The Gepids were, according to the Roman sources, an East Germanic people related to the Goths. In Roman parlance, they were a gens, a group that claimed descent from a common ancestor. But what did this really mean in practice? Were the Gepids all relatives?

Probably not, it turns out. The modern understanding is that the Late Antique/Early Medieval gentes were genetically heterogeneous groups (understandable, given that many of them traveled great distances over the course of several generations and encountered new populations wherever they went. Humans have always had a way of mixing.) Yet it also seems true that these groups, even as they incorporated new elements, maintained some core identity. This usually centered on a myth of origin.

These were peoples with rich oral traditions and spiritual beliefs that probably incorporated ancestor worship. They preserved a long cultural memory of where they had come from, the lands they had occupied, the enemies they faced, and their notable ancestors. These all combined to form a shared tradition that constituted and unified “the people”–whatever their genetic origin. A few such legends still survive. We have the origin myth of the Lombards from Paul the Deacon, the legend of Hengist and Horsa from Bede. These stories were not uniform and unchanging, but malleable and responsive to the shifting political reality of the community. Surely every tribe of the Migration Era possessed such stories, and I’ve had some fun inventing one for the Gepids.

The constitutive cultural tradition would have had many custodians: tribal elders, holy men and women, storytellers and bards, all manner of memory-keepers. Women might have sung its songs to their infants, people may have shared their favorite tales around the evening fire. In addition, there would have been a smaller group that held themselves out as a living connection to the mythic past: the noble or royal clans. These individuals surely traced their descent from the most revered ancestors, or even to the gods themselves. But above all, the identity of the tribe was built on a feeling of belonging and ritual adoption, not on literal descent.