The Origo Gentis Theme — the literary examination of the origins of a given people, which in the Germanic context is the theme of this chapter — does not constitute a literary genre in its own right, but is found in connection with various different genres to produce what is in fact a genus mixtum, which conveys details of the origins of a particular people by using various narrative patterns. Examples of the origo gentis may be found in heroic epics, may introduce or form part of ethnographic works, chronicles, biographies and legends, or may even be used in official writings either as justificatory support or as a learned excursus or digression. An origo gentis will often introduce the historia, a genre developed in particular by the Christian historian Paulus Orosius in the early fifth century, and characterized as “an exemplary Christian history of kings and institutions.” The models are the Old Testament and classical ethnographical writings.5 The story of Noah and his three sons, who represent the three continents, and their seventy-two descendants is particularly popular, as are Caesar’s ethnographical discussions, the Germania and the Agricola of Tacitus, and indeed also Virgil’s Aeneid, whose hero is the son-in-law of Priam, who had fifty sons and fifty daughters. The few members of the family who survived the capture of Troy were forced to travel the world and found new cities and peoples everywhere. Why should there not be a Franco, the father of the Franks, among them, if there was certainly an Aeneas, the founder of Rome.

The Germania of Tacitus follows a tripartite pattern that became a model for other writings. It contains first the origin of a people, an origo (as a pars prototo in the Getica 9 and 315). In contrast with the notion of a beginning sprung from the word, the logos of John’s Gospel, the “mythical” beginning of an origo gentis is subordinated to the concept of eternal return, and always takes as read any earlier beginnings. Thus the origo Amalorum, the origins of the Gothic Amal dynasty in the Getica begins in the middle of the genealogy of the A(n)ses. The Lombards have a Scandinavian prehistory (Paul the Deacon, I, 7–9). The Bohemian House of Premysl are the inheritors of Libussa, who had two elder sisters and a father named Crocco (Cosmas, I, 3).