"Recently, something of an academic counter-revolution... has taken place. Oxford-trained historians have led the way, publishing books repeating the same argument: the barbarian migrations involved real ‘peoples on the move’, which brought down the Roman Empire. This has stimulated traditionalist archaeologists into a backlash against more nuanced interpretations of the material record. Whatever their authors’ politics there can be no doubt that these works have—in the most generous interpretation—been written sufficiently carelessly as to provide succour to far-right extremists. What is more, the barbarian migrations have become a popular metaphor among racists and other opponents of modern migration... The Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s preferred historical model was the Crusades but it is nevertheless significant that he described the killings as ‘a small barbarian act to prevent a larger barbarian act’,17 the latter being the supposed take-over of Europe by Muslim immigrants."

“the most significant historian of early medieval Europe under the age of 60 anywhere in the world... hat's not me being cocky, but a pretty sober assessment of the range and quality of my work.”

“The recent use of scientific methodologies to examine migration has added an extra, alarming dimension. DNA, whether ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’ samples , is being used to track migration. The danger, barely addressed , is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth- century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’.”

“One of the problems that has most beset the study of early medieval Europe is, as noted, that of Germanism. This book aims to tackle this issue... To lump all Germanic-speaking tribes together is simply to repeat the assumptions of Roman ethnographers or the politically contingent Germanist interpretations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is, furthermore, the danger of assuming a linkage between Germanic-speaking barbarians of antiquity and the Germans of modern Europe. This was an approach adopted equally by nineteenth-century historians working in the context of German unification, by the Nazis and at the same time, polemically, by their enemies... here are many occasions where modern historians and, especially, archaeologists, treat the different Germanic-speaking groups as sharing some sort of unifying ethos... It is implicit in such interpretations that all ‘Germanic’ peoples somehow share a common mentality. In their minds is a common stock of cultural traits which all ‘Germanic’ people can draw upon as and when they see fit. This may be claimed to be a reductio ad absurdam of traditional assumptions. It is, but only because these assumptions are fundamentally absurd.”

“Historians are not immune from similarly bizarre reasoning, of course. The counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking about the fifth century has been led by British historians from Oxford. Peter Heather has repeatedly deployed the notion that, because wagons, women and children are occasionally mentioned in sources concerning the barbarians, the barbarians must have been ‘peoples’ on the move... Such are the weakness and double-standards of the arguments in favour of the traditional narrative. You can list many more.”

“I twitch every time anyone mentions ‘Germanic’ culture.”

“The first part of the essay calls into question the idea that the Germanic-speaking barbarians shared any sort of unifying ethos or culture that would allow us to conceive of them as a single entity. This section largely summarizes a particular direction in recent work, but the conclusion is still far from generally accepted or integrated in current study and so requires restating... The comprehensive rejection of the idea of a unifying Germanic ethos and identity among pre-migratory Germani removes the classic basis for nineteenth-century views of the German people as rooted in distant history... One inheritance of nineteenth-century notions of pan-Germanic culture is the unlikely notion that all Germani had access to a common range of cultural traits, upon which they could draw at will... Attempts to change this intellectually careless state of affairs are making only slow process.”