Strange as it may seem to hear it said, there were no Germanic peoples in late antiquity. The illusion that there were can be outgrown. - Walter Goffart

My central concern in the present book is... to liberate barbarian history from the German nationalism that has suffused it ever since the sixteenth century and, in whatever disguises, continues to do so today.

The myth of the Germans before Germany is hard to suppress because, owing to its great age and genesis in the sources themselves.

Superfluous... is the unthinking modern transposition into history of a common "Germanic" language family-a concept borrowed from comparative philology. The history of a language as known to philologists has nothing to do with that of human beings... No discernible benefit comes from our being reminded again and again in modern writings that many of these barbarians at each other's throats probably spoke dialects of the same language. The G-word can be dispensed with.