Horizon

I suspect it is the Indo-European bit (since almost all European languages are descended from the Indo- root), with some dubious Madame Blatvesky stuff thrown in. From the 1880s onwards there was a strand of mystical whatnot which claimed the 'Masters' came from the Tibetean area (cf Blatvesky's Masters of the World) hence the Nazi fascination for the area - including the archaeological expeditions as fictionalised in Seven Years in Tibet - and the belief that the Aryans were the master race. There's also a whole bundle of theories about the post-resurrection Christ having retreated to the Hindu Kush. It is possible - and I had better emphasise that I am speculating since my own reseach has only glanced at the 1890s stuff, not the post-WW1 stuff - that the Nazi ideaology combined the Nietzchen Superman with the Aryan Masters and threw in the blond image as the heroic ideal. Why the blond become synonymous with the Aryan/Superman thing, I have no idea although I am sure there is lots of pyschological theory about it.

Of course, as an Aries, I am always mildly annoyed that I can't say I'm Arien (cf Libra becomes Libran, Taurus becomes Taurean etc)!

poop. I could have sworn I closed that bold tag after "Seven years in Tibet".

Madame Blatvesky

Blavatsky, thank you. Among her many travels she lived for a while at the site of the West Philadelphia White Dog Cafe, a trendy lefty-peacenik hangout on Penn's campus - you'd love it, MAB. There are some great period-ish decorations in there, including a picture which presumably dates from the First World War of a group of duelling dogs - a dachshund in a pickelhaube, a scots terrier with tartan shawl and tam o' shanter, a French poodle, and a very Tsarist-looking Russian hound.

Madame Blavatsky's "work" seems to have influenced Austrian race theorist and neo-paganist Guido Von List (1865-1919) whose "work" influenced the Pan-German movement and Adolf Josef Lanz (1874-1954), a race-fanatic/writer who had a big impact on Hitler.

When I was studying historical linguistics, it seemed that the use of the field by the Nazis to justify their racial policies was a sort of skeleton in the closet. We now are extremely careful to differentiate between a language and its speakers when discussing the movement of languages from one area to another, but until the last few decades, the prevailing theory was the Völkerwanderung.

Actually "prevailing theory" is a bit too tentative -- it just seemed like common sense that England came to speak a Germanic language because waves of Germanic speakers invaded the island and displaced the native Celtic speakers to Wales, Cornwall, and the Highlands. The enormous range of Indo-European -- the first language family seriously studied -- implied some sort of historical conquest. Given the science and pseudoscience of the times, you're not that far from a "master race" theory.

Aryan was used alongside Indo-Germanic as an alternative term for Indo-European in part to describe the area in which it was spoken. Two modern country names are based on the PIE root "arya-" (meaning something like "noble"): Ireland and Iran.

Recent years have seen a revival of the Völkerwanderung theories to describe England, as the more recently advanced theories of peaceful settlement and language borrowing have been criticized as products of PC British scholars unfamiliar with the migrations of refugees common to continental poplations. No one's seriously advancing Völkerwanderungen as the default explanation for language movement, though, especially when discussing IE and Europe.

A big controversy in early medieval history is whether the "barbarian" invasions were really more like refugee crises. In an article on the subject someone (I'll look up the reference if anyone wants to track it down) made a striking point. The whole invasion/refugee idea about the late empire is based to some degree on this assumption that the Germanic tribes were nomadic and constantly wandering around (which seems not to be true in many cases, particularly the tribes which settled right up against the empire's frontiers and were in many ways hard to distinguish from those on the other side). He pointed out that when we speak of other groups of people who are settled in a particular area, it is not usual to assume that they came from somewhere else and that they were merely camped temporarily.

He suggested that the tribes have been cast this way as a direct result of historians' (particularly German historians, I assume) obsession with finding the origin of the volk, with all of the ideological unpleasantness that comes with that.

And I take it that this is related to the linguistic problem. We know very little about these tribes apart from archeological and to some degree linguistic evidence, and the farther from the empire they lived the less we tend to know. I believe that very few of them had any writing systems, although there is an extant fragment of the bible translated into Gothic (the work of missionaries, no doubt). Even so, IINM, scholars simply turned to linguistic analysis in an attempt to trace their migrations.

Wasn't it the Huns (or the Huns' steppe cousins)they were fleeing?

Yes. The Visigoths moved into the Empire because of the Huns, and the Emperor let them in but refused to give them a suitable place to settle. It was only after much frustrated negotiation that the German king finally decided to take some territory the hard way, and ended up doing a good job of it, too.

IINM, that was the first "wave".

Nice pun, by the way.