Gaiseric and Desdichado

I use a small cropped version of the following Angus MacBride image as my avatar on many locations.  It's actually an image of Valaris, an Ostrogothic warrior who makes up a small vignette in the history of Procopius about the Gothic War that the Eastern Roman Empire fought against the Goths who had occupied and conquered Italy.  Although ultimately the Byzantines won that war against Totila and the Goths, they did so in such a Pyrrhic fashion that the Ostrogoths' relatives the Lombards were able to sweep in essentially unopposed and took their place.  Today much of northern Italy is still called "Lombardy" and has an essentially Germanic cultural character (although it no longer speaks a Germanic language for most of that area.)  Southern Italy was later exposed to conquest by the Normans.  And the Byzantines were so drained that their own empire gradually faded away; their loss of strength led directly to the need for the First Crusade to defend Eastern Christendom against the resurgent heathens of Islam.

For a variety of reasons, the success against the pagans was only limited and ultimately, under the martial leadership of the Ottomans they conquered most of the territory of Byzantium, and they hold it still.  One day (and hopefully one day in my lifetime, although I'm not holding my breath) it will be rewon for Christendom again.  But first, Christendom has a long process to "cleanse the inner vessel" before it can set its ambitions on anything bigger.  Christendom has brought itself to an existential crisis by the idolatry and iniquity of the majority of traditional Christians.  Sigh.

Anyway, although the image is of Valaris, who not only eventually lost his duel to Artabazes (although he killed him in turn) and an Ostrogoth, it was presented as a representative example of the Late Migration period Germanic warrior.  My own identity is not with the Goths, obviously, but with others of their cousins from the migrations.  I consider myself very about 40% Celtic (Briton and Scottish), 40% Germanic (Anglo-Saxon with a layer of Viking and Norman on top of that) and about 20% "other" (mostly Portuguese, but some small amount of Prussian Jew).  So, the barbarians that harried Rome were not my direct ancestors, but rather close cousins of my direct ancestors.  My own ancestors were more interested in expanding northwestward rather than southeastward.  While I can look at the raids of Brennus or the conquests of Theoderic as part of my "heritage" that's possibly stretching it just a bit.  My heritage is more the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, Horsa and Hengist, Ælle, and the Heptarchy generally (and the Celtic substrate that remained and contributed significantly to the genetics, if not necessarily to the culture and linguistics, of the English as they later emerged.)

Because of that "extended" heritage, where I claim all of the migration period Germanic peoples as part of my heritage (especially if they are concerned with burning down the decadent and wasted strength of the empire, which we are in dire need of again), one of my earlier nom de plumes when I decided that using my real name was becoming inadvisable, was Gaiseric, a king of the Vandals who ravaged what was once the provinces of Hispania and Mauretania and Numidia, sacked Rome in 455, and established a pirate power based in Northern Africa (of all places).  Sadly, his legacy didn't outlive him very long, but the name of his people entered our language as a synonym for destruction of property (vandalism).

Desdichado, on the other hand, is a name that has a much closer tie to my own specific heritage, it being the alias that Ivanhoe used when fighting at the lists of Ashby.  Sir Walter Scott intimated that Desdichado meant "disinherited" which describes Ivanhoe's situation in more ways than one; he's literally disinherited by his father Cedric, and his people, the Anglo-Saxons, have been conquered and suffer the overlordship of the foreign Normans.  Of course, Ivanhoe himself (and his soon-to-be wife Rowena) was not particularly interested in Anglo-Saxon resurgence; his generation was more about the budding identity of English which was mostly Anglo-Saxon, but which absorbed the Normans as well.  Historically (and linguistically) this is nonsense; the English identity didn't emerge until the Hundred Years War, more than two hundred and fifty years after the time frame of Ivanhoe, and Desdichado doesn't actually mean disinherited; it actually is simply a rather fancy word for "unhappy."

Be that as it may, I relate to the concept of Desdichado; our own culture and heritage and country (which is a subset of that Ivanhoe would have founded had he been a real person) has mostly been stolen out from under us, leaving us disinherited in our own lands.  I'm surprised, disappointed, and yet also not that so few people get the reference—I had one guy ask me sarcastically if I was from the "Yorkshire Desdichados, then?" until I pointed out that it's not my real name, and if we actually still had our culture intact, he'd probably get the reference since Ivanhoe is much more a classic of English literature than the anti-literature that the so-called literati have tried to foist on us during our indoctrination posing as education.

In any case, I could have looked for an image that's more specifically Third Crusade age, but since Ivanhoe is a fairly typical romanticized local version of the Germanic warrior, I kept the image of Valaris, who was presented as the prototypical Germanic Warrior in the Osprey series of the same title by Simon MacDowall.  Plus, I was already using the image, and I like it.