Barbaran/Barbarians (Review)

[selenak]

Aka the one about the battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Overall: not an instant classic, but succeeds in what it sets out doing in an entertaining fashion.



For all that the Romans are the hands-down bad guys of the tale offers a treat to anyone wanting to hear (subtitled) dialogue in Latin. (All the Roman characters speak Latin, while the Cherusci, Marbodians etc. speak modern German. Good choice, especially since honestly we have no idea what they spoke and how it sounded like. The earliest documents in early medieval German are from many centuries later.) Now I'm always fascinated on how different Latin sounds depending on the speakers' original language. (For example, in the famous West Wing scene when President Bartlet starts ranting at God in Latin, it took me a second to get what he was doing, simply because when yours truly learned those words in a German school, they naturally were pronounced quite differently.) Here, the Romans are played by Italian actors, so the result probably sounds closer to the original than anything else I've heard so far. (And they must have been coached, because these are the first "Romans" I've ever heard to pronounce "Caesar" "Kae - sar" - my Latin teachers just told us that this was the original pronounciation, just as Cicero was Ki - Ke -Ro, and then went on to use the traditional soft c along with the rest of us.)

(Another linguistic question is which non-Roman original name to give to good old Arminius. Because we don't know what his original name was. "Herrmann" was something either Luther or Johannes Aventinus came up with in the Renaissance, and it became so thoroughly associated both with nationalistic propaganda and a thousand spoofs - "Herrmann the German" - that you want to avoid it. This series settles on "Ari" as his original pre Romanization name instead.)

Okay, so much for the language aspect. You can tell the budget mostly went into the final battle in the last episode, because the locations are mostly the same Cheruscan village (even when it's supposed to be a different village) and the same Roman camp. (In reality, not only were there different camps but Varus himself would have spent at least part of the time the plot covers at Trier (today mostly known as Karl Marx' birth place), where the Roman governors had their seat. But constructing an actual Roman-German city is expensive, even with GCI. Anyway, the series made a virtue out of necessity because the true location star are the forests, and of these, we see plenty in every episode. And that's thematically fitting, not just because that's where the famous battle takes place but because the sheer amount of forest was what the Romans kept being freaked out about when describing the area later. Not since the various Robin Hood shows have I seen an such a woody series, and honestly, it's a good look.

Characters: the pilot isn't centred on Arminius/Ari at all, who shows up very late in the game, but on Thusnelda, and this turns out to be significant in that while Arminius gets plenty of screen time later, Thusnelda really keeps being treated as much as the lead of the series as he is. Every review I've seen so far makes the comparison to Lagertha in Vikings, and while I bet the series creators were keenly aware of Lagertha's popularity, they do manage to make Thusnelda her own person, not just a clone. (As there really was a Thusnelda - about whom we know even less certain facts than about Arminius, but we do now some -, let me add this is also the hands down most interesting version I've come across so far.) I'm especially intrigued that the series about two thirds in lets her father Segestes observe "we're far more alike than you care to admit" - without her refuting it, which, given that Segestes is the frustrated schemer of the tale and Thusnelda the heroic freedom fighter (who, however, has to learn about compromises to forge alliances) - adds yet another layer.

Arminius/Ari is indeed presented as the trailer made me hope he would be as torn between two worlds, though given that the Romans are introduced as imperialists exploiters from the get go, the choice he's got to make is rather obvious. The series tries to make it harder by giving him a personal relationship with Varus the historical originals did not have; it makes Varus his foster father after child!Ari and his little brother (Flavus, though the name isn't given yet in the series; presumably they keep this for season) have been taken as glorified hostages/foster children by the Romans. (It also lets Varus negotiate this with Ari's father Sigimer in flashbacks; historial Quinctilius Varus was nowhere near the German lands at this point. He may or may not have been in Raetia, but afterwards he was procurator in Africa and in Syria.) This is also as good an emotional explanation as any for Varus' trust in Arminius at a key point late in the story. What I hadn't anticipated was how the relationship is used when it comes to the straw that brakes the camel's back, i.e. the key turning point which makes Arminius decide on turning against Rome. Surprisingly, it's not one of the various injustices committed against his people - though these play a role in building up turnmoil in him - but the reveal that fostering him was always intended by Varus to give the Cheruscans a Romanized leader, that Arminius has risen as far as he could get within Roman ranks (which is, as in history, to the rank of knight and leader of various auxiliary parts of the army), could go no further in Rome because despite being a Roman citizen and knight, his "barbarian" birth will always be associated with him, and that hence his future lies with leading his tribe in a Rome-friendly fashion. Now, on the one hand, making the "you're supposed to lead your people in a Rome-friendly fashion" bit news to Arminius is one of the series' more ahistorical bits, because that was the whole point of him being taken as a hostage/to be fostered in the first place. Exactly this was done with Juba II., the King of Mauretania whom Cleopatra's daughter Selene ended up marrying and who, like her, had been raised in Rome. Ditto with Herodes Agrippa, as watchers of I, Claudius would know. On the other, from a storytelling pov, making the feeling of personal betrayal by Varus and rejection by Rome (in the sense of being regarded as a second class Roman no matter how hard he assimilated) the turning point, not primarily a "I can't bear to watch my people being exploited and oppressed!" motivation, which is given to Thusnelda instead - makes Arminius a far more complicated figure than the freedom fighter of post-Luther tradition. It also means that having accomplished his goal (and thus burned all his bridges, of course), he will still be of two worlds, because you can't just reverse a life time of assimilation and being raised Roman; hence him monologueing to a dead Varus instead of celebrating with the rest in the final scenes.

The one notable character not based on anyone historical is Folkwin Wolfsspear, who is a childhood friend of Thusnelda's and Ari's, and is Thusnelda's lover through most of the show, which made me conclude he's a redshirt walking since Thusnelda has a historical marriage destiny. But no, in a neat use of surprise trope, Thusnelda and Arminius get engaged and married as a political decision because romanized Arminius isn't popular among the tribes and they have a revolt to organize, for which marrying Thusnelda will heighten his credentials, and Folkwin is on board with this. Unfortunately, the "arranged marriage starts to become real" trope, which I like, is then followed by the threat of a more traditional triangle/rivalry thing on the horizon in the very last episode, but maybe they'll surprise me again if this gets a second season. Which would be nice, because this is a triangle depicted with much affection in every direction, and everyone keeps saving everyone else's lives at different points. Threesome, I say!

Supporting cast: Thusnelda's parents, Segestes and his wife, are by far the most interesting, because while they are antagonists, you can see where they are coming from, and the narrative gives them both emotional lives beyond their ambition. There's a certain historical plot point involving Segestes and Thusnelda years after the battle in the Teutoburg Forest which I would want to watch these actors play.

The Romans: Varus himself is basically your avarage colonizer who in his own mind is a benevolent patriarch unable to understand why anyone else doesn't see it this way, even while ordering one brutal measure after the other. His affection for Arminius is real, as is his utter inability to understand what's actually going on in his foster son. There's a tribune who is initially antagonistic to Arminius but bonds with him somewhat later over discovering they both served under Tiberius in Pannonia, but by and large, we're talking Stormtroopers of the Empire type of characterisation. (Or, you know, Brits in American movies about the war of independence. Or Germans in - well, okay, not WWII, but WWI.) And of course by the end of the season, they're all dead. Considering the series took care to establish Ari was taken/fostered along with his younger brother, I expect that if/when there's a second season, we might get more detailed Romans via Flavus, who after all served with Germanicus against Arminius & Co.

The acting: Jeanne Goursaud is great as Thusnelda (though I wish they'd let her put on a few pounds, she looks a bit thin to me), Laurence Rupp speaks Latin like a pro when Arminius is with the Romans and does the inner conflict and brooding very well, David Schütter as Folkwin is the cheerful blond daredevil to Ari's brooding brunet man of thought, and Bernhard Schütz - who played Wolfgang's dastardly father in Sense8 - is as mentioned excellent as Segestes. Varus gets played by Gaetano Aronico, who also is the only one of the Romans who gets to do character stuff (and does it well), but all the other actors of Romans have to speak Latin as well, so, go team!

Greatest concession of cinematic tradition: two of the four Cheruscans who sneak into a Roman camp in the pilot do so via using the latrines. No sooner are they out of said latrines that they look just like Luke, Leia and Han did after emerging from the trash compactor on the Death Star. Magical dry cleaning of waste: not just for science fiction anymore.

In conclusion: not a must, but if you want a historical show about only temporarily united rebels going up against the Empire and winning (for now), have a look.

Comments

[ratcreature]

In my Latin class we had to pronounce C as K. In Roman times I imagine they must already have had a ton of dialect variation, long before it diverged into separate Romance languages, though I imagine the barbarians would have been more likely to speak "proper" Latin having had to learn it as a second language or recent switch than the long time users. Kind of like it's much easier to understand English in Northern Scotland than in Glasgow, because they used to speak Gaelic fairly recently. Or spoken German being close to standard in the North rather than incomprehensible dialects you need subtitles for...

[selenak]

Good point, except from the perspektive of this Southerner some dialects in the North need subtitles, too. ;)

(Something that was fascinating to me when talking with some then still living exiles in Los Angeles in the mid 1990s who'd left Germany because of Hitler: you could still tell where they had come from, regionally, when they spoke German. Not in their English, which was contemporary. But their German was that from 60, 70 years ago, not just vocabulary wise but with specific regional inflections, too.)

Re: Latin pronounciation, in my class, the C = K thing was explained but handwaved; otoh, once we got around to verse when reading and translating Ovid, you better get the hexameters right when reading out loud...

[ratcreature]

The Northern dialects are incomprehensible for most locals too, those are reclassified as minority languages now...

I mean, some generations ago the intentional switch was kind of a familial trauma, e.g. my mother couldn't talk to her grandparents, because her parents had decided to raise their children only with standard German so they wouldn't be punished in school for talking "wrong" and had forbidden their parents to talk in Low German, and they had very little standard German and kept making grammar mistakes, because it has fewer cases, does gender differently etc. So that part of getting to mutually intelligible speech sucked.

[watervole]

Blimey, I though four cases was bad enough!

[ratcreature]

Well, Low German has fewer cases than standard German, only two. Genetive has been mostly lost (which isn't that big a deal compared to standard because that's on the same trajectory, especially the spoken language), but dative and accusative have merged with just one case for objects in the Low German dialect around here. And not making that distinction or guessing the wrong case with standard sounds really wrong.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Where did you learn Latin? I learned in the US (Arizona and California), and we had to do the "k" pronunciation as well. In fact, we had to do as close to the reconstructed "Classical" pronunciation as we could come. When I got to graduate school and took a course on the history of Latin, during which we went over the evidence for the reconstructed literary pronunciation, there weren't many, if any, differences between that and what I was taught to do in Latin 101. The main aspects in which we were allowed to fall short were the parts that would have been physically difficult for us to hear or pronounce: long/short vowels, the 'r' (pronouncing 'r's in other languages is always hard; I'm looking at you, German ;) ), double consonants, etc.

I find it interesting that apparently in Germany the Classical pronunciation doesn't get used either. I know the Romance language countries (Brazil included) go with a more medieval pronunciation, and I remember learning that the pronunciation used in the UK has some differences from the US, although I forget the specifics. But I had no idea about Germany.

selenak, when you say "soft c", do you mean "Si-se-ro" or "Chi-che-ro"? One of my Latin profs was a medievalist at heart, and would occasionally use the "Chi-che-ro" pronunciation for us, just to expose us to the (a) medieval variant, but there was no "Si-se-ro" allowed in our Latin.

In Roman times I imagine they must already have had a ton of dialect variation

They did indeed. We can tell from inscriptions, from poetry, from the Satyricon, and from occasional explicit remarks. I was always made aware that the "reconstructed" pronunciation I learned was one of many, that it happened to be the prestigious, literary one but was no more "correct" than any other, and that to what extent it was used by actual people speaking Latin was unknown, but certainly not everyone.

It's worth noting that there were also other Italic languages, not just Latin dialects, being spoken in the Italian peninsula in Roman times, though they were starting to go extinct by the time of Teutoburg. And we can see from early Roman literature that there were people whose pronunciation of Latin was influenced by these, especially if Latin was their second language.

In Plautus' time already, there were people who pronounced it "Si-se-ro", even though those people aren't why we pronounce it that way today. The same sound changes have happened more than once in the history of Latin.

I imagine the barbarians would have been more likely to speak "proper" Latin

Perhaps. I lack evidence (this not having been covered in my history of Latin studies), but I imagine it depended a lot on whether they were singled out to be Roman hostages and *taught*, or whether they picked it up from random soldiers through trade and negotiating and such at the frontier. I imagine there was a lot of pidgin being spoken that is now lost to us.

the Cherusci, Marbodians etc. speak modern German. Good choice, especially since honestly we have no idea what they spoke and how it sounded like. The earliest documents in early medieval German are from many centuries later.

True, although I can't resist pointing out that the same is true for Proto-Indo-European, and yet I have a colleague who specializes in reconstructing it and coaching people in speaking it for things like video games. ;)

That said, while we can reconstruct some generic "Proto-Germanic" pronunciation, we utterly lack any specifics as to how the Cherusci spoke circa 9 CE, and we would certainly get it wrong, and even if they miraculously pronounced things exactly like our generic reconstruction, we'd have to invent a lot of vocabulary to make a movie (which is what's going on in that video game work--the pronunciation is the most historically grounded part).

The question of "are we reconstructing the actual pronunciation of an unattested language, or just coming up with correspondences between sounds in attested languages?" is one that gets a certain amount of ink spilled by the people who care. I remember my Indo-European linguistics professor telling us which scholars thought we could get a time machine and make ourselves understood--with, obviously, some surprises--and which thought our reconstructed pronunciation, while probably correct in detail, as a *whole* didn't correspond to any one place and time but to individual details assembled from a bunch of different places and times, such that no human ever spoke anything like what we reconstruct.

...Sorry, you accidentally hit on the topic of my PhD. ;)

Anyway, German for this movie: good choice!

[ratcreature]

I learned Latin in Germany too, but there are differences between states, because education isn't centralized (and used to be even less so than now) and it probably changed over time, though my older siblings also did the K pronunciation almost a decade before me already.

Rs however just kind of suck. I hate the trilled R in particular, and yet languages I'm trying to learn insist on having that obnoxious sound. Even though it's apparently hard even for native speakers -- I read somewhere it's among the last sounds children manage in languages that have it. Though actually some German regions are weirdos doing that rolling R thing, no idea why. But I think German is quite forgiving with Rs since you can do different kinds and they're all allophones that will sound okay.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Interesting! That reminds me, the people I know who learned Latin in the US in a religious context learned the ecclesiastical pronunciation, the "Chi-che-ro" one, but everyone I know who learned it in an academic context learned "Ki-ke-ro."

Even though it's apparently hard even for native speakers -- I read somewhere it's among the last sounds children manage in languages that have it.

Lol, I needed a year of speech therapy as a child just to manage the English 'r' (along with 'ch', 'sh', and 'j').

But I think German is quite forgiving with Rs since you can do different kinds and they're all allophones that will sound okay.

You might think so, but have you ever tried being a non-German speaker asking for directions in Germany? In Berlin, my wife tried asking someone how to get to Neue Grünstraße, and the guy--who, surprisingly, spoke enough English to understand the question and give directions*--needed her to repeat it several times before he said, "Oh, you mean GRRRRRünstraße!" with a German 'r'. It's not easy!

* She agrees with me that finding such people in Germany was difficult, contrary to the perception of German speakers who speak English well enough to tell us that everyone in Germany speaks conversational English. ;)

[ratcreature]

From my experiences in Berlin the natives just aren't very helpful and frequently just rude, which they think is charmingly authentic or something, insisting that despite their reputation and them frequently being at the top of "most unfriendly places" lists etc. it only means they are misunderstood... So chances are half of the people you asked may have even understood you, but just couldn't be bothered.

[mildred_of_midgard]

That possibility did occur to me, but many of these people gave off a friendly and helpful vibe like they were doing their best, just...not in English, or sometimes not in adequate English. Including in other German-speaking cities like Munich, Leipzig, and Vienna. It felt much the same as in other European cities where you were just going to have to get by on sign language to get around if you didn't speak the language. On one occasion (in Munich) I had a friendly bilingual bystander stop what they were doing to translate for me and a museum staff member who genuinely didn't seem to understand what I was saying, and everyone acted like that was totally normal.

In any case, on two visits of 7-10 days each, I haven't found it noticeably easier to get around Germany without knowing German than I have in any other European country I've visited. You give thanks when you get lucky, otherwise, you sign, make do, or do without.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I'd expect you to have better luck with English in countries like the Netherlands or Scandinavia than in Germany. Also it's really hard to be put on the spot suddenly. I mean, I'm fluent in English but find suddenly having to talk really awkward, because I mostly use it in writing. I need some days in an English-speaking environment to get over that.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Never been to Scandinavia, but of the European countries I've been to (the non-British Isles ones, obviously), the most success I had getting around on pure English was in the Netherlands.

Also it's really hard to be put on the spot suddenly. I mean, I'm fluent in English but find suddenly having to talk really awkward, because I mostly use it in writing.

Now, that I believe, because my perception was that while some of these people had not a clue what I was saying, others were clearly trying to communicate back to me in German + sign, which led me to believe that they understood my English, my signing, or both. Which is part of the reason that, while I have no interest in learning to speak any other languages, once I can read German relatively fluently, I'd like to improve my listening comprehension. I feel like there would be a huge payoff for the lower (compared to speaking) effort in learning to understand spoken German, even if I still have to sign and repeat myself a lot in English to make myself understood. Also, then selenak won't have to summarize YouTube videos for me. ;)

(I'm also really bad at understanding other people's signing, I have to admit. If I could just improve my comprehension of a number of other languages, I would be much better off, as a person who likes to travel.)

[selenak]

when you say "soft c", do you mean "Si-se-ro" or "Chi-che-ro"? One of my Latin profs was a medievalist at heart, and would occasionally use the "Chi-che-ro" pronunciation for us, just to expose us to the (a) medieval variant, but there was no "Si-se-ro" allowed in our Latin.

Neither, actually. I never heard the prounciation "si-se-ro" until I heard people say it in English. The (not historical but traditional) German pronounciation is zee - zer - o. Ditto for Caesar as Zae - sar. Like I said, my teachers did point out it was actually Kae-sar and Ki-ker-o, but left it at that.

The "Kae-sar" pronounciation in the series also stood out for me because of the Italian speech rhythms which automatically make you expect something like "Cesare", but no.

[msilverstar]

Oh wow, a fourth pronunciation! I'm like mildred, California Latin classes pronouncing it Ki-ke-ro and Kai-sar

[lirazel]

I am super interested in this era and don't often find good narratives about it, so it's great to know that this is at least worth checking out!

[herself_nyc]

I started this last night but was too emotionally wrung out to squint at subtitles or to remember how to make them bigger. But I will go back to it!

Should I watch Vikings? I feel like it's been around forever not really catching my interest but that were I to actually watch any of it I'd probably fall hard. :/

[selenak]

Vikings: I liked the first two seasons. S3 is when the quality starts to dive, s4 rallies a bit and offers a good wrap up/ending for my remaining favourite but continues with the problems, and first half of s5 was when I stopped watching because it became really bad (imo, as always) and I disliked everyone. With this caveat, the first two seasons are hugely enjoyable. Oh, and if you do watch s2, make sure to get the European version of the season finale, because the US one has a cut threesome.

[kalypso]

Well, this sounds quite interesting. Probably I should try to get back into Netflix, as I'm currently missing Discovery, but I'm so far behind on everything I haven't bothered.

Thusnelda is presumably the one whom Tacitus mentions as being pregnant with a child who will have an ironic fate?

[selenak]

The very same.

[kalypso]

I wonder if they'll take it that far.

[msilverstar]

Looks like a fine history series, we all like that so maybe could watch together!