I'm starting work on a thing based on music (artist gave the okay) and not a paragraph in I'm already stumped. The only description I have for one of the characters is "barbarian." That brings to mind Conan, obviously, and I'm trying to find out if any of the many, many peoples referred to as barbarians come close to the stereotype. Or what the loinclothed, musclebound stereotype is based on. I'm aware a barbarian isn't one single people, and that the Ancient Greek coined the phrase to indicate anybody less than Greek, so from their point of view that leaves a whole lot of people. Storywise, it would make sense to stay close to the long-haired Schwarzenegger type, but I need to base his speech and mannerisms on something real. At least initially, when the opening character, who isn't knowledgeable on the subject, finds him. Given the context, the reader will probably also expect something close to the stereotype, so I have to build from there. In short: Can we pinpoint one race as the original barbarian? Note: Not going with Viking.
I've heard of Gallic warriors who fought naked, that's pretty barbaric. Check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudity_in_combat Other than that, I don't know who might be considered the very first barbarians.
Thing about going bare-chested is - one, it's cold, two, it doesn't offer a lot of protection. So being barechested is almost definitely out, at least in Europe. If you ignore that fact, then the Celts or the Gauls might fit the bill. If you're willing to look beyond Europe, many African tribes did go bare-chested, although not as many as you might think. The Zulu did.
I'll give that a looksee in a minute. I believe the Picts at least went barefoot, to be more in touch with the force of mother Nature or something like that. I'm sure that Wiki will provide more. I'm already conceiving an angle where we find the Barbarian in a loincloth, being all barbaric and gruff and angry because he's trying to find his other boot and possibly armor. I need to keep him on the warlike side of reasonability, but it'll be fun to build him up to a smarter person than one would expect. I am, but I won't. Due to the condensed nature of the rock opera I'm basing this on, I'm already working with mainly stereotypes, one of which being a Native American of unspecified tribe, simply referred to as The Indian. Making the barbarian from an African tribe only opens up that much more options to shoot myself in a racist foot.
Damn. I just found out that Cimmeria is a real thing. Guess I'm just gonna have to peel off R.E. Howard's fantasy bits off the actual history and I'll have my barbarian. Thanks for the help!
For Greeks "barbarian" simply meant foreigner most of the time. It didn't necessarily mean uncivilized- Greeks could recognize that the Egyptians, Medes, Chaldeans, etc had venerable cultures and institutions but still called them "barbarians." The Latins' use of the term didn't seem to be much different. Sure they could see the difference between settled/ urbanized peoples they encountered and nomadic or semi-nomadic types, but weird foreigners are weird foreigners. And yes, Cimmerians were a real people but the peoples of RE Howard's Hyborian Age only bear a passing resemblance to their historical referents, as I think Howard himself would gladly admit. He made free and unfussy use of what anthropological and historical materials he had at hand along with ideas that were percolating through contemporary occultism.
Barbarians? Attendees at the Border War Football Game between Colorado State University and University of Wyoming.
You beat me to it. Yes, Cimmeria was a real place, usually associated with the Crimean peninsula, on the northern port of the Black Sea. It's also worth bearing in mind that the Amazons - those mythological female warriors known in Greek myth - possibly also lived in Cimmeria (or, as it was known then, the Bosporan Kingdom, or the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus. (Confusingly, this has nothing to do with the Bosporus or Bosphorus River in modern-day Turkey). The story is well-known enough that The New Yorker ran a story on it in 2014, and the Antikensammlung Museum in Berlin ran an exhibition on them in 2007, exploring the links between the Greeks, Scythians, and Amazons. The New Yorker article, by the way, mentions many details about the real Amazons, including their clothing, weapons - even some of their names - and mentions the legends of where they came from, as well as how other people saw them. It's a fascinating read -- I highly recommend it. As for "barbarians" more generally ... gosh, what a wide-ranging question. Take your pick! It depends on which era you're talking about, what your perspective is, etc. etc... but in general, anyone who didn't live in cities or practiced agriculture was considered a "barbarian". The term is applied so widely as to be almost worthless. Just in the classical era (before the Fall of Rome), I can think of at least a dozen candidates: - The Scythians, on the European side of the Crimean peninsula, who possibly intermingled with the Amazons and produced ... - ... the Sarmatians (a large confederation of ancient Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples who dominated the Pontic steppe, roughly 3rd century BC to 4th century AD) - The Elamites, who dominated Persia before the Persians - The Hyksos, invaders of Egypt - The Sea Peoples, a mysterious riders of the storm, who overthrew the Hittites and threw Egypt into chaos - The Illyrians, a host of Balkan raiders, who together with the pastoral Dalmatians held off the Romans for generations - The Phrygians, dominators of Turkey, and famous for King Midas and the Gordian Knot - The Thracians, settling on the steppes of northeastern Greece, masters of metalwork - The Celtiberians (aka the Celts of Spain), who fought guerrilla wars with the Romans and were only beaten by treachery - The Galatians, Gauls in Asia Minor. (The statue of "the Dying Gaul" in the article on "Nudity in Combat", above, comes from Galatia. They are also famous from the New Testament, as Paul the Apostle writes The Epistle to the Galatians, the ninth book of the New Testament) - The Dacians, on the edge of the Roman world (now north-central and western Romania), who fought two wars against the Romans - The Arverni, who spearheaded the Gaulish revolt in France against Julius Caesar - The Iceni, famous for Boudicca's revolt - The Catuvellauni, the tribe of Caratacus, the famous British warrior and guerrilla leader - The Alans of the Black Sea region, fleeing westward before the Vandals, Goths and Huns, who (together with the Germanic tribe of the Alamanni) gave their name to Germany -- Allemagne, "All Men" -- and who ended up in Brittany. - The Vandals, who might have an unfair reputation, since they never captured Rome, but started in Scandinavia and ended in Africa - The Visigoths, who under their leader Alaric broke Rome, and the Ostrogoths, the heirs of Rome - The Jutes, forgotten invaders of Britain, who subjugated Kent and the Isle of Wight - The Huns (perhaps conflated with the Xiong-nu of the Mongolian steppes), who caused such chaos in Europe under their leader, Attila - The Hephthalites, a mysterious tribe sometimes called 'the White Huns', who crashed against northern India and caused chaos within the border of Sasanian Persia Count these up, and you have 20 ( !!!) different 'barbarian tribes' in Europe and on its periphery ... and this, even before we reach the so-called "Dark Ages". Hope this helps!
I believe you are thinking of the Picts. They would fight naked, and covered in Woad. For Barbarians, you can look at the Visgoths, goths, germanic tribes, and the slavs.
The Dying Gaul https://sothebys-md.brightspotcdn.com/webnative/images/b8/36/18c73dda47e88b710a6d236a67d1/l22233-chvqd-t2-01.jpg
The pre-Roman and early-Roman Britons (such as Boudicca's Iceni) were considered pretty barbaric by the Romans.
When I think of barbarians, I think of people who are more connected to nature than to put-on airs. Instinct rules them, including lusty drives to sex, and war, and poetry. Spirituality and superstition are present as an expression of their experience, and pride governs many of their interactions. They remember where they came from, and clan is their most pressing loyalty.
A few more thoughts: Justice would be given the highest priority and governed by unbending, unwritten rules. Each man would be responsible for securing his own justice. You kill my brother, I am obligated to kill you. Another possible characteristic would be the way the warrior is celebrated as a great mythic hero, superhuman, such as Cúchulainn in the Irish mythology epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (which has its origin in ancient oral storytelling) – who single-handedly defends Ulster from the army of Connacht, in the 1st century in a pagan heroic age Here’s how Cúchulainn appears in battle – (How The Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill) And finally – women would be seen as equals in both word and deed. After all, Cúchulainn was trained in battlecraft by three women!
You're thinking of that other mythical tribe, the Hooligans. ;o) Yeah, and to make matters worse, on top of Cimmeria being real, the barbarian in the rock opera mentions Odin, which brings the Viking into the mix after all. So we get about another twenty kinds of "barbarians." I looked into the goths because I thought I might have some fun with that, but... damn. There's a goth for every occasion, isn't there? Visi, Ostro, West, the list just keeps going. I briefly considered the Iceni, but I also have a highlander and an Arthurian knight to include in the story, so that would be a little heavy on Emerald Isles characters.
Yeah, Finn McCool was a bad ass. Though this is the first time I've heard speak of the warp-spasm, which is pretty cool because it connects a bunch of dots for me. I used to read Slaine comics, where Slaine MacRoth goes around killing shit for... reasons. One thing that returned in every comic was the warp-spasm, which they used a really childish translation for in Dutch, and I always thought it was more like the Viking's berserk mode. Now I'm pretty confident that Slaine was basically copy/pasted from Cúchulainn. I'm gonna have to do a lot of rereading now. ;o)
The worshippers of the Norse God's extended beyond the Vikings. You have the Slavic Perun, a thunder God that shares traits with Thor. But how do you tell which are the most Emo? Seriously, I think part of your issue is one of culture, and the clash with a more "civilized culture". Your Barbarians can be from just about any warrior culture.
I should point out that the Emerald Isle specifically refers to the island of Ireland, not the British Isles as a whole...
Yeah, the real Cimmerians were a steppe people culturally related to the Scythians. They stormed out of the Caucasus under pressure from the expansion of their cousins and wreaked havoc in the Near East and Anatolia in the Iron Age. Howard’s Cimmerians are forerunners of the Celts, particularly the Gaels. To directly address the OP, if you’re writing for western audiences, our vision of what a barbarian is heavily shaped by Roman accounts of the Celts and the Germanic tribes whose invasions ultimately destroyed the Western Roman Empire. I don’t think you can go wrong with using imagery associated with them.
Hey, I've heard about Conan the Librarian: late book, he takes names and kicks ass, no excuses. Used to work at the local county library. Understand he's been instrumental in revamping the library at the state penitentiary since that last beheading incident over dog-earred pages in a rare book.
You mean this fellow? A few years ago, I wrote a parody of "The Modern Major-General's Song", all about librarians. I picked it because I thought it would be fun to think of all the words that would rhyme with "librarian". (Sumerian, Rastafarian, agrarian, Libertarian ...) Anyway, I made it all about how cool libraries and librarians are.
Yeah, the wiki explains the word originating from Greco-Roman "barbaros" where "bar bar" basically signified unintelligible gibberish. As far as the Ancient Greeks were concerned, everybody not-Greek was a barbarian. Which I realized when I accidentally shuffled into Gary Moore's Blood Of Emeralds in the car. Maybe I'll pick something Irish for the barbarian, complete the trifecta. I know that leaves out Wales, but if I go by every kingdom at the time I'm gonna need about twenty more characters. I try to stay away from any game since I'm usually the only one who understands it's a game. Yeah, western audiences and a sprinkling of scifi B-movie as a sort of tribute to the original work's origins. I think I could actually get away with Big Dude In Loincloth, but I don't like it when it's easy. ;o) Yeah, that's Conan-- Exactly, Weird Al's-- Oh, goddammit. I wanted to do this one.
