We live in an age of economic migration, asylum-seeking and the fears to which such things give rise. Hence the need to remind all would-be builders of ‘fortress Europe’ that we Europeans are ourselves merely the flotsam and jetsam of successive ‘barbarian’ tides. Hence the importance of acknowledging, in a field so politically sensitive, that much of what we know of the emergence of the post-Roman world comes to us, long after the dust had settled, from writers such as Isidore, Jordanes or Bede, each with their own particular tribal axes to grind. Those inclined to consider such accounts literal have on the whole been dismissed as naïve, or at worst openly racist. Even a willingness to seek out a modicum of remembered truth from such ‘legends’ courts controversy, as does the search for a Traditionskern, or nucleus of tradition, around which ‘tribal’ identities coalesced. Not surprisingly, given the past century’s tragic sonderweg, this is a debate, all too often a slanging match, in which German identities and the work of Germanic historians have been exposed to particularly close scrutiny. To name merely a few of this circus’s better-known funambulists, since the 1970s, Herwig Wolfram, Walter Goffart, Walter Pohl and, from the Anglophone sidelines, Patrick Geary and Susan Reynolds, have each walked the high-wire, without fatal accident, yet to less than universal acclaim. Indeed, as the nineteen essays collected here reveal, consensus remains as remote today as it did fifty years ago. Most of these essayists take it for granted that what Geary termed ‘The myth of nations’ is indeed best treated as a series of mythologising, literary devices, to be deconstructed according to the particular impulses or intentions of their various authors. Thus Gregory of Tours was chiefly concerned not with the origin of the Franks, but with the legitimate claims to authority of his own cathedral city and diocese (the essay here by Andrew Rabin), and thereafter with the Christian destiny of a kingdom for which, in Gregory’s eyes, tribal origins mattered far less than Church and adherence to Catholic orthodoxy (Helmut Reimitz, splendidly summarising his 2015 book on Frankish identity, itself cited in the bibliographies to a further dozen of these essays). On the Visigoths or Ostrogoths, both Jordanes and Isidore of Seville wrote with polemical intent: Isidore to contradict the Byzantine rejection of the Goths as heretic scourge (the essay by Erica Buchberger), Jordanes to dash whatever hopes might have been raised by Procopius and others in Constantinople that the Goths would sooner or later simply abandon Italy and return to their northern ‘homeland’ (a fine essay by Robert Kasperski, building on earlier insights by Goffart). Writing two centuries later, on the emergence of the Lombards, Paul the Deacon was likewise determined to prove both their antiquity and their by now securely established orthodoxy: a people, whatever their pagan origins, older even than Aeneas or Romulus, now seeking honour and recognition within Carolingian Italy (Marios Costambeys, noting the irony that by this time it was Jordanes and their written ‘history’ that in many ways had become the Goths’ most enduring Italian legacy). Tropes prominent here (in essays by Helen Fulton, Robert Rix and Thomas Charles-Edwards) include the myths of migration from alternatively Trojan (Francia, Britain), Scythian (Goths, Lombardy, Ireland) or Scandinavian ‘homelands’, with Rix particularly useful on the pagan ‘otherness’ and hence martial prowess invoked by those referencing the far north (Jordanes, Paul the Deacon, later the ‘Passio S. Sigismundi’ on the Burgundians, Widukind on the Saxons, or Dudo on the Normans). As Rix reminds us, around the time of his imperial coronation in 800, Charlemagne commanded the removal of a statue of Theoderic from Ravenna for display in Aachen: the deliberate appropriation of Gothic northerness by a ruler himself aspiring to distinctly northern virtues. Thomas Charles-Edwards’s essay, not for the faint-hearted, reveals the linguistic rather than racial origins claimed for the Irish diaspora, first from Nimrod’s Tower of Babel, thereafter via Scythian and Spanish wanderings ever further westwards. Hence the author’s delight in the irony that this supposed ‘history’, so much of it absurdly mythical, in fact very closely mirrors the realities of seventh-century Ireland, following the Battle of Mag Roth and the emergence of the kingdom of Tara: this myth itself regularly rewritten thereafter, again to reflect historical realities in Munster, Leinster or other provincial polities. Turning to the Viking settlement of Iceland and the Orkneys, Judith Jesch likewise looks to the contemporary concerns of those who wrote Íslendingabók, Landnámabók and the Orkneyinga saga, for an explanation of why their accounts differ so widely, not least, in the case of the Saga and the Landnámabók, as reflections of the Norwegian ‘tyranny’ imposed first on the Orkneys (by 1200), and thereafter Iceland (from the 1260s onwards). Further tropes, such as the idea of a ‘New Jerusalem’, or ‘New Troy’, are then taken up by Conor O’Brien (cleverly cheese-paring, contesting the assumption that there was any single ‘New Jerusalem’ motif to which writers might aspire) and Michael Clarke (dealing with much later medieval appropriation of Trojan motifs, not least in the Burgundian identification with the Golden Fleece, itself symbolic of the curse placed by Jason on Trojan pride, and hence a warning to all latter-day Troys, from Valois Paris to Sforza Milan, that pride and lust would topple even the best-built towers). Elsewhere Shami Ghosh invites us to accept his not entirely surprising conclusion that, in early medieval writing, folk-tradition and oral memory are almost impossible to distinguish from literary invention. Ben Guy offers a brief conspectus of the use of genealogical lists of descent, as in O’Brien’s essay, reminding us that such lists, from the Bible to the ‘Lignages d’Outremer’, could serve a variety of purposes, not one all-embracing cause. Only three essays here directly engage with archaeological as opposed to literary or much later testimony. In a specifically Anglo-Saxon context, Katherine Cross reminds us of the dangers of matching such material remains as brooches, coins or urn-burials to the historical narrative as supplied by Bede, not least because objects in themselves supply no proof of ethnicity. Her ensuing remarks on the uses of the Romulus and Remus legend, and York Minster’s ‘Horn of Ulf’ remind us that ‘meaning’ is one-tenth inherent, nine-tenths interpretative, here in particular citing Susan Oosthuizen’s demonstration of the ways in which the spread of IKEA super-stores and their products tells us very little of the extent to which, since the 1990s, Europe has been overwhelmed by a tidal-wave of marauding Swedes. More fancifully, and not entirely convincingly, Catherine Karkov looks to objects such as the Franks Casket and the Ruthwell Cross as evidence that the Anglo-Saxons perceived England itself as a paradise of abundance and natural plenty, its new settlers heirs to Adam and Eve, cast out from Eden only to find sanctuary once more in a land newly flowing with milk and honey. Of all these essayists, only John Niles dares posit a direct link between literary narrative and material culture, arguing that the chamber-tomb of Childeric, with its polychrome jewelry and horse-burials, supplies clear proof of Hunnic influence. According to Niles, even the long hair of the Frankish kings testifies to a tradition of service under the Huns, in due course promoting a small and immensely wealthy warrior caste to rule over a far looser tribal confederation of ‘Franks’, first east, then west of the Rhine. This is heady stuff, in more senses than one: not so much Traditionskern, as fully Bacharachian Traditionsbeweis. It confirms that this remains a bitterly contested field, so controversial indeed that one of modern science’s sleekest new devices, genome-sequenced blood-typing, is still considered too brutal for deployment here. The dangers are obvious enough, not least were such evidence to be handed to those for whom Saxon, Danish, or for that matter Magyar or Scots ‘descent’ are matters not so much of historical as of modern political concern. Ironic, all the same, that historians, self-declaredly determined to report things as they ‘really were’, no matter how petty or small-scale, shun so significant a highway to truth. For the rest, and more generally, how does this collection cohere? Inevitably there is repetition: at least four individual retellings, for instance, of the Gothic origin legends recounted by Jordanes. There is too little cross-referencing, so that rather than achieve symphonic progression, each author is left to sing their own aria, frequently a capella and too often da-capo. What is new or original here remains very hard to distinguish from the laudatio parentum or naming of parts that inevitably begins (and in some cases entirely engulfs) each essay. Some of the best chapters are, in effect, mere summaries of monographs published elsewhere: a description that applies to Lindy Brady’s ‘Conclusion’, not so much a conspectus of the work here presented, but a summary of her important 2022 book on British and Irish Origin legends. Two- or three-line summaries of each contribution, ideally with French and German translations, might have helped winnow wheat from chaff. The left side of the stage does not always hear what is sung on the right, so that remarks can be made on Dares Phrygius (pp. 345–58) without reference to the work of Frederic Clark, clearly signalled in at least two other chapters. The ordering of contributions is not as sequential as it might have been, for example placing the late lamented Alheydis Plassmann’s historiograpical survey near the end of the book, as chapter xvii, when it might have sat better and more usefully at the beginning. Meanwhile, will anyone save a reviewer read this volume cover to cover? For the paddlers and dippers, an index is helpfully supplied. And so it should have been, given the book’s absurdly high price. More sauce for the publisher, but, as ever, at the reader’s (or rather the university library’s) expense.