Warini Erotic

The Warini were a Germanic people of the southern Baltic shore, attested from the first century AD until the middle of the sixth and usually placed in what is now Mecklenburg and the country west of it in northern Germany. They did not survive as a people. What is left is a name in a Carolingian law book, probably a river, and two episodes recorded by outsiders.

Tacitus names them first, in a passage of the Germania that groups the Warini with the Angles and five other peoples sharing one cult. Their goddess was Nerthus, whom he glosses as Mother Earth. She lived in a grove on an island, kept in a covered wagon only her priest could touch. When he judged she was present, cows drew the wagon through the settlements and fighting stopped: weapons went into storage, and no one carried iron until she was returned. Then the wagon, the cloth and the goddess herself were washed in a hidden lake by slaves, who were drowned in it immediately after. That is a Roman report from a man who had never been there, and it remains the closest thing to an interior view of Warini religion that anyone has.

Five centuries later Procopius, writing in Constantinople, gives them a king named Hermegisclus and a succession quarrel. Hermegisclus had betrothed his son Radigis to the sister of the king of the Angles, across the water in Britain. On his deathbed he told the young man to drop her and marry his own widow instead, a Frankish princess, on the grounds that a Frankish alliance was worth more than an island one. Radigis did it. The jilted Anglian woman raised a fleet, crossed at the head of it herself, beat the Warini in a battle near the mouth of the Rhine, had Radigis run down in a wood, and then married him anyway. The numbers Procopius gives are absurd. The shape of the story is nearly all that anyone wrote about Warini politics.

After that they stop appearing. Their odd afterlife is a law code compiled under Charlemagne around 802 and titled the Law of the Angles and Warini, that is, of the Thuringians, which sets the name several hundred miles inland from any coast. Historians read that as a fragment of the people moving south, or as a name that stuck to a population which had absorbed them. The remainder were likely taken up in the Anglian migration to Britain and in the Slavic settlement of the Baltic coast in the century after Procopius wrote. The Warnow, which runs through Rostock to the sea, may carry the name still.