The Early Germans (The Peoples of Europe)
Malcolm Todd
The growing number of volumes in the "Peoples of Europe" series are generally quite useful to students of early medieval history; at less than 300 pages, they do well as surveys. This one, unfortunately, is one of the less readable efforts. Todd is interested in the Germanic tribes and their migrations from the early Roman Empire up to about 700 A.D., but he wanders from a chronological coverage of all the multitude of Germanic peoples (who never thought of themselves as "Germans" in the first place), to a topical one (chapters on economy and agriculture, social institutions, burial practices, trade and diplomacy, art and technology, etc), to a geographical survey divided into sections on Goths, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, Gepids, Lombards, and (oddly) Scandinavians. It's a confusing book to read, with various groups appearing (naturally) in each other's chapters. Todd also mentions in passing specialized information or rival interpretations of the sources that he apparently assumes everyone knows -- which is a bad assumption in a survey of this kind. While there's useful stuff here, I would not suggest this as a first resource for someone new to the field. Instead, I would recommend the separate books in this series by James on the Franks, Heather on the Goths, and Christie on the Lombards -- and Heather's latest, _The Fall of the Roman Empire_ (2006), over all of them.
