Who are the Langbards?
Very simply, they were a group of people who, over hundreds of years, moved from northern Europe down to what is now Hungary and thence into Italy. The only certain date we have for this migration is their arrival in Italy in 568 CE (though some of them had been there before, and some may have stayed there after earlier visit, so arriving slightly earlier than the main body of the Langbards). They were a composite people, built up over hundreds of years of fighting and winning battles with other peoples, which they absorbed into their own human mass by means of a form of serfdom and through subsequent emancipation into the wider community. They called themselves the Langbards, and their language was Germanic, and though not enough of it survives to be completely sure, it was most likely West Germanic. They represent a kind of human snowball rolling slowly but ever more powerfully through Europe over hundreds of years, until its mass and momentum were sufficient to invade a land as large and as sought after as Italy (though they never really held the entire peninsula, they did hold most of it.) Once there, they established a Kingdom that lasted until it fell to Charlemagne in the year 774, so roughly 200 years. During most of that time, the administrative capital was Pavia, just south of Milan in what is now appropriately called Lombardy (see the naming issue below), and the royal palace here was the habitual residence for most of the kings. I say “here”, because I live in Pavia.
Paul the Deacon Fanfiction – oral re-telling, from memory
Let’s be clear about this: all stories are, in some way or another, fanfiction, like it or not. Dante from Virgil, Virgil from Homer, and I don’t know Homer’s direct inspiration, but of course he had it. So, let me be completely honest and upfront about this: in creating these oral stories I’m drawing in a huge way upon an Early Medieval Latin history by a proud Langbard and devout Benedictine monk, Paul the Deacon. His work is called Historia Langobardorum (History of the Langbards).
Scholars have always hotly debated its origins and nature. Is it a condensed version, in Latin, of Germanic oral history, perhaps alliterative sagas? Is it simply a rehash of diverse written sources, many of which have been lost? Is it a mix of history and Paul’s own imagination? Was it written with a personal, or perhaps political agenda shaping the stories?
Now, I don’t presume to know the answers, and believe no one ever will, short of inventing a time-machine. If you ask for my personal opinion, I would say it is a blend of all of these explanations, but with a preponderance of the first: in other words, much of it (and perhaps all of the really memorable narrative passages) are condensed versions, in Latin, of Germanic oral history, likely originally in the form of alliterative sagas. Why do I think that? For a totally un-historical, un-scientific, but nevertheless very good reason.
I have told a few fragments of Paul the Deacon’s stories orally several hundred times over a ten year period, as Master History Walker of The Original History Walks® of the Cultural Association Il Mondo di Tels, Pavia. Essentially, in the context of educational walking tours of Pavia, for school kids, I have verbally recounted some parts of Paul’s stories that relate to the city. During History Walks, I have also recounted some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales several hundred times, too, and many other stories besides. I think all guides and storytellers know what I mean when I say that, after you tell a story many, many times, you settle into a way of telling it that suits the oral medium. It is very different to simply reading from a book (especially reading from a guidebook!) You subtly rearrange things so that someone who is listening, without any visual aid like a presentation or a poster, can follow and enjoy the story you are telling. As a professional oral storyteller, I’ve done this many times. With the narrative fragments of Paul the Deacon’s stories, it just isn’t necessary. They are already in the perfect form for oral storytelling. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence. They are, in my un-provable and unscientific opinion, a translation into Latin of an established oral tradition that was alive and well in his time.
Paul hints at the existence of a wider body of song and oral storytelling several times. Here is a telling example, from the end of Book I of his History, talking about the heroic king Alboin who first led his people into Italy:
But the name of Alboin was spread far and wide, so illustrious, that even up to this time his noble bearing and glory, the good fortune of his wars and his courage are celebrated, not only among the Bavarians and Saxons, but also among other men of the same tongue in their songs.[1]
However, and this is fundamental to my project, I am also pretty sure that Paul severely edited the stories, cutting out elements that in some way offended his Christian faith or simply his sense of what was appropriate to a history. There are two main reasons why I think this. The first is the character of Gambara. She appears to be a seeress, and a kind of legendary mother of the Langbard people, and her story is the first that Paul tells. She has two sons with alliterative names (a common element in many Germanic origin stories) and she interacts with the goddess Fream (Frigg/Freya) in a way that corresponds with what is generally understood about early Germanic seeresses. However, Paul tells her (pagan) story almost unwillingly, introducing it as ‘a ridiculous tale told by the ancients’, and tells it in a compressed and abridged form. How do we know it is compressed and abridged? Because the same tale is, fortunately, told in another key Langbard document, attached as a kind of prelude to Rothair’s Edict, a book containing the law code published in Pavia in 643 CE. Here it is in a more complete, detailed, and narratively satisfying form. This, to me, makes it plain that Paul abridged the stories where he found pagan elements he did not agree with. I also believe he cut out other important stories altogether, because they did not correspond to his idea of what constitutes history. For example, the Hildebrandslied is an alliterative heroic song that linguists believe originated in Langbard Italy in the 7th century or before, and was then told in other Germanic lands in translations and variants. The Song of Hildebrand survives as a fragment, that appears to relate to the corpus of sagas and songs built around the court of Gothic King Theodoric/Theudereik/Dietrich von Bern. That would be appropriate, because Theodoric conquered and ruled Italy with his Goths before the Langbards arrived, and the Langbard kings resided in the palace Theodoric built in Pavia, where Paul the Deacon, incidentally, studied as a young man. Here’s the thing: Paul himself makes no mention of Hildebrand, and does not recount his tragic tale. I guess it didn’t fit in with his history. Therefore I believe he selected specific tales from a broader corpus of oral storytelling, and most likely abridged them until they could fit into a history written in good conscience by a devout Christian monk.
So, what I am doing is this: based on Paul the Deacon’s narrative, but integrated with related folk-tales from Lombardy/Italy, or with related folkloric and literary elements drawn from across the Germanic traditions, trying to recreate an oral history not as I think it was told in reality (that is forever lost to us), but at the very least with a spirit and atmosphere akin to the way it was told in reality. To attempt to achieve this, I am not writing the stories down until they are finished. So, the entire creative process happens orally and mnemonically, normally during walks I take in the countryside around Pavia, where I live, or while I iron or do similar menial tasks. I literally tell/sing the stories to myself, many times, until they settle into a form I am satisfied with, part alliterative, part prose, part song, and then I record them, and only then do I write down the result. My goal is to achieve something akin to the atmosphere and style of the oral storytellers upon whom Paul based the narrative portions of his History.
Why Langbards? (and not Lombards, Longobards, Longobardi, Langobardi, Longbeards, Heaðobards…)
Well, the name literally means Longbeards. You will find them in most encyclopedias as Lombards, sometimes qualified as the Ancient Lombards. The trouble with using the word Lombards is that the modern inhabitants of Lombardy, Italy, are also Lombards. And they have very little in common, except a geographical home, with the people in these stories. Paul the Deacon calls them in Latin Langobardi, specifically stating that in their own language Lang = Long and Bard = Beard. The ‘O’ in the middle of Langobardus is required by Latin phonetics, and probably wasn’t part of the original word. The declined endings after the ‘D’ are required by Latin grammar, so what we are left with is Langbard. Of course, we could call them Longbeards, and be done with. But that would, I feel, reduce the mystical, mythical feel surrounding a name which, as you will discover in Gambara’s Spell, has divine origins. Heaðobards is a probable Old English variant, found in Beowulf and the Widsith, but is too distant from what they called themselves, and from what most people call them today… so Langbards it is.
Why Spells?
I confess to being one of those people who actually read dictionaries for pleasure. I admit it here and now, I spend more time reading dictionaries than I do novels or stories. My favourite is called www.etymonline.com, an etymological dictionary of the English language. I was looking for a word that could have had a similar meaning for those ancient people who were ancestors of both the Langbards and me (I am Australian of majority English descent). Tale was too connotated with certain historical literary models, particularly The Canterbury Tales, and also implied something spoken or written and not sung (at least to my ears). Story is of Latin origin… What about spell?
spell (n.1)
Old English spell “story, saying, tale, history, narrative, fable; discourse, command,” from Proto-Germanic *spellam (see spell (v.1)). Compare Old Saxon spel, Old Norse spjall, Old High German spel, Gothic spill “report, discourse, tale, fable, myth;” German Beispiel “example.” From c. 1200 as “an utterance, something said, a statement, remark;” meaning “set of words with supposed magical or occult powers, incantation, charm” first recorded 1570s; hence any means or cause of enchantment.
Yes! It has the right meaning to describe what I want to do, existed in Proto-Germanic, the language presumably spoken by those ancestors I mentioned, and today it also has associations with causing magic to occur through song, which was something very real for the Langbards, as you will discover listening to these tales.
The tales abound with wars, cruelty, bloodshed, shape-shifting, omens, prophecies, drugs and hallucinations, strong female characters, poison, gods, music, wonders, magic… There is even a dragon at one point. So, please listen on if you think this is your cup of tea.
Come, sit in the warm and listen well,
As I sing and speak a Langbard spell…
[1] Alboin vero ita praeclarum longe lateque nomen percrebuit, ut hactenus etiam tam apud Baioariorum gentem quamque et Saxonum, sed et alios eiusdem linguae homines eius liberalitas et gloria bellorumque felicitas et virtus in eorum carminibus celebretur.
Paul the Deacon, Historia Langobardorum, Book I, Chapter XXVII. English translation by William Dudley Foulke (Ed. Edward Peters, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003