Gothicism as English national myth of the XVII - XVIII centuries

During the Middle-Ages the so-called Legend of Brutus acted as a national myth in England. According to it, descendants of Brutus who was a grandson to Aeneas, were the first people to colonize British Islands. After Brutus death, his oldest son inherited England, his second son - Wales, and the youngest one received Scotland. So on the principle of majorat, an English monarch was given a superiority over other British rulers."The Legend of Brutus" was harshly criticized in the "Anglica Historia" written by of Polydore Vergil at the instigation of King Henry VII. The medieval national myth could no longer pass as a glorious prehistory in the Renaissance era and soon it was rejected. The English historians began a quest for the origins of their people searching it directly in the Holy Writing. In the historiography of that time emerges an idea of a German or Goth descent of the Englishmen. It was shaped as a conception, which declares Tuisco, the euhemerized god from Cornelius Tacitus "De Origine et situ Germanorum", to be a forefather of all the German people, including Saxons, who were considered to be the ancestors of the Englishm. In the XVI-XVIII centuries were published Latin translations of the sources of Scandinavian mythology, and the Tuisco conception was supplanted by Scandinavian Gothicism, a doctrine, according to which the people of Northern Europe were the direct descendants of Goths. This idea was supported by the prologue in the Prose Edda, where Odin was regarded as a real historical figure who brought his people from Asia to the northern part of Europe. In favor of this theory also stand English medieval tradition, which put Odin as one of the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon kings, namely Hengist and Horsa, who were the first chieftains of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The difference between the Odin conception and the Tuisco one was in the origins of the population of the northern part of Europe. According to the last one Europe was peopled by the Goths of Scandinavia, and the first conception took Asia or Scythia as an ancestral home of Goths. That was also supported by the authority of Holy Writing, where Asia was considered as a threshold of mankind. In the mid-XVIIIth century England Gothicism became an established approach to the examination of the Englishmen origins. Myths of English pagan gods did not endure the Christian Middle-Ages, so the English willingly shared their founding fathers with the Scandinavians, as in case of the Gothicist paradigm all the German peoples were presented as one ethnicity, quite recently divided into single groups.

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