The Legends of Ermanaric

Caroline Brady (1905–1980) was an American philologist whose scholarship focused on Old English and Old Norse works. Brady's book "The Legends of Ermanaric" suggests the Gothic king Ermanaric, who ruled in the fourth century AD, was the subject of two competing traditions: one, in Ostrogothic lore, viewing him as a good king, and a second, promulgated by those subjugated by him, as evil. Brady's thesis gained less traction than her ability to investigate the intractable problems of Germanic myth, and the convoluted nature of the related scholarship. She was noted as "a broad and discriminating investigator", who had "a sovereign disregard of established opinion". Such disregard caused one reviewer to label Brady's work "more valuable in the sphere of criticism than construction," and another to note that her "conclusions are reached without reliance on the views of predecessors, and one may be sure that, in some quarters, the volume will be thoroughly combed for flaws to match those it has uncovered in the reasoning of others". Indeed, after Brady's "vigorous tilting with no less a scholar than Kemp Malone," he penned two separate reviews disparaging what he termed her scholastic immaturity, and suggesting "she overestimates the worth of debaters' points". Others shared concerns with Brady's thesis without being so dismissive, including the Old English scholar Philip W. Souers,[72] who wrote that: "Her knowledge, from linguistics to archaeology, is great; her command of bibliography is sure; her acquaintance with languages shows the temper of a true scholar... It was worth doing, to try to establish a late Gothic legend that could be seen reflected in the Norse, to see where the results would lead. Others have always worked from the German sources. Though I cannot accept her hypothesis as proved, [the book] is without doubt one of the most important works in that difficult subject of heroic legend that has come from American scholarship in recent years."