The origin of the Germans

The Bagratids of Armenia are speculated to have been an offshoot of the Orontid Dynasty, Achaemenid satraps and, later, kings of Armenia (c 400 – c 200 BC). They had their original appanage in Bagrevand in historic north-central Armenia and claimed their descent from a solar deity Angl-Thork, the tutelary god of the Orontids, until their conversion to Christianity. Thereafter, this claim was abandoned in favor of the mythical ancestor of the Armenians, Hayk.

The Bagratid god Angl-Thork definitely reminds of the Angles and the Thuringians. The early inhabitants of Thuringia were a German tribe called Hermunduri; about A.D. 420 they became known as Thuringians. The Thuringii may have been the descendants of the Hermunduri. Angl-Thork was the god of the proto-Thuringians, since it was an Armenian god while Hermes was a depiction of Armenia. In fact, Angl-Thork was the god firstly of the Yervand dynasty of Armenia, and the Hermes cult at mount Herman was in particular of the Yervand dynasty (one colossal key to unlocking the dragon cult’s codewords).

The Thuringii or Toringi were a Germanic tribe which appeared late during the Völkerwanderung in the Harz Mountains of central Germania around 280, in a region which still bears their name to this day — Thuringia. They evidently filled a void left when the previous inhabitants — the Alamanni — migrated south to the region named after them, Alemannia. They may have been remnants of the Alemannic confederation, or simply another lesser tribe. Some have suggested that they were the remnants of the Hermanduri, that last part of whose name (-duri) was corrupted (-thuri) and afterwards suffixed with -ing, meaning “descendants of (the [Herman]duri)”.

The Hermunduri, Hermanduri, Hermunduli, Hermonduri, or Hermonduli were an ancient Germanic tribe, who occupied the area around what is now Thuringia, Bohemia, Saxony (in East Germany), and Franconia in northern Bavaria, from the first to the third century.

Pliny the elder, in his Historia Naturalis, lists the Hermunduri as one of the nations of the Hermiones, all descended from the same line of descent from Mannus. In the same category he places the Chatti, Cherusci, and Suevi.

The Irminones, also referred to as Herminones or Hermiones, were a group of early Germanic tribes settling in the Elbe watershed and by the 1st century AD expanding into Bavaria, Swabia and Bohemia. Irminonic or Elbe Germanic is a conventional term grouping early West Germanic dialects ancestral to High German.

The name Irminones or Hermiones comes from Tacitus’s Germania (98 AD) who categorized them as one of the tribes of descended from Mannus, and noted that they lived in the interior of Germany. Other Germanic groups of tribes were the Ingvaeones, living on the coast, and Istvaeones, who account for the rest. Tacitus also mentions the Suebi, as a large grouping which include the Semnones, the Quadi and the Marcomanni, but he does not say precisely which (if any) of the three nations they belong to.

Pomponius Mela writes in his Description of the World (III.3.31) in reference to the Kattegat and the waters surrounding the Danish isles (see the Codanus sinus): “On the bay are the Cimbri and the Teutoni; farther on, the farthest people of Germania, the Hermiones.” Mela then begins to speak of the Scythians.

Pliny’s Natural History (4.100) claims that the Irminones include the Suebi, Hermunduri, Chatti, and Cherusci.

Mannus is a Germanic mythological figure attested by the 1st century AD Roman historian Tacitus in his work Germania. Mannaz is the conventional name of the m-rune ᛗ of the Elder Futhark. It is derived from the reconstructed Common Germanic word for “man”, mannaz.

The name of this deity means human or man (as in Homo sapiens). It stems from the same root as the Indian Manu, progenitor of humanity, first holy king to rule this earth who saves mankind and the Vedas and the priesthood from the universal flood.

In Nennius the name Mannus and his three sons appear in corrupted form. The names of the three sons of Mannus can be extrapolated as Ingui, Irmin, and Istaev aka Iscio. According to Tacitus, Mannus is the son of Tuisto and the progenitor of the three Germanic tribes Ingaevones, Herminones and Istvaeones.

In the Eddas, Mannus seems to most closely resemble Heimdall (World’s Brightness). In the opening passage of the Voluspa, men are referred to as being Heimdall’s kin, while in the poem Rigsthula he is shown uniting each of the hierarchal ranks in siblinghood. Furthermore, while Mannus is remembered as being the father of both Odin and Frey, Heimdall is remembered as being one of the Aesir, but also to have qualities directly linked to the Vanir and to exist in a close paternal relationship to Freyja.

In Eddaic Creation, Mannus occupies the same stead as Borr, ie. a god (Tuisto, Buri), begets a god (Mannus, Borr), begets a trio of brother gods (Ing-Irmin-Istaev, Odin-Vili-Ve). Borr or Burr (Old Norse: ‘son’; sometimes anglicized Bor, Bör or Bur) was the son of Búri, the husband of Bestla, and the father of Odin and his brothers in Norse mythology.

The role of Borr in Norse mythology is unclear. 19th century German scholar Jacob Grimm proposed to equate Borr with Mannus as related in Tacitus’ Germania on the basis of the similarity in their functions in Germanic theogeny.

19th century Icelandic scholar and archaeologist Finnur Magnússon hypothesized that Borr was “intended to signify […] the first mountain or mountain-chain, which it was deemed by the forefathers of our race had emerged from the waters in the same region where the first land made its appearance. This mountain chain is probably the Caucasus, called by the Persians Borz (the genitive of the Old Norse Borr). Bör’s wife, Belsta or Bestla, a daughter of the giant Bölthorn (spina calamitosa), is possibly the mass of ice formed on the alpine summits.”

In his Lexicon Mythologicum, published four years later, he modified his theory to claim that Borr symbolized the earth, and Bestla the ocean, which gave birth to Odin as the “world spirit” or “great soul of the earth”

Tacitus (Germania, chapter 2): “In ancient lays, their only type of historical tradition, they celebrate Tuisto, a god brought forth from the earth. They attribute to him a son, Mannus, the source and founder of their people, and to Mannus three sons, from whose names those nearest the Ocean are called Ingvaeones, those in the middle Herminones, and the rest Isvaeones. Some people, inasmuch as antiquity gives free rein to speculation, maintain that there were more sons born from the god and hence more tribal designations – Marsi, Gambrivii, Suebi, and Vandilii – and that those names are genuine and ancient.”

In the Eddas we find the name Yngvi applied to the god FreyR, while the same source lists Jormun (the Old Norse cognate of Irmin) as a byname of Odin’s. Widukind of Corvey further identifies the deity associated with the Saxon Irminsul as Hermin, that is, Hermes, but worshipped as Mars. Nothing factual can be said of “Istvae”.

The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic.[1] Their exact relation is difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, and they remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, so that some individual varieties are difficult to classify. Dialects with the features assigned to the western group formed from Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture (ca. 1st century BC).

The ancestor of the Irminones appearing as Armenon. His sons here are Gothus, Valagothus/Balagothus, Cibidus, Burgundus, and Longobardus, whence come the Goths (and Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Crimean Goths), Valagoths/Balagoths, Cibidi, Burgundians and Lombards (Langobards).

They may have differentiated into the tribes Alamanni, Hermunduri, Marcomanni, Quadi, Suebi by the 1st century AD. At this time the Suebi, Marcomanni and Quadi had moved southwest into the area of modern day Bavaria and Swabia. In 8 BC, the Marcomanni and Quadi drove the Boii out of Bohemia.

The term Suebi is usually applied to all the groups that moved into this area, though later in history (c. 200 AD) the term Alamanni (meaning “all-men”) became more commonly applied to the group.

Jǫrmun, the Viking Age Norse form of the name Irmin, can be found in a number of places in the Poetic Edda as a by name for Odin. This pans with both the historical circumstances of the Irminones in relationship to Rome, Widukind’s confusion over whether Irmin was comparable to Mars or Hermes, and with Snorri Sturluson’s allusions at the beginning of his Prose Edda; that Odin’s cult appeared first in Germany and then spread up into the Ingaevonic North.

The Ingaevones or, as Pliny has it, apparently more accurately, Ingvaeones (“people of Yngvi”), as described in Tacitus’s Germania, written c. 98 CE, were a West Germanic cultural group living along the North Sea coast in the areas of Jutland, Holstein, Frisia and the Danish islands, where they had by the 1st century BCE become further differentiated to a foreigner’s eye into the Frisii, Saxons, Jutes and Angles. The postulated common group of closely related dialects of the Ingvaeones is called Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic.

The Istvaeones, also called Istaevones, Istriaones, Istriones, Sthraones, and Thracones, were a Germanic tribal grouping in the 1st century CE. The West Germanic languages constitute today the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish.