There are peoples we can argue about because the sources contradict one another. And there are peoples we cannot even argue about, because there is nothing to argue with. The Nuithones belong to the second kind. They occur exactly once in the whole of ancient literature, as the seventh and last name in a list given by Tacitus, and after that there is silence: no second author, no inscription, no tombstone, no military diploma, no find bearing the name. This article is therefore not about who the Nuithones were. It is about what one may honestly do when that question cannot be answered, and about why Tacitus lists seven names in the first place.
The Nuithones are a textbook case of what philologists call a hapax legomenon: a word that occurs exactly once in the surviving literature. Among ancient ethnonyms this is not unusual, but it is always uncomfortable, because a single attestation can be compared with nothing. It cannot be cross-checked, cannot be dated, cannot be secured by a second line of transmission. You have it, or you do not.
In the case of the Nuithones there is a further difficulty: the one attestation itself says almost nothing about them. It names them, and it names them explicitly as one of several about whom, individually, there is nothing to report. Our entire knowledge of this people consists of a name in a list and of one quality shared by everyone in that list.
The passage is Tacitus, Germania 40. It matters where exactly it begins: the chapter does not open with the list of names but with the Langobards (Contra Langobardos paucitas nobilitat, "the Langobards are ennobled by their small numbers"). Only the second sentence gives the enumeration: Reudigni deinde et Aviones et Anglii et Varini et Eudoses et Suardones et Nuithones fluminibus aut silvis muniuntur – "then the Reudigni and Aviones and Anglii and Varini and Eudoses and Suardones and Nuithones are protected by rivers or forests."
Then comes the sentence that decides everything for our subject: Nec quicquam notabile in singulis, nisi quod in commune Nerthum, id est Terram matrem, colunt – "nor is there anything notable about them individually, except that in common they worship Nerthus, that is, Mother Earth." Everything else in the chapter – the sacred grove on an island in the ocean, the veiled wagon, the cattle, the lake in which the attendants are drowned – belongs to the cult, not to the Nuithones.
It is worth pausing on how unusual this construction is. Our only source not only tells us little about the Nuithones, it explicitly states that there is nothing to report about the individual peoples in this list. That is not a loss of transmission; it is an authorial decision. Tacitus either knew nothing, or considered what he knew not worth relaying.
For scholarship this means that the earliest negative finding about the Nuithones does not date from the nineteenth or twentieth century but from Tacitus himself. Anyone writing today that nothing is known about the Nuithones is essentially repeating what the source already says.
What does the sequence carry? At first, only itself. The names are strung together with et, without any indication of direction, without river names, without distances. Tacitus writes neither "from west to east" nor "along the coast." The widespread assumption that the list follows a geographical line is an interpretation that cannot be proven from the text.
It is not unreasonable, though. For two of the seven names there are settlement areas that are roughly known: the Angles in the Schleswig region and the Varini, whose name survives in medieval legal sources. If you fix those two, a space emerges between Jutland, the western Baltic and the lower Elbe. The remaining five are then slotted in wherever there is room. That is a working hypothesis, not a result.
Let us check the inventory. Pliny the Elder, who lists numerous northern peoples in Book IV of his Naturalis historia, does not name the Nuithones. Ptolemy, whose second-century Geography records a whole series of tribes on the Jutland peninsula and along the Baltic, does not name them. Orosius, who in Historiae adversum paganos VI,7,7 lists the peoples of Ariovistus and there offers a form echoing the Eudoses, does not name them either.
Nor do the late antique and early medieval catalogues help: Jordanes' Getica does not know the name, and the Old English catalogue poem Widsith, which preserves several names of this list in recognisable form – Warni, Aviones and Jutes, together with the Angles – contains no form that can be straightforwardly connected with the Nuithones. That is striking: precisely where several of their neighbours surface a second time, the Nuithones are absent.
For other small peoples, epigraphy rescues what literature withholds. A tombstone with a natione origin formula, a military diploma assigning a soldier to his people, a unit name such as cohors I …orum: such testimony has pulled more than one name out of the fog. For the Nuithones there is nothing of the kind. No cohort, no ala, no diploma, no natione Nuitho.
This is less surprising than it sounds. The list of seven belongs to a region beyond the Roman frontier from which few men reached Roman units. Still, the point stands: the second channel through which ancient ethnonyms normally travel is completely empty here.
That leaves the spade. It too yields nothing, and for a fundamental reason that cannot be repeated often enough: archaeology finds pots, brooches, houses and graves, but no ethnonyms. A ceramic form tells you how people cooked, not what they called themselves. Equating an archaeological culture with a people known from literature is a methodological step that must be justified, and one that current scholarship treats with great caution.
For the Nuithones even the starting point for such an attempt is missing, since one would at least have to know where to look. Nobody does. The circle closes: no second source, no inscription, no location, no find group.
There is something else that popular accounts rarely mention: the Germania hangs by a thin thread of transmission. The text entered circulation through a manuscript from Hersfeld brought to Italy in the fifteenth century; that codex is lost. The Codex Aesinas, rediscovered in Jesi in 1902 and now in Rome, carries the Germania throughout in a fifteenth-century humanist hand; its genuinely old leaves belong to the Agricola. We are reading a text that was copied by hand for a very long time before it could be printed.
With ordinary words this is manageable, because context exposes errors. With proper names it is dangerous, because a scribe who does not know a foreign name cannot correct it either. That is precisely why two names wobble within this single sentence: for the Suarines the manuscripts offer a form different from the one most editions print, and the goddess's name varies between Nerthum and Nertum, out of which the humanists temporarily manufactured a goddess "Hertha" who never existed.
Editions usually print Nuithones; the form Nuitones also occurs, and German translations accordingly write "Nuithonen" or "Nuitonen." Both spellings refer to the same passage. Which letter sequence the manuscripts actually offer, and how the critical apparatus of the authoritative editions – for instance the Teubner edition by Alf Önnerfors (1983) – records the variants, cannot be responsibly asserted without consulting those editions. So we say here what we know and no more: the form is regarded as uncertainly transmitted.
That is no trifle. With a name that occurs exactly once there is no control. With the Suarines one can at least set manuscript against marginal reading. With the Nuithones the form stands alone – and a name standing alone can be neither confirmed nor improved.
This is exactly where the Danish scholar Gudmund Schütte intervened. He considered the name corrupt and proposed that behind it lay either Teutones – the Teutones of the Cimbrian migrations – or Euthiones, a name associated with the Jutes. Both are tempting, because they fill an empty field with a known people.
Neither holds. Against the Teutones: the corruption would have to be substantial, and Tacitus elsewhere knows perfectly well how to name the Teutones. Against the Euthiones: chronology. A name of that shape is only attested in the sixth century, in Venantius Fortunatus and in the tradition concerning the Frankish king Theudebert, roughly five hundred years after Tacitus – and whether those Euthiones are identical with the Jutes is itself disputed. One would be replacing an uncertain name with another uncertain name and end up with two problems instead of one.
Conjecture is a legitimate tool. It applies when a transmitted text fails grammatically, factually or metrically, and a small change makes it plausible. With a proper name that criterion is almost entirely absent: Nuithones is grammatically impeccable, the sentence works, nothing is wrong. The only thing that troubles us is that we do not know the name from anywhere else.
That turns the conjecture into a circular argument. One changes a name because it is unknown into one that is known, and justifies the change by pointing out that the new name is known. Such emendations say more about the editor's wish to close a puzzle than about the text. Present-day scholarship treats them accordingly.
That leaves the attempt to make the name itself speak. That is exactly the angle we pursued at length with the Aviones – there, because at least a debatable word stem presents itself. With the Nuithones the situation is worse. The handbook of Old Germanic ethnonyms by Alexander Sitzmann and Friedrich E. Grünzweig, today the standard work for such questions, states explicitly for the names of this list that meaning and derivation remain unclear because of the single attestation and the uncertain manuscript situation.
That is the answer, and it is unsatisfying enough that the internet almost never reproduces it. Anyone encountering interpretations such as "the new ones" or "the people on the Nuith" should check the source: as a rule they come not from the scholarly literature but from the urge to leave no name untranslated. An etymology built on a form whose correctness is not secured is a calculation with an unknown quantity.
The situation shows most clearly in an outward detail: the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde treats this group in its second edition not in seven separate articles but in a single collective entry, "Nerthusstämme" (Helmut Castritius and Beatrix Günnewig, vol. 21, 2002, pp. 89–91). A standard work that ordinarily treats every graspable subject individually here declines to do so – because there would be nothing to say about the individual that has not already been said about the whole.
That is not negligence but methodological honesty. A separate article on the Nuithones could only quote the Tacitus sentence and then report that everything else is unknown. The collective entry does exactly that, without creating the false impression that there are seven subjects rather than one.
This brings us to the second question. If there is nothing to say about the individual peoples, why does Tacitus name them? One answer: because that is how ancient ethnography works. Catalogues of peoples are a fixed literary form. Pliny fills whole passages with strings of names; Ptolemy builds his Geography out of lists. An enumeration creates an impression of completeness and control: the space has been surveyed, the names are known, even if nothing stands behind them.
The second answer is substantive. In Tacitus the seven names are not an end in themselves but the vehicle of a single statement. He needs a group in order to introduce the Nerthus cult, because the cult is the real subject of the chapter. The names are, so to speak, the address at which the goddess lives.
One occasionally reads that the number seven is meant symbolically. Caution: the text gives no support for this. Tacitus does not highlight the number, does not count along, does not comment on it. And a few chapters later, in Germania 43, he names five peoples of the Lugian group – Harii, Helvecones, Manimi, Helisii, Naharvali – without anyone suspecting a numerical scheme there. No recognisable principle exists.
The plainer explanation is more plausible: Tacitus gives the names that stood in his source. That there were seven of them is then a fact of transmission, not a carrier of meaning. Anyone wishing to read the seven symbolically must label that as speculation – which we hereby do explicitly.
Tacitus was never in Germania. He worked from sources, and scholarship has long reckoned that the lost Bella Germaniae of Pliny the Elder – twenty books by a man who had served as an officer on the Rhine – were among his most important. This cannot be proven, because the work is lost; it is a well-founded hypothesis and is presented as such in the literature.
If it holds, the Nuithones take on a different colouring. Behind the name would stand not Tacitean hearsay but an older note, perhaps gathered by soldiers or traders – a name reported to someone once, whose context was already lost by Tacitus' day. A people that survived only as an entry in a list.
One detail is often overlooked. The following chapter opens with the sentence Et haec quidem pars Sueborum in secretiora Germaniae porrigitur – "and this part of the Suebi extends into the more remote regions of Germania." Tacitus thereby assigns the seven peoples to the Suebi. That is a Roman act of ordering, not a statement by the people concerned.
Incidentally, the Latin contains no word for league or confederation. Tacitus writes in commune … colunt – they worship in common. The familiar term "Nerthus league" is modern scholarly shorthand, convenient and established, but it suggests a political structure that the sentence does not supply.
The attitude this article recommends can best be read off Tacitus himself. In the final chapter of the Germania he admits that he does not know whether to assign the Peucini, Veneti and Fenni to the Germani or to the Sarmatians (Germanis an Sarmatis adscribam dubito). And then the book ends with a sentence that leaves nothing to be desired in clarity.
Cetera iam fabulosa: Hellusios et Oxionas ora hominum voltusque, corpora atque artus ferarum gerere: quod ego ut incompertum in medio relinquam.
"The rest is already fable: that the Hellusii and Oxiones have the faces and features of men but the bodies and limbs of beasts – which I leave undecided, as not ascertained."
Tacitus, Germania 46; translation: Glanz und Gravur
The last name of the seven-name list and the last sentence of the book belong together. Both mark the same place: the point at which the author stops asserting. Incompertum – not ascertained, not investigated. Not refuted, not invented, not embellished: left open.
This brings us to the most important distinction in this article. That we know nothing about the Nuithones does not mean they did not exist. It means only that the transmission yields nothing. A negative finding is a statement about the state of our knowledge, not about the past.
The reverse holds equally. Nothing positive can be deduced from the absence of evidence either. Anyone claiming the Nuithones must have been small because otherwise they would be mentioned more often is arguing from silence – and the silence of sources has many causes. A people may go unmentioned because it lay far away, because it never threatened Rome, because the one report describing it was lost. The case of the Marsigni, likewise named only once by Tacitus, is similar.
What remains is a name, a sentence and a method. The name is not securely transmitted. The sentence states explicitly that there is nothing notable to report. And the method consists in letting that stand, rather than filling the gap with guesses that feel firmer with every repetition.
One may find that a meagre result. We think the opposite. A people of which only a name survives is the most honest teacher that the study of antiquity has to offer: it forces one to distinguish between what the source says, what scholarship infers from it, and what somebody would like to be true. Anyone able to keep those three levels apart for the Nuithones will keep them apart for the Reudigni and everywhere else as well.
The Suarines · The Aviones · The Eudoses · The Reudigni · The Nerthus League · The Angles · The Warni · The Suebi.
All History & Finds articles →
While Uppsala is famous above all from a text, Thuringia holds the best-excavated Germanic sanctuary in the ground: the …
Read more →Olaf Tryggvason ruled Norway for only about five years – yet he became one of the loudest figures of the Viking Age. A …
Read more →