The Varini, Warni or Warini were one or more Germanic peoples who originally lived in what is now northeastern Germany, near the Baltic sea. They are first named in the Roman era, but appear to have survived into the Middle Ages. It is proposed that in Old English they were called Werns or Warns.
Name and Etymology
spelled the name as Varini, Pliny the Elder as Varinnae, PtolemyViruniΟύίρουνοι, Procopius as Varni. Later attestions include Wærne or Werne in the Old English Widsith, and Warnii in the Lex Thuringorum. The name supposedly meant "defenders", "living by the river".
Attestations
Classical
The earliest mention of this tribe appears in Pliny the Elder's Natural History. He wrote that there were five Germanic races, and one of these were the Vandals. These included the Burgodiones, the Varinnae, the Charini and the Gutones. Tacitus gave the most information about the Varini in his Germania. He mentioned them as one of a group of remote Suevian peoples, living beyond the Semnones and Langobardi. He did not mention that they were Vandili. Surviving versions of the second centuryGeography by Ptolemy included the Viruni in the description of Germania, but these are difficult to interpret and have apparently become corrupted. These describe the Viruni as being near the otherwise unknown "Teutonoari". Gudmund Schütte suggested that this name is an error combining the Teutones and "Aoaroi", and would equate the later to the Varini as a doubling-up error. Together these two peoples were surrounded by:
The Elbe to their west. Schütte reconstructs Ptolomy's intentions in such a way that the Langobards were living in this area.
A river called the Chalusus to the east, beyond which the surviving versions of Ptolemy's Geography name the Teutones and Avarni. Schütte proposes to be a doubling-up of the same two peoples supposedly west of this river. West of them, in turn is another unknown river the "Suevos" and a people called the Aelvaeones.
Saxons to their north, between Elbe and Chalusus. Some scholars such as Matthias Springer believe the text originally said "Aviones".). To the east of these Saxons over the Chalusus, are the Farodini.
The large Suevian people the Semnones, to their south, whose territory also stretches east of the Chalusus, as far as the Suevos.
This is perhaps in the area of Mecklenburg, where one of the main rivers is Warnow and a town is called Warnemünde. Ptolemy also plotted the position of a town named Virunum at 40°30' longitude and 55° latitude using his system. This was however east of the Chalusus river, between the "Suevus" and "Viadua" rivers, which both lay between the Chalusus and the Vistula according to him. The town Οὐιρουνον has been identified as somewhere near modern-day Drawsko Pomorskie.
Late antiquity
The Warini were mentioned by Procopius in the 6th century, implying that the Varini had a very large territory in his time. Procopius situates the Varni bordering the Franks, with only the riverRhine between them, but also stretching to the coast. Their king Hermegisclus had made a strategic alliance with the Frankish ruler Theudebert I, marrying his sister Theudechild. As the king died, the satraps compelled his son Radigis to marry his stepmother. The son, however, was already engaged with a British queen, who crossed the North Sea with an army of 400 ships and 100.000 men, seeking retaliation. Radigis was caught hiding in a wood not far from the mouth of the Rhine and had no other choice than to marry his fiancée. He also wrote in passing that when the Heruls had been defeated by the Lombards, some of them moved to Scandinavia. When other Heruls sought to find them years later, they crossed the Danube, went through the lands of the Slavs and after a barren region, they came to the land of the Warni. After these Warni they passed through the land of the Danes, and then crossed the sea from there to Scandinavia, where they found them living with the Geats. Others, however, question Procopius's reliability for this northern region. Modern scholars claim that the area north of the Rhine may have been under Frankish control during the greater parts of the 6th and 7th centuries, at least since the defeat of the Danish sea-king Hygelac in 526. According to the chronicle of Fredegar the Varni or Warni rebelled against the Merovingian Franks in 594 and were bloodily defeated by Childebert II in 595 "so that few of them survived". The Warini also appear in the title of a 9th-century legal codex, Lex Angliorum, Werinorum hoc est Thuringorum, which has much in common with Frankisch, Frisian and Saxon law codes. Recent research suggests that they were part of a Thuringian federation, which dominated Northern Germany from Atilla's death in 453 to the middle of the 6th century when they were crushed by the Franks. Their military fame might explain why the names of the Warini and Thuringians have been mentioned in a much wider area, extending even beyond the Rhine. Their home country seems to have been the district between the rivers Saale and Elster, which was called Werenofeld. When the region east of the Elbe became Slavic-speaking, a group in this region continued to be called Warnabi, perhaps representing assimilated Varni. The Warini are mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon poem Widsith as the Wærne or Werne. The name Billing, mentioned in Widsith, might be related to the ancestors of the Saxon Billung-family.
