The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture

This is truly a masterpiece on the Huns. Sadly, it's incomplete. It's far superior to the work of Thompson on the Huns even in this incomplete state. The analytical methodical scholarship, typical of savants of the German school, is seen throughout. This is supported by the author's 1sthand experience amidst Altaic nomads. One can only imagine the outcome if Maenchen-Helfen had lived longer. One doesn't see scholars of his stature anymore in Central Asian studies. In contrast to other reviewers, his compendium on the Huns is fun to read. It's always amusing to see a magisterial scholar speak frankly about lesser mortals. He certainly considered E.A. Thompson, the best known of the few English historians of the Huns, to be a slipshod scholar &--unkindest cut of all in Oxford--a poor Latinist. All these scholars are long gone. But the myths that he worked so hard to explode live on. One in particular is standard fare in recent books: that the Huns in eastern (& briefly western) Europe were the same as the Hsiung-nu on the borders of China. This error creates a gigantic transcontinental Hunnic empire in the 4th or 5th centuries that never existed. He also explodes the story still taught, at least in Catholic school histories, that the bold & holy Leo III confronted Attila & saved Rome. This, too, never happened. It turns out that despite their well-earned fearsome reputation, the Huns were a passing fad in history & not much of a military force. Masters of the compound bow & mounted, they were hideous raiders. But they won few big battles against the Romans (more properly, Germans in Roman pay) & were often slaughtered. From the time they showed up around 370 to their disappearance was hardly more than 70 years. He's suitably agnostic about most details, including their language, which may have been a kind of Turkish, their religion, their political organization etc. One of the few things certain is that they boiled mutton in poorly manufactured copper kettles. Maenchen-Helfen himself is an attractive character. As a young scholar, he spent some months with the last of the wild Turkic tribes in Mongolia. That was in '29. A few years later, he evacuated Germany. His friends who assembled this volume from his papers after his death don't say he was rejecting Hitlerism, but that's the implication. Few enough among German scholars, especially in such a racially charged field as Hunnic studies, showed such humanity. In exile in California for the rest of his life, he seems to have maintained intellectual integrity in a field where ax-grinding, by German, Soviet, Slav & sometimes Turkish students was rife. It's odd enough that practically every educated American knows a bit about the Huns, tho few have even heard of the Sarmatians, their more important predecessors. This is thanks to the effect, still lingering after nearly 1500 years, of outrageously dishonest Christian propaganda. Odder that everything we were taught was wrong. Those who dislike being abused by bad teachers will want to know this book, even if they care little about what the Huns did or who they were--Harry Eagar (edited)