criticisms of such scholars as Walter Goffart or Alexander Murray highlight the absurdity of believing that scant traces in later literary sources gives us windows into a broader, late antique pan-Germanic ethos for which the late antique source material provides decidedly no evidence, yet in studies ranging from philology to archaeology, such assumptions remain, as we have seen, firmly embedded in contemporary scholarship (p. 6). Not coincidentally it also goes on to discuss the incredible rancor between the Vienna and Toronto schools - which is reflected here in our current debates on this article. Andrew Lancaster is not wrong, however, when he points out that both the Vienna and Toronto schools are now both committed to dismantling the notion of a pan-Germanic ethos or identity, both seeing Germanic as a linguistic term - as the introduction states on the same page I just quoted.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:46, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

So then this article will be superfluous, and will best serve as a redirect to Germanic languages. I actually think that would be the best solution overall, considering the controversial nature of the topic.--Berig (talk) 21:15, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, some scholars continue to want to use the term in various ways (as is also detailed in that article), while others wish to dispense with it entirely. It’s also still commonly encountered. So I think we just need to acknowledge the controversy and problematic history of the term and then we can still have an article here.—-Ermenrich (talk) 21:27, 10 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Then we'll also need a short overview of the Toronto, Vienna and Oxford schools as well. Not everyone is familiar with the influence of modern politics, ideologies and movements such as postmodernism.--Berig (talk) 07:10, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

For the most part, I'll let Ermenrich's posts above speak for me. But another point: I think treating mainstream scholars such as the Walter Pohl, Patrick Geary and Michael Kulikowski as political ideologists, and constantly claiming that DNA evidence is about to show them all wrong, or even hinting that they've already been shown wrong, isn't going to be something most people (or WP policy) can work with. We don't have sources for that, and we can't use Wikipedia editors as sources. Also, just deleting the name Goffart and switching it to "some scholars" clearly won't help us find the way. Moving SOME things to language-related articles might indeed be a good idea though.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:07, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The opening paragraph sets the tone for the article. Here the second sentence calls into doubt the entire premise of an article titled "Germanic peoples." I invite you to consider the implications of this:

They are also associated with Germanic languages, which originated and dispersed among them, and are one of several criteria used to attempt to define the historical Germanic peoples.

So unlike any other group, the Germanic peoples defy definition. What difference would it make to remove the phrase "attempt to"? Well, for one it would give the article a positive tone and, further, it might require some intellectual rigour and honesty throughout the rest of the article.

Another point is the word "they" which in any other context would likely be regarded as a distancing tactic. It reminds me of Ronald Reagan's use of "they" to refer to African Americans. He was rightly condemned for that. How about as an unbiased purveyor of information we clean up this little ethnic slight? Dynasteria (talk) 20:38, 11 July 2021 (UTC) And given the general discourse displayed on this page over quite a long period of time, I feel compelled to state that if no one objects to removing the phrase "attempt to" (within several days) I will feel free to do it myself without fear of being reverted. If it is reverted, the burden to justify will then be on that person, not me. Thank you. Dynasteria (talk) 21:54, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I object, and the sourcing for the problems defining Germanic has been explained many times. See the posts of Ermenrich above for example. The sourcing against this is only Wikipedians. The debate is described in print by people on all sides of it. No serious scholar denies that there is such a debate.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:07, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Are you or are you not going to take a break from attempting to micromanage every attempt any individual makes to improve this mess of an article? Enough with the constant obstruction and constant bludgeoning with wall after wall of long-winded text. :bloodofox: (talk) 22:23, 11 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Andrew Lancaster: I accept that your personal opinion is against my suggestion. However you have not given a logical argument why the "debate" should be in the lede. The article is not titled "Debate on the concept of a Germanic people." Whether or not multiple academics are engaged in debate is completely irrelevant to anything here. Your position really becomes a straw man argument the more you present it. Dynasteria (talk) 07:51, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

What did you think of Ermenrich's explanations? Also see my citation of MOS:LEDE above [6]. I'm keeping an open mind about how much of this article should be about the debate you mention, but that seems a different question. You are talking about tweaking wording to remove all implication of debate and uncertainty. Wouldn't it be a deliberate distortion of the academics to imply certainty and consensus? Why is it important to imply certainty and no debate? Maybe I am missing something in your explanations.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:55, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Commenting first on the initially raised question in this section. "They" is the third person plural pronoun (per default—it has acquired an extended range of meaning in the last 20 yrs). It references an aforementioned plural noun, and is preferably used to avoid verbatim repetition of the same phrase in consecutive clauses. Such repetition is generally considered bad style, unless for disambiguation purposes. "Ethnic slight"? I don't see it. Ambiguity? I don't think readers will likely interpret it as referencing to "Graeco-Roman authors".

"...several criteria used to attempt to define..." is awfully clumsy. And yes, it might even bear the connotation of the "attempt" being unsuccessful. What about "...several approaches to define..."?

The debate is important, and should be covered in the article. It also has its place in the lede, which summarizes the article. But the lede-mention should stay in proportion with other aspects of the page topic "Germanic peoples", a terminological concept which—in spite of a significant minority(?) opinion—has not become obsolete.

Finally, it is odd to read the accusation of "bludgeoning" right below a post of 417 bytes. Per WP policies, ad hominem attacks are a no-go; text-walling is bad, but not per se a breach of policies if the editor has a genuine message to convey. –Austronesier (talk) 09:07, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Once again Andrew Lancaster, this article is not about academicians or their debates. It is about a people who once existed and whose descendants regard them as ancestors. I simply don't want to get into the weeds of the debate. I am capable of it; I refuse to do so. The "debate" dominates the article injudiciously, as numerous contributors have pointed out. It should be a secondary consideration in the lede and elsewhere. Dynasteria (talk) 12:35, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Austronesier: I can go along with your suggestion. Dynasteria (talk) 12:38, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Austronesier, after investigating it a bit, my own conclusion is that at this point it is a majority of scholars who questions the (usefulness of the) concept of Germanic peoples, at least for Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The best way to solve this problem, however, would be to assemble recent statements on the academic consensus/the positions of the Vienna and Toronto schools, etc. and see what they say. I've already seen several at De Gruyter online, including in the Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskunde itself, that indicate that the idea of Germanic peoples with a shared Germanic culture beyond language is no longer the majority view of scholars working in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

If we come back to the question raised by Dynasteria why this is only the case for Germanic peoples, it obviously has a political dimension, but it also just reflects the much greater amount of scholarship that's been invested into this question than, say, Slavic peoples or Turkic peoples. These have had similarly negative nationalist connotations but are not as large of fields in Western academia.--Ermenrich (talk) 12:52, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"It obviously has a political dimension." Let's all agree on this. Dynasteria (talk) 13:01, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Everything has a political dimension, including the original idea that there are Germanic peoples in the first place.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:13, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

If and when the call to action comes, may each of us find his or her own right path.Dynasteria (talk) 13:34, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ermenrich: Or maybe someone simply assumes that a language has a "speech community" and calls that "speech community" a "people".

Berig, Oh sure, but the idea that a Swede and a German or a Dutch person and an English person have something in common because they speak Germanic languages (the original implication of the idea "Germanic peoples"), more so than because they are Europeans or (formerly) mostly Christians, is a political idea, and was intended as such. In the same way that the original idea allowed Grimm and others to appropriate the actions of the Ostrogoths and Vandals for the "Germans". We shouldn't forget that the Grimms and many other pioneers of the field actually used the word "Deutsch" to refer to the Germanic peoples, not "germanisch". That came later.--Ermenrich (talk) 15:21, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ermenrich:, @Austronesier:, Srnec made a point which might be important above: there are different debates and uncertainties for different periods and regions, e.g. late antiquity. (But it is only in late antiquity that we can start mapping the Germanic language family onto real named peoples in any meaningful way, and using the linguistic definition of Germanic.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:37, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ermenrich: My impression is similar, but yet differs in one point. After skimming through Interrogating the ‘Germanic’, I agree that the majority of scholars who are actively engaged in the theoretical debate do indeed question the usefulness of the concept of Germanic peoples. But does this also hold e.g. for the field archeologists who need to present their research results in a recognizable framework? In their introductory chapter, Harland & Friedrich point out (and implicitly deplore) the very fact that "the general tendency in humanities scholarship is, arguably, still simply to assume that the ‘Germanic’ is a self-explanatory label". Paradoxically as it may seem, and probably not in the full intent of Harland & Friedrich, but this is a secondary-source statement about 21th century research, which we cannot ignore if we want built encyclopedic content that simply reflects both field research and theoretical debates.

Just a practical example: I have taken a look at some articles in the RGA which still adhere to the traditional framework. E.g. "Elbgermanen" by Mildenberger & Beck (in the 1989 edition, the entry probably was last updated around 1980). They categorize manifest differences in burial practices along demarcations that were set up by linguists. Their maps illustrate this vividly. My question is: how do archeologist of the 2010s and 2020s contextualize their finds from the same area? Has the majority of them completely discarded the label Germanic? I simply lack the insight into the topic to answer, but I think details like these are crucial for our discussion here. –Austronesier (talk) 14:31, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keeping track: I've received one "No" vote and one "Yes" vote so as it stands it's 2 to 1 in favor of removing "attempt to." I'll wait a couple of days for further votes. Dynasteria (talk) 16:40, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The text has already been rewritten by Austronesier, so I would say the original proposal is moot? In any case, I support his wording, not any further rewording for the moment.--Ermenrich (talk) 16:52, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I didn't notice. I would remove the second comma (after "them"). Otherwise, the following verb "are" refers to the subject of the sentence "they" rather than to "languages":

They are also associated with Germanic languages, which originated and dispersed among them and are one of several approaches to defining the historical Germanic peoples. Dynasteria (talk) 18:51, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see how that comma changes the subject. "Them" can not be the subject? Anyway, technically the sentence is also wrong because languages can not be approaches. (Languages are a type of evidence used as the basis of "approaches". But there has to be a neater way to say it.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:32, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've boldly changed the wording to "They are also associated with Germanic languages, which originated and dispersed among them and which inform one of the several approaches to defining the historical Germanic peoples." Still a little unwieldy, but better, I think. Carlstak (talk) 11:41, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Two things occur to me. One is that rewriting the introduction right now is a good idea, because mobile readers only see the introduction, and it's overly long and convoluted, but that it can only be a stop-gap, because the introduction should be a summary of the major points in the article, so it needs to be rewritten pretty much last, after the article is recast and refocused. The second came to me after thinking about an exchange I've had with Andrew Lancaster at my talk, and that is that one reason there is so much disagreement on this talk page is that we're using the term "Germanic peoples" differently. In the anglosphere, it maps pretty well to "Germanic studies", encompassing a group of cultures studied right through the Middle Ages and in some spheres (such as folklore and those that use folklore evidence such as rural practices and traditional songs) the 19th and even the early 20th centuries. It's used to distinguish some areas of medieval studies from others (including Germanic from Celtic), and while it depends in part on location where modern Scandinavian studies are classed, "Germanic" is the commonly used term for the over-arching field and the human groups within it. However, many editors in this conversation are using it for what are still often termed "Germanic tribes" in English: the peoples of "antiquity". Hence the focus on what classical writers wrote about people. I looked at the history of this article, half expecting it to have been moved from Germanic tribes or even the antiquated Ancient Germans (and found instead an early article creation, October 2001, that is indeed all about relations with the Romans except that it jumps ahead to conversion to Christianity). This article, since it is in the English-language Wikipedia, needs to be about more than the classical reports and what scholars have said about them; it needs to include later periods as well as people who speak Germanic languages who didn't get reported on by classical authors, and it should not imply either that the Germanic peoples faded away long ago, or that the only interesting things about them are their origins and the Urzeit in general. Articles about many aspects of Germanic studies link here; readers reading about, for example, Dumézil's theory and the Nazi "Nordic" concept, need an exposition here (as well as the readers who learn here for the first time that "Germanic" doesn't mean the same as "German", which is why writers used to use "Teutonic"). Yngvadottir (talk) 09:19, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Your perspective is very helpful. People use these terms differently, and that is very important to what people the community decides to do with this article. Complications: (a) This problem is also in academia, so I am not sure there is an easily identifiable single "correct" academic usage? (b) The way the term "Germanic peoples" is used traditionally within Germanic studies represents strong knowledge claims about the historical topic you refer to as the "Germanic tribes", and not only about medieval Germanic-speakers. Today, not all scholars agree with those strong knowledge claims which were once built within the old terminology choices of Germanic studies (even scholars from that background). So IMHO that all seems to make what you call the "Germanic tribes" the topic which the others have to be structured around.

To put it another way: I think what you call the "Germanic tribes" is the one topic which has to be in this article? It is the only topic I can't imagine being farmed out to another article or given a different name to this one? (This is based not only on the above reasoning but also a few years watching what people think this article is about.) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:16, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, because Germanic studies have been mentioned so often, I notice on WP it redirects to Germanic philology and this has no German WP equivalent, although the article explains the field originated in 19th century Germany. Our article implies that in practice it is not normally a distinct field in university curricula. German WP "Germanistiek" is linked to English "German studies". In practice this seems relevant to questions of how various fields influence terminology in English. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:21, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The issue of "Germanic studies" is a bit of a red herring. "Germanic studies" is a mostly just another name for a Department of "Germanic languages and literatures," not the study of the "Germanic peoples" and their cultures in a way useful to this article. It does not focus on the history and culture of barbarian peoples, and often has no medieval component at all. Just look at these programs in "Germanic studies" I've found:

1. University of Illinois - focus on modern German or Scandinavian. Classes in Middle High German available. Nothing about the Germani.
2. University of Chicago - the department is subtitled "German Department" and offers nothing but modern German, Norwegian, and Yiddish. No medieval languages, no Germani. Yet it says The Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago is a national and international leader in the field of Germanic Studies.. This isn't the type of "Germanic studies" that's being discussed here there.
3. University of Indiana - offers modern German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Yiddish, also Middle High German and Old Icelandic. This comes the closest so far, but still, no Germani, and I'm willing to bet most students never touch anything medieval (I speak from experience).
4. University of Victoria Germanic and Slavic Studies. Offers degrees in "Germanic Studies", but the intro course is explained thus: GMST 100 introduces students to the cultural symbols, spaces and events which have not only shaped German-speaking identity but also the discipline of Germanic Studies itself. By examining architecture, literature, film, myths, visual art and graphic novels, students will acquire cultural literacy in “things German” and essential skills in reading a broad spectrum of media. Our required text will be Nora Krug’s graphic memoir Belonging. There's also "Germanic Cultural Studies" Provides case studies in the cultural history of German-speaking countries in which students analyze texts, films, media, as well as visual and material objects and spaces from a variety of approaches and perspectives. Clearly not what is being discussed here.
5. University of Minnesota - Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch. Again, Germanic studies basically means "Philology", but this probably comes the closest: (Students have the option of electing an emphasis (German or Germanic Medieval Studies or Scandinavian), though this is not required. The requirements for an emphasis are: five of the six electives and the Plan B topic must be in the emphasis.)
6. University of Sheffield - used to mean "German": Germanic Studies has a long tradition of distinguished research in German, but we are also a leading department for Dutch Studies. And we house the world’s only Centre for Luxembourg Studies, too.
7. University of Sidney The Department of Germanic Studies teaches language from beginners to advanced levels and offers study options in German literature, film, history, thought, and society from the 18th century to the present.

I could go on, but I invite you to search "Germanic Studies" in Google for yourself and see what comes up. My point is, this term is not being used in a way that supports using "Germanic" in a sense that it is not mostly about philology - language and literature.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:12, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I've split this out, because I feel guilty now for potentially making a big point of a small housekeeping issue. Perhaps I should make clear that I had always thought of the type of Germanic research which went beyond language and literature to be especially strong in Germany, but apparently the presuppositions of that way of grouping topics are now questioned in Germany itself (and I think also in Holland and Belgium). I've come to understand more recently that perhaps something similar, which still has a foot in topics that go beyond language and literature, has survived more in Scandinavian countries? I do not mean to make any strong points about this, but only address a point I was honestly uncertain about. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:44, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ermenrich: It's taken me so long to respond, I'm pinging you in case you stopped looking :-)

I didn't realise Germanic studies was a redirect; I see that happened in March 2012 after a proposal was made in 2009 and received no discussion. The last version is here and is pretty sad; it was created as a disambiguation page.

I'm not sure what your background is ... and it's none of my business, and I similarly hope no one will dox me based on what I write here :-) But what your search has yielded is a partial glimpse of the results of decades of cutbacks; in the US and possibly elsewhere, starting with the First World War, not the Second. There is little student demand for these subjects, so there are few faculty positions, and it's a vicious spiral. However, many reading here may be more familiar with the German system of tertiary education where a student is expected to proceed all the way to a doctorate; the norm elsewhere is a bachelor's degree, with only certain fields having high numbers of master's degrees (business, teaching) and only medical and legal students being expected to get doctorates. In the anglosphere, large parts of Germanic studies and Scandinavian studies are graduate fields in most institutions, and this plus consolidation into interdisciplinary programs (particularly medieval studies and folklore) makes it hard to track down what's actually available to a student. There are so few people that often the best clue is who's published on things requiring knowledge of more than one part of the field, and where they are employed. Germanic studies, based historically on Germanistik but including much of Nordistik, remains the term used for the entire field by scholars, but departments tend to be named for what the undergraduates study. With Scandinavian this has always been the case. For example, University College London is known for language teaching, and has separate German Studies and Scandinavian Studies departments; the latter offers a BA in Viking and Old Norse Studies and the institution is the home base of the Viking Society. The University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are top American institutions for studying modern Scandinavian languages: Washington has Scandinavian Studies and has renamed Germanics to German Studies to match, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison instead has an amalgamation: German, Nordic, and Slavic. Because of Anglo-Saxon (which may not yet have been mentioned on this page, but was very important in the early development of Germanic Studies as a field of study in the UK and thus in other English-speaking countries), Old Norse was often tucked into English departments; both Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse have since often been placed within Medieval Studies. The pioneers are probably Oxford, where Old Norse is within the Faculty of English and there are two Germanic studies majors in all but name: English Course II and the joint course in English and Modern Languages, and Cambridge, which uses a tripos system (effectively students are required to have a related minor) and the department is Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic. (I know there are also important departments/scholars elsewhere in the UK and in Ireland). At Cornell, which has the Fiske Icelandic library collection, Old Norse was tucked into German, but is now in Medieval Studies, which for undergraduates offers only minors, including an alternate Viking Studies minor: German Studies (undergraduate), Medieval Studies (undergraduate minor). You looked at Sydney above; judging by Margaret Clunies Ross's appointments, they also cover some of the field within English and some within Medieval Studies. In contrast, the University of Texas at Austin retains a Department of Germanic Studies, including a Germanic Civilization undergraduate track that avoids requiring language study. (This is a wealthy state university, and does not have a history of specialising in training in modern languages.) At the University of California, Berkeley has a separate Department of German and Department of Scandinavian, and John Lindow, now emeritus, was in Scandinavian and Folklore, while Los Angeles (UCLA) retains its Program in Indo-European Studies, but it's graduate-only and almost entirely linguistic in focus; the program in Comparative Folklore and Mythology that formerly granted undergraduate and graduate degrees merged into World Arts and Cultures in 2001.

However, I believe the emphases on the modern countries, their languages and literatures supports my point: in the Anglosphere, the Germani are not the core of the field; as you found, they're barely mentioned. (Ancient history and classics probably cover them more than even the medieval studies programmes.) ... which needless to say does not mean I do not think they should be mentioned in this article. I don't believe anyone has suggested leaving them out, or even leaving out the scholarly controversies. Yngvadottir (talk) 09:15, 14 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Germanic studies is definitely a notable topic that deserves an article of its own. Krakkos has created literally dozens of great pages about scholars in the field, so it's quite an imbalance that the field itself is not covered beyond a pitiful stub.

But I don't think that the topic range of Germanic studies defines Germanic peoples. This kind of reification of various things (languages, mythology, folklore, settlement types, burial traditions etc.) traditionally labelled as Germanic into the people(s) who display such features is not what scholars of the field usually do, except for a period that ranges from Jastorf to the Early Medieval. After that period, scholars contiune to speak about "Germanic languages" (which is uncontested), and also about other things "Germanic", but rarely reified into a ethnic concept (at least in modern scholarship). So looking at Germanic studies alone gives little guidance about the scope of Germanic peoples. I also disagree that English-speaking scholarship defines Germanic peoples in a different way from non-English scholars when the latter talk about Germanen etc. US/UK scholars are in constant interaction which continental European scholars, and I don't think Toronto, Oxford and Vienna are lost in translation. –Austronesier (talk) 09:48, 14 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've personally taken courses on Germania in a Germanic studies department, as well as a variety of medieval-oriented courses, as well as studied Gothic, Old Norse, and Old High German in said department. Old English is frequently handled by English departments but, like Gothic, might also be encountered in historical linguistics programs, frequently with overlapping departments. Russian, Old Church Slavonic, and other Slavic topics often gets mashed into these departments as the humanities budgets continue to contract. As @Yngvadottir: highlights, these departments (and programs) vary by institution, and are frequently impacted by budgets and by faculty members. If there's a medievalist or philologist in the department, one can expect related courses, often English-language and frequently aimed at undergraduates by way of alluring titles and low requirements. As for the phrase Germanic studies, we would very much benefit from a built-out article on it, I agree. @Krakkos: and @Yngvadottir:, maybe you want to lead the charge there? My time is super limited for Wikipedia lately, unfortunately. :bloodofox: (talk) 19:43, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Can you cite any such department or program that calls itself "Germanic Studies" and is devoted to all things "Germanic"? I've cited actual existing departments, can you cite one? There isn't one at any Ivy League School, nor at the University of Chicago, at Stanford, at Berkeley, at Oxford or Cambridge. The closest thing I've seen is Minnesota or Wisconsin, and there the focus is clearly on literature and linguistics, when Germania and the Germani are clearly a topic discussed primarily by historians. The only journal I've found that says it's devoted to "Germanic Studies" is appears to be devoted solely to modern Germany, namely The New German Review. There's also the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, but it's focus is, as the name says, philological/literary.

While I don't doubt you've taken such classes, you must be aware that Wikipedia cannot rely on the word of its contributors for how it presents things. We need actual sources. And when actual sources, such as the Germanische Altertumskunde Online, say the following, it's hard to argue with them without producing sources ourselves:

The question of “what we may describe as ‘Germanic’”had already become a problem for the editors by the second edition. Today the concept remains important for linguistics, but is no longer useful for archaeology or history. It is thus difficult at present to speak of an interdisciplinary germanische Altertumskunde. In any case, the temporal, geographical and content-related boundaries of this encyclopaedia are not defined by the notion of “Germans” as the bearers of a particular culture. English translation from here.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:09, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ermenrich, I think you may have missed my mention above of UT Austin, which has a redoubtable Department of Germanic Studies. In making my points about medieval studies and about Germanic Studies often being graduate-only in the US, I also mentioned Cornell, which is of course Ivy League and should probably be regarded as the best in the field in the Ivy League. (Of course I would say that.) I had linked to the undergraduate program (in this response I'm switching to US spellings since I'm talking only about the US, and the closest British equivalent so far as I know is "course") in German Studies (and to the undergraduate Medieval Studies program, since they have moved Old Norse under that umbrella). The graduate program is now also called German Studies but note "Germanic studies" in the characterization of the library holdings and that the grad school page is still headed "Germanic Studies Ph.D." (the grad program was formerly Germanic Languages and Literatures since it was a joint program of the Department of German Literature and the Department of German(ic) Language (I forget the official name), which were bureaucratically distinct; see the eulogy for Frans Van Coetsem here, which uses afdeling germanistiek and afdeling Germanic Languages and Literatures. Since we're talking Ivies, Harvard has also had some respected scholars in the field (like Texas, it can afford to largely ignore market forces) and still calls its department Germanic Languages and Literatures; note the statement there, "Thus, the program is designed not only for students who wish to pursue graduate study in Germanic studies ..."; Germanic studies is overwhelmingly a PhD field in the US. I'm also going to ping EEng here in case he wishes to defend the honor of his alma mater. However, you yourself mentioned that the Indiana U, U of Illinois, and Chicago departments are still Germanic Studies, and it would be dangerous to underrate Indiana (historically the powerhouse of folklore studies in the US) or Chicago (the first "research university" on the German model in the US, and I wouldn't class many Ivies above it. Chicago is weak in Scandinavian, but it's not so much that their undergrad page is subtitled "German" as that they use that as the URL and the selling point for undergrads. Their PhD program page is more representative; they specialize in modern stuff, is what it is. I'm going to repeat my point that these programs demonstrate that the Germani are far from central to Germanic studies in the Anglosphere; they may be studied in other departments, such as classics or linguistics, or there may simply not be a faculty member interested in the Germanic Urzeit; most US universities with German programs don't even offer free-standing courses in Middle High German, just covering the literature in a survey course, and of course Latin is not widely taught either in the US. The Germani need to be in this article, but whether there are courses about them is the wrong criterion for judging the breadth of a Germanic studies program, let alone what anglophone scholars in the field draw on in their publications. Yngvadottir (talk) 23:25, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

We cool; Harvard's Germanic Lang & Lit department has plenty to answer for. I should point out, though, that the page you link is to a description (advertisement, more like) of the undergrad German program; you'd probably do better to look at [7] [8] [9] and [10], which describe the grad program. EEng 00:02, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're going to need to look at course offerings. As you know, some of these departments have changed their names over the years, including Wisconsin-Madison—which Yngvadottir highlights above. However, they still lump "Nordic" and "German" together there, and you can take plenty of folklore courses as part of the department's curriculum (like I did once upon a time—nowadays mentioned here: [11]). Most of the courses these departments offer will be introductory language courses, as that's where the demand is due to undergraduate degree requirements and humanities department shrink. For example, while I can't find the old course I once took (the program appartently ceased to exist after the program head died and the school saw this as an opportunity to axe another humanities program), a quick general search tells me that, for example, the Department of Germanic and Slavic studies at UGA offers a regular course on Germania ([12]), and units that discuss Germanic languages in historical linguistics programs frequently discuss the peoples speaking these languages alongside paradigm-memorization and syntax-hammering. Whatever they're called and whether Slavic studies has been merged in by an administrative decision or whatever, such departments are obviously not restricted to language courses and might not even offer courses on linguistics as a field. Linguistics programs and certainly linguistics departments are not terribly common. Generally speaking, departments can indeed be quite interdisciplinary—there's significant overlap in these departments with linguistics, history, folklore studies, film studies, art history, and a variety of other programs and departments, particulary at those not starved for funds. As another example, Seiichi Suzuki is "professor of Old Germanic studies" at Kansai Gaidai University. There's plenty more one can dig up on this. Whether are not they're calling it Germanic studies in their department name is another question but linguistically related groups are frequently bundled together—and that includes courses on much more than language acquisition. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:21, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir:, I can't find any "Germanic civilization" track at UT Autsin, nor anything suggesting it isn't primarily a modern language department. In fact, looking at the faculty, the only one currently doing medieval is Sandra B Straubhaar in medieval Norse. Cornell does not have anyone teaching Germanic studies (they have a media specialist who dabbles in Middle High German).

The fact that many departments formerly were called Germanic Studies or formerly included distinguished faculty who considered themselves to do "Germanic Studies" does not change the fact that they are no longer called that and those faculty are no longer there - there is clearly movement away from such an idea. At the University of Michigan while I was there, they were even planning to phase out calling it "Germanic Languages and Literatures" in favor of "German, Dutch, and Scandinavian", although I note that no longer seems to be the case based on the website. Germanic studies, is, when used at all, simply another term for Germanic languages and literatures.

Whatever "Germanic"'s usefulness as a term might be, I think we can all agree that medieval Scandinavian, Old English, and Old and Middle High German would be essentially parts of it - and yet there are very few places that do more than one of these. Germanic, outside of the linguistic sense, implies a cultural continuity that most scholars simply no longer believe is there. To speak from my own field, most scholars of Middle High German at this point don't even study beyond that one language, even if they study things like the Nibelungenlied that have historically been called "Germanic".--Ermenrich (talk) 23:39, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

FWIW, The Oxford Guide to Middle High German (by Jones and Jones, 2019) discusses the broader Germanic linguistic context pretty frequently and even breaks out the phrase Germanic peoples in a few cases when discussing the speakers of, well, ancient Germanic languages (cf. p. 253, p. 340). :bloodofox: (talk) 00:21, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've carefully referred above to a group of cultures, plural; I think we can all agree that assuming simple cultural continuity is problematic. Here's that Texas faculty page: note how many faculty have a background in historical linguistics, including Scandinavian, and the different balance among the emeriti. What you are seeing as movement away from an idea I am (and I think Bloodofox is also) seeing as primarily evidence of retrenchment and dwindling student interest. And as I said above, things are complicated by many courses being assigned to other departments and/or interdisciplinary programs, notably medieval studies and in the UK especially, English, but also including comparative literature, folklore, and classics; partly this is because of the scholarly advantages of synergy, partly it's because of dual appointments to eke together the funding for a faculty position. For one notable example, Cornell's Medieval Studies program is a point of pride there, and its faculty page shows more coverage of the earlier eras of Germanic studies than you gleaned from the German Studies graduate faculty page; as I mentioned, Old Norse has been transferred to Medieval Studies, and so for example Oren Falk is in History and his interests are listed as "medieval, cultural and Norse", and Wayne Harbert, emeritus, is in Linguistics with primary interests in the syntax of Celtic and "older Germanic" languages. Andrew Galloway, in English, starts his focus of interest at Bēowulf. I would not class Erik Born as "dabbling" in Middle High German, here he is again in Medieval Studies; he's no Art Groos, but rather he reflects the modern emphasis on intersections. I'm afraid that in saying Cornell "does not have anyone teaching Germanic studies" you're using the term in a very different way from as the conventional term for an overarching field incorporating many specializations, and for which "Germanic languages and literatures" is not a bad second-best, it just happens to omit much of what I am most interested in. ... Finally, Bloodofox also mentioned Slavic. In the UK and the Republic of Ireland, there's also the relationship with Celtic languages, literature, and culture complicating the picture, as I mentioned with reference to Cambridge.

In response to the question Andrew Lancaster posed below, I am not a folklore specialist and, as in linguistics, many who are are more interested in either theoretical studies or a specific topical issue, but tracing motifs in and between Celtic, Finnic-Altaic, Slavic, mainland Germanic, and Norse traditions continues to be something academics do, and the applications of such studies include the study of Old Norse mythology and religion as well as of early Germanic literature; in pursuit of my interests in Germanic studies, I've read scholarship about heads in wells and groups of three impossible trials as Celtic motifs, about goats in Siberian folk tradition and the goddess Rauni and her possible relationship to Sif, and about columns and oak trees in Irish Celtic and classical tradition in relation to arguments about whether either figured in continental Germanic tradition. So, yes, in some areas of inquiry and to follow some scholars' theories. Yngvadottir (talk) 01:45, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Yngvadottir: I really think the problem here is (and "always" has been) the difficulty of getting a calm discussion about which topics NEED to have their MAIN coverage in this article. IMHO there are one or two such topics only (the Roman era peoples, because "Germani" is not a common English term, and according to normal WP methods, the broad concept should be here too?) but too many other topics which are relevant here are having their MAIN coverage pushed to this article. (While satellite articles that could be proving the viability of those topics, such as Early Germanic culture, and archaeological and linguistic articles, seem to be of no interest to anyone, and are left languishing.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:16, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier: to be clear, one reason for looking into this concept was the implication in some earlier posts that there are Germanic studies sources, so far un-named (except perhaps Grimm) who should be seen as the mainstream when it comes to defining the topic of this article. It was clearly implied that this does not include the Vienna school and the various German and English speaking scholars who either accept Vienna position(s), or something even more critical of the older methodologies for defining early Germanic identity. The un-named Germanic studies scholars you and Yngvadottir are discussing are not matching that description I think? My attempt to understand what people are saying here is that there are scholars who are not notable writers about definitions and methodologies, who still use the older definitions and assumptions? If that's correct then I suggest that no-one is denying the relevance of that to how WP should handle these topics. It does give some challenges. But we need to consider how important it is, for example, to call everything "Germanic". Is it essential to European folklore studies that folklore needs to be designated to a language group such as Romance, Celtic, Slavic, or Germanic for example? (It is not a sarcastic question. That really seems to be one of the positions being put forward?)

My suggestion has been that we should always use wordings which explain what "framework" of terminology is being used in specific articles. I think normally this would be uncontroversial on WP when there are different terminologies being used. This can be done partly by using terminology such as "Germanic (language) speaking" instead of just "Germanic", and in other cases it can be done by mentioning alternative viewpoints, and so on. So to point to the gorilla in the room, the special problem we have had is that these types of solutions are apparently controversial. It is argued that there is too much mention of alternative viewpoints, and too much explanation of how we're handling the scope of topics. Maybe I was just too ham-fisted, or maybe I just did not go far enough and have left things in a compromised situation? OTOH, historically, the article mixed things up more freely, and we continually had people understanding this article to be a topic which included, for example, modern Afrikaners and Luxemburgers (but not Jamaicans).

I can't help wondering how we avoid the return of such problems, especially if we re-merge discussions of early Germanic culture into this article. Some editors interested in those topics apparently prefer to unite an enormous range of topics under an older Grimm-esque definition of the term Germanic, from etymologies of proposed proto-Germanic terms, to much more recent folklore that happens to be found in Germanic-speaking countries. (Ironically though, at least some of those editors accept that the Roman era historical peoples are a different topic which leads to proposals that the Germanic peoples should be pushed out of the Germanic peoples article, leaving room for other topics named after them.)

Note that I did not split out the Early Germanic culture article, but until now that split has not been much objected to. Collectively, the two child articles (this one and that one) contain much that we did not have in July 2019, but no one has yet made any serious attempt to make that article look like a coherent single topic that is justified by mainstream scholarship. I propose that some of the concerns raised in recent days and weeks require us to look at both articles, and also to ask ourselves what we do with material added to them since July 2019.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:16, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

PS, I think older versions of this article and related ones basically contained no full and fair discussion of the Vienna school's ideas about ethnogenesis. I think WP is still basically avoiding them even after the work I've done to get them at least mentioned. I think WP policy implies they should actually be the reference point of what we write on this topic. This also seems to be a "gorilla" we have to deal with when considering what the July 2019 version does not have.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:06, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Under the theory that more editors with less investment in this topic may finally lead to some progress, I'm going to advertise this article's difficulties at the Classical Greece and Rome and the Middle Ages wikiprojects.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:41, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

See here and here.--Ermenrich (talk) 13:49, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A good initiative.--Berig (talk) 14:14, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Great idea, full support! This morning I was tempted to throw in another two *panninganz of mine, but then I thought: "nah". –Austronesier (talk) 20:00, 15 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This comment is made pointedly toward improving the general tone and direction of the article. Above, I suggested that the political aspect of these massive, ongoing discussions that pervade this Talk page should be ever present in contributor's minds. I don't think Wikipedians and the public in general are willing or able to acknowledge the elephant in the room. After two world wars and the attendant racism of the Nazis, it became de rigueur in the anglophone academic universe to distance, disparage, and minimize the concept of a Germanic people. That should be pretty obvious. Before and during WWI, American newspapers published the vilest imaginable depictions of those murderous, rapacious Huns that were ready to enslave us and ravage our women. German-Americans changed their names to sound more English. People didn't want "sauerkraut babies" in their schools. In the period that I've lived through, the post-WWII Cold War era, the depictions continued with regard to the Nazis. A German accent was equivalent to a comedy routine. In the town where I lived, the chief of police refused to hire a fully qualified German immigrant because the citizens would feel uncomfortable being pulled over and "interrogated" by someone with a German accent.

Pursuant to this, it becomes irrelevant what a consensus of scholars believes about the Germanic people, either as a concept or a reality. Such a consensus has highly dubious antecedents. It is time to release the Germanic people from the chains and shackles of being enslaved to a century of two world wars in which Germany, a separate nation, lost twice. It was stated above that everything involved in these discussions is political, but I would caution that if if there are no important distinctions then there is no meaning. If you believe in everything then you believe in nothing. Dynasteria (talk) 07:37, 16 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]