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Long after the smoke from the battlefields died down, long after the ravens had eaten their fill, the Migration Era lived on in Germanic heroic legend, well into the Middle Ages.

For centuries after the battles and events of that era, people throughout Europe were crafting legends and sagas that repurposed and mythologized those events, sometimes recasting major figures from that time into villains and heroes of a later saga. Goths and Huns figured prominently. And that is our subject today: who got mythologized, and how.

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How an Empire Ends: Germanic Heroic Legend