I’m all in favour of a new Celtic expansionism back into the old homes, although we’d have problems-

1. There is substantial part descent in the peoples currently there. Willing to call them cousins.

2. We need massive increase in Celtic reproductive rates. I’m getting on, but willing to do my part.

I’d like Austria and Bohemia and all the old Hallstatt and LaTene homelands back.

German kind’s drive west against the Celts was halted by Caesar and blocked by Rome for the next half millennium. It regained momentum as Rome crumbled, sucking Germanic energies west into former imperial territory. Many of the few Celtic holdouts were finally overrun, even if most of those holdouts had already drowned in a Latin tsunami. This wandering of the people, coupled with strong pushes from steppe riders like the Huns and Avars, left a vacuum in Eastern Europe for the Slavs to fill for another half millennium before German kind returned to the east.

I always sympathized with the idea that the drang nach osten and its accompanying ostsiedlung [love German phrases] starting from the Middle Ages was just the German speakers reclaiming lands they had left on their drive west into Rome, in front of the invading Huns. The few they left behind, like Crimean Goths, lasted no longer than the 1600s. Still pretty good run.

Someone once wrote an account of some German officer who claimed to be first to put his boot in the Volga in 1942, with this sort of thing in mind.

There’s a limit to all that, of course. For one thing, the Goths probably were never east of the Don. And even back in the iron age they had been migratory peoples coming down from the north onto the steppe, and the ancestors of the slavs may have already been in the Pripet Marshes region. Plus there are still Iranic-speakers who could claim the whole steppe, and plus all of them are long since interrelated anyway. I bet if 24andme could get anything like this fine-grained, every Ukrainian has some of all those peoples right back to the Cimmerians. The real ones, not the Conan ones.

Fun, though.

I recall we had a thread about SF and alternate history a while back. If I didn’t then I recommend Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. The relevant one here is one of his best, “The Sorrows of Odin the Goth”.

Little rough on the Germans in question, but, hey… Ya know what? Don’t start none, won’t be none. You look at it over the long haul of history, and what happened to the German minorities was pretty much just the inevitable pushback from the Balts and Slavs they’d abused and conquered going back to the days of the Teutonic Knights.

This is the lesson to take from that whole thing: If you want peace for your kids and grandkids, don’t be doing wrong things today, because it will eventually come back on you.

Of course, that’s only if you leave survivors.

Which, I suppose, is the alternative lesson: If you’re going to do evil, have the conviction of your beliefs, and go all the way.