†† “Davon Wood” The name betrays a Germanic origin, though it cannot of course be taken literally, in the modern German sense: besides the fact that we know Broken to have had its own dialect (mainly a mix of Old High German, Gothic, and Middle High German, although at times, as we will see, this can be a gross oversimplification), one finds it unlikely that the place was called “Thereof Forest,” “thereof” being the standard contemporary meaning of davon. But there is a secondary connotation to the modern word that is much more interesting, especially as it seems to have fallen out of use — and would have been more likely, therefore, to have derived from one of the ancient Germanic languages, and thus to have formed a part of the Broken dialect’s vocabulary. That connotation is “therefrom,” suggesting that davon was used to denote a “source” of things, including and perhaps especially evil and dangerous things. When coupled with the use of the word “bane” (see definitions in the note to p. 0), this seems all the more likely.
Judging by its location relative to Broken (assuming that “Broken” and Brocken are indeed the same peak, which seems, as Gibbon says, almost irrefutable), it appears that Davon Wood was simply a different name for the vast Thuringian Forest (as Gibbon concludes in a later note). Its hundreds of square miles of thick, rugged woodland, covering mountains and valleys alike, as well as its sudden and frequent drops into cascading waterways, match the narrator’s description of Davon Wood precisely — or rather, it would have matched it precisely, during the period under discussion (from the fifth to eighth centuries), when the forest was still primeval, and large tracts had not been cleared for lumber and firewood, and afterwards reforested with secondary growth that, while still impressive, does not have the overwhelming dimensions of those portions of the ancient forest that have survived. If we accept the proposition that the Thuringian Forest and “Davon Wood” are one and the same, then we can further conjecture that the mountains which the people of Broken knew as “the Tombs” were the same range that today is known as the Erz, or “Ore,” Mountains. Situated on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic, the Erz contained (as the name makes clear) a wealth of mineral deposits and forbidding, icy passes that conform closely to the narrator’s description of the Tombs. —C.C.
† “marauders” This word, used repeatedly throughout the text, may of course be a generic term for all nomadic tribes; but the emphasis on their appearing from the east, “out of the morning sun,” along with repeated later references to “eastern marauders” who attacked with the sun at their backs in order to blind and confuse their enemies, seems to indicate that it is a term applied primarily to the Huns, who did indeed prefer such avenues of attack — and who, despite their reputation as fearless and undefeatable warriors, may well have elected to bypass a kingdom as relatively small and capable of defending itself as was Broken. — CC.
‡ “… with this limitation, as with so many …” It’s as well to establish early on that this sense of nostalgia on the narrator’s part for the “limitations” of the past fits with the nature of many Barbarian Age Germanic states. The word “barbarian” is often associated, in the popular consciousness, with a warlike, nomadic lifestyle, as well as with undefinable borders and anarchic governments; but the truth (or rather, what little truth we know) is that many if not most of the small, vanished kingdoms of central-northern and northeastern Europe occupied discrete, relatively well-ordered regions. This is particularly true of those kingdoms that, like Broken, retained heavy Gothic influences, although the Goths had long since moved on if, indeed, they had ever actually “invaded,” or were in turn invaded, which is one of those time-honored yet ultimately unproved theories of population migration that has of late been seriously questioned.
The standard notion of what has come to be known as (to use the phrase employed in one of the early twentieth century’s key works on the subject, written by the important if somewhat outdated British historian J.B. Bury) “the barbarian invasion of Europe” may represent less firmly grounded scholarship than it does the culmination of centuries of historical conjecture and pseudo-hagiography among academics across Europe, and even, eventually, in the United States, as well. But the central flaw in this notion of wave upon wave of non-agricultural, raiding tribes — pressed by the need to gain food for their people and forage for their ever-expanding herds of horses and ponies, as well as by a desire for wealth that they could not or did not wish to earn through settled hard work in trading towns and ports — has become suspect, in recent years (just as, during the same period, the supposedly irrefutable truth about the Indians of North America being the true “Native Americans” has been quietly called into question, as evidence of other, older inhabitants has emerged): in fact, the “barbarian hordes” theory may be a piece of propaganda that is far, far older than is that modern term for the deliberate deluding of whole populations. Indeed, it may be an unusually effective bit of fiction that dates back to imperial Rome itself, and especially to the western portion of that empire, which needed an explanation for why their proud legions were regularly repulsed and sometimes overwhelmed by the tribes north of the Danube and east of the Rhine.
Any emperor, much less a commander of a legion, who could allow himself to be fought to a standstill, to say nothing of defeated, by such barbarians would have had a great deal of explaining to do, both to the Roman aristocracy and to the larger group whose acronym the Roman legions bore into battle: “SPQR,” Senatus Populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the people of Rome.” Yet such defeats did occur, from time to time, especially at the hands of the Germanic tribes. In fact, the number of defeats only rose as Rome’s life as a republic became a distant memory and its transformation into an empire was consolidated. It became necessary, therefore, to concoct a more elaborate rationalization than the simple combat superiority of the Germanic tribes; and the theory of wave after wave of “barbarian invaders” may have been cut to fit this need. Such men (and women, too, for Norse and Germanic females often fought alongside the tribes’ male warriors) could be — indeed, had to be — portrayed as the worst of all possible dangers, if the indomitable reputation of the Roman legions was to be maintained on other frontiers. And so those tribes were widely declared to be not only every bit as wily as the leaders of those empires and kingdoms that lay beyond even Persia, but as treacherous as the Egyptians or the Carthaginians, and as savage as the crazed Picts in the northernmost reaches of Britannia — with the added attributes, of course, of being uncanny horsemen and expert seamen. Small wonder, then, that Caesar himself eventually declared that he would not campaign in or try to conquer Germania: to face “the Germans” became akin to engaging a semi-supernatural force, and the generally disastrous encounters that occasionally did take place, if they ended in temporary Roman successes, were characterized by punitive measures against German warriors and civilians alike that were unusually horrifying, even for such ruthless troops as the imperial Roman legions.
This inflation of an enemy in order to explain defeat or disaster is hardly an unprecedented or a unique tactic in world military history; indeed, it is all too common when governments need to rationalize not only failure but the enormous expenditures of blood and treasure that usually accompany such failures, as well as the cost of constantly manning a hostile frontier that ensues. The somewhat distinguishing feature, in the case of Broken, is that it was governed, not by the usual Germanic tribal elective monarchy, with its communal systems of farming and hunting, but by a theocratic hereditary monarchy in which property was held by specific individuals and families according to wealth and to rank that was determined by faithfulness to the kingdom’s deity, Kafra, and his representative in this life, the God-King. These were all attributes that tended to heighten the kingdom’s already strong (even by Germanic standards) tendency to exist in and defend its own form of exceptionalism and splendid isolation from the outside world. But the overriding point, here, is that the history of Broken’s not having fit into the larger story of the “barbarian invasions” of Europe may have been a fact less rooted in Broken’s never having existed than in the very strong possibility — most strongly put forward, in recent years, by Michael Kulikowski, in his recent and seminal account of “Rome’s Gothic Wars”—that the warriors the Romans faced when they crossed into Germania were fearsome precisely because they did not represent violent hordes from the exotic East, but rather because they were the longstanding inhabitants of those lands, as brave as the Romans and more determined to defend their homelands than the legions were to conquer them. The logical conclusion of all these considerations — that there was a limit to Roman military and imperial power — was a notion that the great empire simply could not see propagated; and so any reference to the kingdom of Broken, whether during Western Rome’s pagan imperial centuries, or during its early Christian era, was excised, explaining why we find no direct reference to it in the ancient annals of Roman history. —C.C.