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From: Kennwalrus< >
Subject: Re: Magyar kings to Attila the Hun
Date: 22 Jun 1998 13:17:05 GMT
FWIW, Settipani's reconstruction of Charlemagne's ancestry suggests a somewhat
more plausible descent from Attila. (More plausible, that is, on grounds of
overall historical situation, and relative temporal contiguity.) According to
S., one of C.'s ancestresses is Austricusa, apparently attested as a Gepid
princess. What isn't attested is which Gepid king was her father; it has been
suggested, on chronological grounds, that it was Elemund. The 6th-century
Gepid kings apparently claimed descent from the first Gepid king, Ardaric, who
had initially served (in the vicinity of 450) as a henchman of Attila; it was
also claimed that Ardaric had married a daughter of Attila (presumably one of
many, as Attila seems to have been a polygamist). It seems that at least some
royal Gepids of the 5th century claimed descent from that marriage. (My
apologies for the vagueness of this acount; partly due to incompleteness of
detail in the originals, partly to the fact that I recount from memory.)
As for the claim on the part of the Magyar kings to descend from Attila: I
imagine that the "Hun-" in "Hungary" *does* have something to do with THE Huns
(though my world wouldn't crumple like tinfoil if I were shown to be wrong in
this presumption). However, most scholars seem to have concluded, after long
and fierce dispute, that the Magyars were much later invaders who swept away
what remnant of the Huns remained. This in itself would hardly convince me,
but, more to the point, I've seen the claimed pedigree, *somewhere*, and (as I
recall) it fails the first test in assessing any such document: the number of
generations claimed to link the earliest (historically attested, and
chronologically placeable) Magyar kings with Attila was far too few.
Where might it have been written up for a 'westerner'? Anderson's royal
genealogies, perhaps? (In its way, I might point out, an excellent source:
not for factual pedigrees, but as a repository of various legends and
traditions -- Anderson is, in his own odd way, quite scrupulously scholarly:
he's quick to state that his sources disagree with one another, and lays out
the various asserted pedigrees _in extenso_. Some of these, in some cases,
though incorrect as they stand, may have some distorted basis in fact. Not all
incorrect traditional pedigrees are simply imaginary, or due to interested
deceit: some rest upon honest misunderstanding of historical fact.)
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