Migration Period

Almost everything written about the religion of the peoples who moved into the Roman provinces in this period was written by Romans, by Greeks, or by churchmen, and almost all of it was written after those peoples had become Christian. Procopius, writing in the sixth century about the wars in Italy, is a Roman official describing Goths for a Constantinopolitan readership.

Ramsay MacMullen's study of Christianisation in the empire is useful here because it insists on asking what conversion actually consisted of on the ground, and finds that the answer is often a ruler's decision followed by a slow and uneven change in practice, rather than a change of conviction in a population. The Gothic case adds a further complication. Many of the peoples who converted did so to the Arian form of Christianity taught among the Goths by Ulfilas, who also translated the Bible into Gothic, and Arianism was subsequently defeated and its literature largely destroyed. So the religion of the Migration Period is doubly filtered: reported by outsiders, and belonging in part to a Christian tradition that later Christianity suppressed. What its practitioners thought they were doing is, for the most part, not recoverable.

The material record of the Migration Period is dominated by the furnished burial, in which a body is buried dressed and equipped, with weapons, brooches, vessels and personal ornament. Its distribution and its changes over time are one of the main ways the movements of the period are traced at all, though the relationship between a burial style and an ethnic identity is contested and no longer read as simply as it once was. Bracteates, thin stamped gold discs worn as pendants, carry images that are usually read as religious: a head, a horse, a bird, sometimes with runic characters around the edge.

The earliest runic inscriptions belong to this period, and they are short, on weapons, brooches and stones, giving names, makers and occasionally formulas whose meaning is uncertain. Taken together the evidence establishes that religion was practised and gives a rough sense of its imagery, without supplying a single sentence of doctrine. The atlas keeps the Migration Period distinct from the Viking Age, which is a later northern movement with its own chronology and its own evidence, because collapsing the two produces a single imagined Germanic paganism that the material does not support.