What do an early medieval Germanic tribe and modern goth music have in common? More than you might think—Ken Mondschein tells the story of how the Goths gave their name to one of today’s most enduring cultural styles.
By Ken Mondschein
I’ve recently been on a bit of an old-school goth music kick—mostly Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy, bands which, though they only put out a handful of albums each, helped to define a genre. But how did music with heavy beats, darkly melodic bass lines, and vocals intoned like a morbid ritual get associated with a migration-era Germanic tribe?
The actual Goths were first mentioned by Roman and Greek authors in the third century CE as living north of the Danube. Pushed east by stronger peoples in the late fourth century, they crossed the border and became Roman foederates, or dependent peoples. As the empire fell apart, various factions seized the provinces: the Visigoths (Western Goths) sacked Rome in 410 and then moved to what is now Spain, where the next-to-last Western Roman Emperor, Julius Nepos, recognized them as an independent kingdom in 475. The Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) founded a short-lived kingdom in Ravenna, Italy, in 493, which lasted until it was reconquered by the Emperor Justinian in 554. Today, the Goths are remembered in numerous place-names throughout Europe, such as the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden.
A 20th-century depiction of the Goth leader Alaric by Allan Stewart (1865–1951) – Wikimedia Commons
However, much like many things associated with the “medieval,” to trace the origins of the small-g gothic aesthetic, we need to look back to the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the Yale historian Peter Gay put it, the Romantic was the “re-enchantment of the world,” a reaction to Newton’s mechanistic natural philosophy or the Marquis de Condorcet’s epistemological and mathematical demonstrations of an inevitable march towards a more enlightened society. While the Enlightenment looked forward to a bright future, the gothic was its antithesis: characters move through a moody penumbra of doom, the present is haunted by the past, and the overall atmosphere is one of decay and dread. While not lacking in the bright colors later celebrated by the Pre-Raphaelites, the gothic Middle Ages are depicted as an age of childish unreason that has left a dark legacy whose skeletal hands might still reach through the veils of time to throttle the joy from the present.
The first work of gothic literature is usually held to be Horace Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto, a tale of doomed love and the past returning to haunt the present. (Read it, if you dare, but don’t expect high art.) Walpole held that it was based on a nightmare he had at his mansion, Strawberry Hill House, which he had refashioned into a whimsical 18th-century version of medieval gothic architecture. Likewise, Thomas Percy in his highly bowdlerized and highly successful Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) portrays the Middle Ages as a time of emotion, loss, and, as David Matthews asserts, “marvellous darkness.”
The Past and The Present by Thomas Cole
This sensibility was not limited to England, as the American painter Thomas Cole’s (1801–1848) paired paintings The Past and The Present (held in Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum) illustrate. The first picture shows a bright, colorful jousting tournament held before a newly constructed castle. The second shows the castle in ruins, decayed and deserted. The contrast between medieval color and emotion and the decayed splendor of the past is stark.
Abbot Suger in window in ambulatory, Abbaye St-Denis, St-Denis, Paris – Wikimedia Commons
Cole’s paintings and the contrast between Walpole’s bright Strawberry Hill House and his dark novel mirror the truth of history: the original gothic, far from being gloomy, was a style that emphasized light and space. In 1140, Abbot Suger rebuilt the apse of St. Denis, north of Paris, in a new style that used pointed arches to open up space for stained-glass windows. This technique gave the building an unprecedented airiness and lightness. As time went on, medieval builders found ways to make structures even taller and lighter. The mid-thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle in Paris achieved such a degree of dissolving structure into stained glass that ironworks are necessary for its structural integrity.
Originally, this architectural fashion was simply known as the “French style.” In 1550, the Italian architect and historian Giorgio Vasari contrasted the new mode of building he championed, which aimed to revive “proper” Roman order, with the barbarous “German” building of the Goths, who had ravaged the Empire. (In actuality, the migration-era conquerors were usually a thin layer of military aristocracy imposed on the original Roman-era local population, whose ancestors might date back to the Neolithic.) Though the “gothic” label was derogatory—as were the terms for many fashions in art and architecture—it stuck.
One of the chief exports of the Renaissance, Italian-style Roman revival became all the rage throughout early modern Europe. Christopher Wren, for instance, refused to rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral in the gothic mode after the London fire of 1666; instead, he designed it in the Italianate fashion, including the great dome for which it is now famous. The Gothic revival, exemplified by Walpole’s mansion, was a later generation’s reaction to this now-dominant style, a harkening back to the past that also allowed the newly affluent to evoke an imagined noble ancestry. Thence, it became a literary movement. One of its hallmarks, besides the presence of the decaying medieval, was the Byronic hero: intense, brooding, and haunted, such as Ann Radcliffe’s various characters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (1847).
Still from the movie Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, released 26 February 1920 in Germany, and March 19, 1921 in United States.
From literature, the gothic aesthetic was transmitted into film, of which the German Expressionist cinema‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) are perhaps the earliest and most influential examples. They were followed by Universal Pictures’ 1931 Frankenstein and Dracula, both of which feature brooding castles and the legacy of the decayed medieval, and Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the same year. The American filmmakers had elided the deeper meanings of the eighteenth century, such as the medieval-gothic being associated with “superstitious” Catholicism, and made it shorthand for “spooky.” This opened the door for both the campy and the sexy: The Addams Family debuted in 1938, and Maila Nurmi’s Vampira character followed in 1954—both, notably, putting femme fatales wearing Victorian mourning dress front and center. Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966 as a publicity stunt-cum-protest, while the American soap opera Dark Shadows premiered the same year.
The Doors were led by vocalist Jim Morrison
The counterculture and the punk movement of the 1960s and ’70s inherited all of these ideas of the gothic. The first band to be termed “gothic rock” was The Doors, by William College undergraduate John Stickney in 1967—fittingly so, both because of their atmospheric sound and singer Jim Morrison’s Byronic public persona. Punk progenitor Siouxsie Sioux was another progenitor of both gothic fashion and sound, with her distinctive look drawn from silent film stars such as Theda Bara and the glam rock of David Bowie. However, though Siouxsie and the Banshees had been performing since early 1977, the first “gothic” single is generally held to be Bauhaus’s 1979 single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
The relationship between the original Gothic people, gothic architecture, the neo-gothic revival, gothic film and literature, and the “goth” genre is tenuous at best. Yet it also shows how the Middle Ages—or the idea of the Middle Ages—can have an indirect and lasting legacy.
What do an early medieval Germanic tribe and modern goth music have in common? More than you might think—Ken Mondschein tells the story of how the Goths gave their name to one of today’s most enduring cultural styles.
By Ken Mondschein
I’ve recently been on a bit of an old-school goth music kick—mostly Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy, bands which, though they only put out a handful of albums each, helped to define a genre. But how did music with heavy beats, darkly melodic bass lines, and vocals intoned like a morbid ritual get associated with a migration-era Germanic tribe?
The actual Goths were first mentioned by Roman and Greek authors in the third century CE as living north of the Danube. Pushed east by stronger peoples in the late fourth century, they crossed the border and became Roman foederates, or dependent peoples. As the empire fell apart, various factions seized the provinces: the Visigoths (Western Goths) sacked Rome in 410 and then moved to what is now Spain, where the next-to-last Western Roman Emperor, Julius Nepos, recognized them as an independent kingdom in 475. The Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) founded a short-lived kingdom in Ravenna, Italy, in 493, which lasted until it was reconquered by the Emperor Justinian in 554. Today, the Goths are remembered in numerous place-names throughout Europe, such as the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden.
However, much like many things associated with the “medieval,” to trace the origins of the small-g gothic aesthetic, we need to look back to the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the Yale historian Peter Gay put it, the Romantic was the “re-enchantment of the world,” a reaction to Newton’s mechanistic natural philosophy or the Marquis de Condorcet’s epistemological and mathematical demonstrations of an inevitable march towards a more enlightened society. While the Enlightenment looked forward to a bright future, the gothic was its antithesis: characters move through a moody penumbra of doom, the present is haunted by the past, and the overall atmosphere is one of decay and dread. While not lacking in the bright colors later celebrated by the Pre-Raphaelites, the gothic Middle Ages are depicted as an age of childish unreason that has left a dark legacy whose skeletal hands might still reach through the veils of time to throttle the joy from the present.
The first work of gothic literature is usually held to be Horace Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto, a tale of doomed love and the past returning to haunt the present. (Read it, if you dare, but don’t expect high art.) Walpole held that it was based on a nightmare he had at his mansion, Strawberry Hill House, which he had refashioned into a whimsical 18th-century version of medieval gothic architecture. Likewise, Thomas Percy in his highly bowdlerized and highly successful Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) portrays the Middle Ages as a time of emotion, loss, and, as David Matthews asserts, “marvellous darkness.”
This sensibility was not limited to England, as the American painter Thomas Cole’s (1801–1848) paired paintings The Past and The Present (held in Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum) illustrate. The first picture shows a bright, colorful jousting tournament held before a newly constructed castle. The second shows the castle in ruins, decayed and deserted. The contrast between medieval color and emotion and the decayed splendor of the past is stark.
Cole’s paintings and the contrast between Walpole’s bright Strawberry Hill House and his dark novel mirror the truth of history: the original gothic, far from being gloomy, was a style that emphasized light and space. In 1140, Abbot Suger rebuilt the apse of St. Denis, north of Paris, in a new style that used pointed arches to open up space for stained-glass windows. This technique gave the building an unprecedented airiness and lightness. As time went on, medieval builders found ways to make structures even taller and lighter. The mid-thirteenth-century Sainte-Chapelle in Paris achieved such a degree of dissolving structure into stained glass that ironworks are necessary for its structural integrity.
Originally, this architectural fashion was simply known as the “French style.” In 1550, the Italian architect and historian Giorgio Vasari contrasted the new mode of building he championed, which aimed to revive “proper” Roman order, with the barbarous “German” building of the Goths, who had ravaged the Empire. (In actuality, the migration-era conquerors were usually a thin layer of military aristocracy imposed on the original Roman-era local population, whose ancestors might date back to the Neolithic.) Though the “gothic” label was derogatory—as were the terms for many fashions in art and architecture—it stuck.
One of the chief exports of the Renaissance, Italian-style Roman revival became all the rage throughout early modern Europe. Christopher Wren, for instance, refused to rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral in the gothic mode after the London fire of 1666; instead, he designed it in the Italianate fashion, including the great dome for which it is now famous. The Gothic revival, exemplified by Walpole’s mansion, was a later generation’s reaction to this now-dominant style, a harkening back to the past that also allowed the newly affluent to evoke an imagined noble ancestry. Thence, it became a literary movement. One of its hallmarks, besides the presence of the decaying medieval, was the Byronic hero: intense, brooding, and haunted, such as Ann Radcliffe’s various characters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (1847).
From literature, the gothic aesthetic was transmitted into film, of which the German Expressionist cinema‘s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) are perhaps the earliest and most influential examples. They were followed by Universal Pictures’ 1931 Frankenstein and Dracula, both of which feature brooding castles and the legacy of the decayed medieval, and Paramount’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the same year. The American filmmakers had elided the deeper meanings of the eighteenth century, such as the medieval-gothic being associated with “superstitious” Catholicism, and made it shorthand for “spooky.” This opened the door for both the campy and the sexy: The Addams Family debuted in 1938, and Maila Nurmi’s Vampira character followed in 1954—both, notably, putting femme fatales wearing Victorian mourning dress front and center. Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966 as a publicity stunt-cum-protest, while the American soap opera Dark Shadows premiered the same year.
The counterculture and the punk movement of the 1960s and ’70s inherited all of these ideas of the gothic. The first band to be termed “gothic rock” was The Doors, by William College undergraduate John Stickney in 1967—fittingly so, both because of their atmospheric sound and singer Jim Morrison’s Byronic public persona. Punk progenitor Siouxsie Sioux was another progenitor of both gothic fashion and sound, with her distinctive look drawn from silent film stars such as Theda Bara and the glam rock of David Bowie. However, though Siouxsie and the Banshees had been performing since early 1977, the first “gothic” single is generally held to be Bauhaus’s 1979 single “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
The relationship between the original Gothic people, gothic architecture, the neo-gothic revival, gothic film and literature, and the “goth” genre is tenuous at best. Yet it also shows how the Middle Ages—or the idea of the Middle Ages—can have an indirect and lasting legacy.
Ken Mondschein is a scholar, writer, college professor, fencing master, and occasional jouster. Ken’s latest book is On Time: A History of Western Timekeeping. Click here to visit his website.
Click here to read more from Ken Mondschein
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