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The Burgundians were an East Germanic people who in the early 5th century founded a kingdom on the Rhine around Worms. Their name lives on to this day in the French region of Burgundy.
In AD 436 the Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine was crushingly defeated – by an army that the Roman general Aetius led with Hunnic auxiliaries. King Gundahar (Gunther) fell with a large part of his people. The survivors were later resettled to Savoy.
This real downfall – a Burgundian king, an army from the east, a bloodbath – became the historical core of the Nibelung saga: Gunther, Hagen and the doom at the court of the Huns. Thus history turned into myth, kin to the Norse Sigurd saga.
"To us, in olden tales, many wonders are told."Nibelungenlied, opening (Middle High German, public domain)
The Burgundians link Germanic history with the great heroic saga. Continue with the Sigurd and Nibelung saga and the Goths.
The Goths · Sigurd the dragon-slayer · The Heruli · The Lombards · Germanic Religion.
