Guy Halsall

“I twitch every time anyone mentions ‘Germanic’ culture.”

“[T]he writing of history is inescapably political, my aim is partly to provide a basis for a more politically and ethically responsible intervention by historians in modern political debate about migration.”

“The recent use of scientific (or pseudo-scientific) methodologies to examine migration has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ (from excavated material) or ‘modern’ samples (from living populations), is being used to track migration. The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’ objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth- century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’.”

“[I'm] (probably) the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of 60 anywhere in the world... [T]hat's not (just) me being cocky, but a pretty sober assessment of the range and quality of my work.”

“Historians are not immune from similarly bizarre reasoning, of course. The counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking about the fifth century has been led by British historians from Oxford. Peter Heather has repeatedly deployed the notion that, because wagons, women and children are occasionally mentioned in sources concerning the barbarians, the barbarians must have been ‘peoples’ on the move... Such are the weakness and double-standards of the arguments in favour of the traditional narrative. You can list many more.”

“There can be no question of a general overriding ‘Germanic’ or ‘Celtic’ identity amongst the different barbarian groups. Shared language might have facilitated communication and alliance but there is no evidence for or reason to suppose a higher level of ethnic identity on this basis.”

“The problems of Germanism have long been recognised. Alas, entirely analogous developments are currently taking place, also in the course of modern political movements, with the ‘Celts’. It is presently more fashionable and acceptable to talk of the ‘Celtic’ peoples as sharing a unified culture so that evidence from one area (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall or Brittany) can be transferred unproblematically to the elucidation of another, sometimes regardless of chronological context. This is no more acceptable than Germanism.”

“In the reinterpretation of ‘Germanic’ archaeology I have benefited from discussions with, and the encouragement of fellow-subversives... vive la re´volution!”