The History of the Gepids: Forgotten or Misplaced?

The memory of many groups in history is deceivingly fragile, often existing only by the whim of the historian, archivist, and those in positions of power and authority. The Gepids, an eastern Germanic group of late antiquity, have largely remained forgotten in historical discourse for several reasons. They left no written records of their own, and the writings that do mention them do so in a scattered and anecdotal fashion. Furthermore, the privileging of texts among historians has often resulted in the omission of other types of evidence, such as archaeology and oral tradition, contributing all the more to their absence in scholarship. Finally, and most importantly, the Gepids have not served any medieval or modern group regarding claims of legitimacy, power, or expansion. When the Gepids do appear in scholarship, the focus is either on the sources from late antiquity or the historiography of the last few centuries, completely overlooking a small medieval corpus containing references to the Gepids. This lack of study is very problematic, as it is in the medieval texts that the first historiographical bias against the Gepids manifests, both among western European and Hungarian sources. This article therefore aims to restore the medieval texts to the historiography of the Gepids. Furthermore, an examination of these sources will not only place them in their proper context but will also reveal the structures set in place that have sidelined the history of the Gepids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]