Author's Notes - the Glossary

Having finished the polishing but for comments my readers assure me are not terribly drastic, and gotten to the part where I'm really looking at the gloss I've included in the Author's Note for the first time in a while ... well, frankly, I'm enjoying the entries.  So here is the first in a new series, in which we'll take a look at some of my research and notes.

Please understand that these are not general-use definitions/explanations, they have been written specifically for and within the context of my work on a piece of historical fiction.  This also means that these entries will not be edited for the blog, but presented as they are within the MS itself.

If you want real information on the people, places, and concepts excerpted here, please look further and read real sources.  It would thrill me to *interest* readers in these subjects, but it would dismay me to be taken for a source.  I've said it before, and I'll say it again:  I am not an historian.  :)

And with that said, off we go!


ALEMANNI
First documented by Cassius Dio in the third century, the name is said to mean “all men” in Old High German.  At the time of Clovis, many Alemanni had settled in Alsace and upon the Swiss Plateau, but they seem to have been less geographically fixed than the Franks and other peoples who appear both in this novel and in Gaul during Late Antiquity.  Their origins are thought to have been as diverse as their settlement habits, which spanned many small homesteads and settlements but included few or no major centers, and shifted more easily than was typical for other communities.  This dynamism has many attractive qualities, but the Alemanni are cast in my Clovis’ eyes as undisciplined, and perform in our story as The Enemy.  Contemporary and personal prejudices would have shunned the lack of tradition and the mixed influences Alemanni culture had at play.  Like many of the “barbarian” nations, they were heavily Romanized, but in the interplay between those nations, I have chosen to try to play up alien feeling, a rejection of other-ness, in order to answer—and explain—Clovis’ dealings with them.

The “mad and directionless” tribe against whom Clovis’ first clash—and, later, one of his most important conquests—was fought is based upon on truth only insofar as truth rules a storyteller; in this particular, it mattered less, perhaps, than some may estimate it should have.  Clovis would have seen them as antagonist, faceless, unanchored by a heroic commander, and worthy of respect only so far as they were powerfully difficult to fight.  No more balanced or complete view of them as a people would make sense coming from this narrator.