[Patrick Fermor hiked the length of the Danube when he was 17 in1934. The first of his memoirs of this journey was published in 1977]
A falcon, beating its
wings above an unwary heron half way up the northern bend, would command
the same view of the river as mine.*
I had climbed to the ruins of Aggstein unnecessarily steeply, as I had strayed from the
marked pathway- and halted among the battlements of the keep to get my breath
back. This gap-toothed hold of the Kunringers teems with horrible tales; but I
scrambled up there for a different reason. The polymath's talk, two nights before, had made me long to
look down this particular reach.
There is nothing more absorbing than maps of tribal wanderings. How vaguely and slowly nations float about! Lonely as clouds, overlapping and changing places, they waltz and reverse round each other at a pace so slow as to be almost stationary or work their expanding way across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew. What a relief it is when some outside event, with an actual date attached to it, jerks the whole sluggishly creeping osmotic complex into action!
There is nothing more absorbing than maps of tribal wanderings. How vaguely and slowly nations float about! Lonely as clouds, overlapping and changing places, they waltz and reverse round each other at a pace so slow as to be almost stationary or work their expanding way across the map as imperceptibly as damp or mildew. What a relief it is when some outside event, with an actual date attached to it, jerks the whole sluggishly creeping osmotic complex into action!
As I mentioned earlier that we- or rather, the polymath - had talked about the
Marcomanni and the Quadi** who had lived north of the river here about. The
habitat of the Marcommani lay a little further west; the Quadi dwelt exactly
where we were sitting. "Yes." he had said, "things were more or
less static for a while. . ."
He illustrated this with a pencil-stub on the back of the Neuse Freie Presse. A
long sweep represented the Danube; a row of buns indicated the races that had settled along the
banks; then he filled in the outlines of eastern Europe. " . .
. and suddenly, at last", he said, "something happens!" An
enormous arrow enters the picture on the right, and bore down on the riverside
buns. "The Huns arrive! Everything starts changing place at full
speed!" His pencil leaped feverishly into action. The buns put forth their
own arrows of migration and began coiling sinuously about the paper till
Mitteleuropea and the Balkans were alive with demon's tails. "Chaos! The
Visigoths take shelter south of the lower Danube, and defeat the Emperor Valens
at Adrianople, here!", he
twisted the lead on the paper - "in 476. Then - in only a couple of
decades" - a great loop of
pencil swept round the tip of the Adriatic and descended a swiftly-outlined Italy - the pace of his
delivery reminded me of a sports commentator - "we get Alaric! Rome is captured! The Empire splits in two -" West
totters on for half a century or so. But the Visigoths are headed
westward," an arrow curved to the left and looped into France, which
rapidly took shape, followed by the Iberian peninsula. "Go West, young
Goth!, " he murmured as his pencil threw off the Visigoth kingdoms across France and Spain at dizzy speed,
"There we are!" he said; then, as an afterthought, he absentmindedly
penciled in an oval across northern Portugal and Galicia, and I asked him what
it was. "The Suevi, same as
the Swabians, more or less: part of the whole movement. But now," he went on, "here go the Vandals!" A few vague lines from what looked like
Slovakia ad Hungary joined together and then swept west in a broad bar that
mounted the Danube and advanced into Germany.. "Over the Rhine in 406;
then clean across Gaul - " here the speed of his pencil tore a ragged furrow
across the paper "- through the Pyrenees three years later - here they
come! then down into Andalusia - hence the name - and hop! -" the pencil skipped the imaginary straits of Gibraltar
and began rippling eastwards again "- along the north African coast
to" - he improvised the coast as he went, then stopped with a large black
blob - "Carthage! And all in
thirty-three years from start to finish!"
His pencil got busy again, I asked him the meaning of all the dotted lines he had started sending out from Carthage into the Mediterranean. "Those are Genseric's fleets, making a nuisance of themselves. Here he goes, sacking Rome in 455! There was lots of sea activity just about then." Swooping to the top of the sheet, he drew a coast, a river's mouth and a peninsula: "That's the Elbe, there's Jutland." Then, right away in the left hand corner, an acute angle appeared, and above it, a curve like an ample rump; Kent and East Anglia, I was told. In a moment, from the Elbe's mouth, showers of dots were curving down on them. "- and there go your ancestors, the first Angles and Saxons, pouring into Britain only a couple of years before Genseric sacked Rome." Close to the Saxon shore, he inserted two tadpole figures among the invading dots: What were they? Hengist and Horsa," he said, and refilled our glasses.
This was the way to be taught history! It was just about now that a second bottle of Langenlois appeared. His survey had only taken about five minutes; but we had left the Marcommani and the Quadi far behind. . . The polymath laughed. "I forgot about them in the excitement! There's no problem about the Marcommani," he said. "They crossed the river and became Bayuvars - and the Bayuvars are the Bavarians - I've got a Markoman grandmother. But the Quadi! There are plenty of mentions of them in Roman history. Then, all of a sudden - none! They vanished just . . ."about the time Vandals drive westward. . ." They probably went along with them too, he explained, as part of the slipstream . . . "A whole nation shimmering upstream like elvers -not that there are any eels in the Danube," he interrupted himself parenthetically, on a different note. "Not native ones, unfortunately: only visitors - suddenly, the forests are empty. But, as nature hates a vacuum, not for long. A new swarm takes their place. Enter the Rugii, all the way from southern Sweden!" There was no room on the Neue Freie Presse, so he shifted a glass and drew the tip of Scandinavia on the scrubbed table top. "This is the Baltic Sea, and here they come." A diagram like the descent of a jellyfish illustrated their itinerary. By the middle the fifth century they were all settled along the left bank of the Middle Danube - if 'settled' is the word - they were all such fidgets. I'd never heard of the Rugii. "But expect you've heard of Odoaker? He was a Rugian." The name, pronounced in the German way, did suggest something. There were hints of historical twilight in the syllables, something momentous and gloomy . . . but what? Inklings began to flicker.
His pencil got busy again, I asked him the meaning of all the dotted lines he had started sending out from Carthage into the Mediterranean. "Those are Genseric's fleets, making a nuisance of themselves. Here he goes, sacking Rome in 455! There was lots of sea activity just about then." Swooping to the top of the sheet, he drew a coast, a river's mouth and a peninsula: "That's the Elbe, there's Jutland." Then, right away in the left hand corner, an acute angle appeared, and above it, a curve like an ample rump; Kent and East Anglia, I was told. In a moment, from the Elbe's mouth, showers of dots were curving down on them. "- and there go your ancestors, the first Angles and Saxons, pouring into Britain only a couple of years before Genseric sacked Rome." Close to the Saxon shore, he inserted two tadpole figures among the invading dots: What were they? Hengist and Horsa," he said, and refilled our glasses.
This was the way to be taught history! It was just about now that a second bottle of Langenlois appeared. His survey had only taken about five minutes; but we had left the Marcommani and the Quadi far behind. . . The polymath laughed. "I forgot about them in the excitement! There's no problem about the Marcommani," he said. "They crossed the river and became Bayuvars - and the Bayuvars are the Bavarians - I've got a Markoman grandmother. But the Quadi! There are plenty of mentions of them in Roman history. Then, all of a sudden - none! They vanished just . . ."about the time Vandals drive westward. . ." They probably went along with them too, he explained, as part of the slipstream . . . "A whole nation shimmering upstream like elvers -not that there are any eels in the Danube," he interrupted himself parenthetically, on a different note. "Not native ones, unfortunately: only visitors - suddenly, the forests are empty. But, as nature hates a vacuum, not for long. A new swarm takes their place. Enter the Rugii, all the way from southern Sweden!" There was no room on the Neue Freie Presse, so he shifted a glass and drew the tip of Scandinavia on the scrubbed table top. "This is the Baltic Sea, and here they come." A diagram like the descent of a jellyfish illustrated their itinerary. By the middle the fifth century they were all settled along the left bank of the Middle Danube - if 'settled' is the word - they were all such fidgets. I'd never heard of the Rugii. "But expect you've heard of Odoaker? He was a Rugian." The name, pronounced in the German way, did suggest something. There were hints of historical twilight in the syllables, something momentous and gloomy . . . but what? Inklings began to flicker.
Hence my ascent to this ruin. For it was Odoacer, the first
barbarian king after the eclipse of the last Roman Emperor. ("Romulus Augustulus!"
the polymath said. What a name!
Poor chap, he was very good looking, it seems, and only sixteen." )
Behind the little town of Aggsbach Markt on the other bank,
the woods which had once teemed with Rugians rippled away in a fleece of
tree-tops. Odoacer came from a point on the north bank only ten miles
downstream. He dressed in skins, but he may have been a chieftain's son, even a
king's son. He enlisted as a legionary, and at the age of forty-two he was at
the head of a winning immigrant clique in control of the Empire's ruins, and
finally King. After the preceding imperial phantoms, his fourteen years' reign
seemed - humiliating to the Romans - an improvement. It was not a sudden night at all, but an afterglow, rather,
of a faintly lighter hue and lit
with glimmers of good government and even of justice. When Theodoric replaced
him (by slicing him in half with a broadsword from the collar-bone to the loins
at a banquet in Ravenna) it was still not absolutely the end of Roman civilization.
Not quite; for the great Ostrogoth was the patron of Cassiodorus and of
Boethius, "the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have
acknowledged for their countryman." But he slew them both and then died of
remorse; and the Dark Ages has come, with nothing but candles and plainsong
left to lighten the shadows. "Back to the start," as the polymath had
put it "and lose ten centuries."
Grim thoughts for a cloudless morning.
Grim thoughts for a cloudless morning.
*the Danube just above Vienna
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