Linones Erotic

The Linones were a small West Slavic people of the ninth century, living on the right bank of the lower Elbe in what is now the Prignitz, on the modern border of Brandenburg and Lower Saxony. No one carries the name today; their line ran into the general Wendish population of the Elbe country and from there into the Germans of the region. They enter the record the way most frontier peoples do, as a name in someone else's war report. The Royal Frankish Annals put them on the page in 808, when the Danish king Godfrid came south against the Obotrites and the Linones, with their neighbors the Smeldingi, took the chance to shake off Obotrite overlordship. Charlemagne's answer arrived within two years: Frankish and Saxon columns across the Elbe, hostages taken, tribute imposed. After that they appear only in passing, and within a few generations the name drops out of the sources altogether.

Their country was sandy, low, and wet, pine and oak on the higher ground, marsh and old river channels below, with the Elbe working as road, larder, and border at once. Like the other Elbe Slavs they organized around fortified ring works rather than towns, and their main one is generally identified with Lenzen, whose name is taken to preserve theirs. If they are the Linaa of the ninth-century Bavarian Geographer, credited with seven strongholds, they were a people counted in thousands rather than tens of thousands, which is the ordinary scale for these polities. Their speech is unrecorded but would have been Polabian, the westernmost form of Lechitic Slavic, close kin to Kashubian and Polish. Their religion was the pre-Christian Slavic cult of the region, tied to groves, springs, and hilltop sanctuaries. Christianity reached them as an instrument of conquest and did not hold; the real conversion of this stretch of the Elbe waited for the German campaigns and settlement of the twelfth century.

What they left is mostly in the ground and on the map. Lenzen keeps the name. Village names ending in -itz, -ow, and -in run for miles on both banks, and the round hamlet plans of the Wendland, houses set in a ring around a green with a single way in, preserve the settlement habit of these Slav farmers. Just across the river, Polabian itself survived in farmhouse use until about 1750. One of its last speakers, a Wustrow farmer named Johann Parum Schultze, wrote down what he could of it and noted that he expected to be among the last who knew it. He was right.