Although historians are confident of where the Jutes settled in England, they are divided on where they actually came from. The chroniclers,
Procopius,
Constantius of Lyon,
Gildas, Bede,
Nennius, and also the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
Alfred the Great and
Asser provide the names of tribes who settled Britain during the mid-fifth century, and in their combined testimony, the four tribes mentioned are the
Angli,
Saxones,
Iutae and
Frisii. The Roman historian
Tacitus refers to a people called the
Eudoses, a tribe who possibly developed into the Jutes. The Jutes have also been identified with the
Eotenas (
ēotenas) involved in the Frisian conflict with the
Danes as described in the
Finnesburg episode in the Old English poem
Beowulf.
Theudebert, king of the Franks, wrote to the Emperor
Justinian and in the letter claimed that he had lordship over a nation called the
Saxones Eucii. The Eucii are thought to have been Jutes and may have been the same as a little-documented tribe called the
Euthiones. The Euthiones are mentioned in a poem by
Venantius Fortunatus (583) as being under the suzerainty of
Chilperic I of the Franks. The Euthiones were located somewhere in northern
Francia, modern day
Flanders, an area of the European mainland opposite to Kent. Bede inferred that the Jutish homeland was on the Jutland peninsula. However, analysis of grave goods of the time have provided a link between East Kent, south Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, but little evidence of any link with Jutland. There is evidence that the Jutes who migrated to England came from northern Francia or from Frisia. Historians have posited that Jutland was the homeland of the Jutes, but when the Danes invaded the Jutland Peninsula in about AD 200, some of the Jutes would have been absorbed by the Danish culture and others may have migrated to northern Francia and Frisia. In Scandinavian sources from the Middle Ages, the Jutes are only sporadically mentioned, now as subgroup of the Danes. There is a
hypothesis, suggested by Pontus Fahlbeck in 1884, that the
Geats were Jutes. According to this hypothesis the Geats resided in southern Sweden and also in Jutland (where Beowulf would have lived). The evidence adduced for this hypothesis includes: • Primary sources referring to the Geats (
Geátas) by alternative names such as
Iútan,
Iótas, and
Eotas. •
Asser in his
Life of Alfred (Chapter 2) identifies the Jutes with the Goths (in a passage claiming that
Alfred the Great was descended, through his mother,
Osburga, from the ruling dynasty of the Jutish kingdom of
Wihtwara, on the Isle of Wight). • The
Gutasaga is a saga that charts the history of Gotland prior to Christianity. It is an appendix to the
Guta Lag (Gotland law) written in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It says that some inhabitants of
Gotland left for
mainland Europe. Large burial sites attributable to either Goths or
Gepids were found in the 19th century near Willenberg, Prussia. However, the tribal names possibly were confused in the above sources in both
Beowulf (8th–11th centuries) and
Widsith (late 7th – 10th century). The
Eoten (in the
Finn passage) are clearly distinguished from the
Geatas. The
Finnish surname
Juutilainen, which comes from the word "juutti", is speculated by some to have had a connection to Jutland or the Jutes.
Possible synonymy with the Frisians While there is no definitive proof that the
Frisians and Jutes were the same people, there is compelling evidence suggesting that they were either a single group known by different names or closely related tribes with overlapping territories, cultures, and identities. The fluidity of ethnic designations during the Migration Period makes it plausible that the distinction between "Frisians" and "Jutes" was more of a practical simplification by later chroniclers than a strict ethnic separation. In several Old English and early medieval sources, such as the
Finnsburg Fragment and the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the terms "Frisians" and "Jutes" appear to be used interchangeably. This suggests that, at least from the perspective of the authors of these texts, the two groups were not clearly distinguishable culturally or ethnically. Moreover, archaeological findings point to strong cultural similarities between the two groups, as burial practices, material goods (such as weapons, pottery, and jewelry), and settlement patterns in Jutland and Frisian territories show remarkable parallels. In the field of linguistics, the linguist
Elmar Seebold argued that the relatively sharp linguistic boundary between Frisian and
Dutch is attributable to migrants from Jutland, with the Jutes simultaneously leaving behind a sharp linguistic boundary between West Germanic and North Germanic in Denmark.
Language and writing The
runic alphabet is thought to have originated in the Germanic homelands that were in contact with the Roman Empire, and as such was a response to the Latin alphabet. In fact some of the runes emulated their Latin counterpart. The runic alphabet crossed the sea with the Anglo-Saxons and there have been examples, of its use, found in Kent. As the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were evangelised the script of the
Latin alphabet was introduced by
Irish Christian missionaries. However, they ran into problems when they were unable to find a Latin equivalent to some of the Anglo-Saxon phonetics. They overcame this by modifying the Latin alphabet to include some runic characters. This became the
Old English Latin alphabet. The runic characters were eventually replaced by Latin characters by the end of the 14th century. The language that the Anglo-Saxon settlers spoke is known as
Old English. There are four main dialectal forms, namely
Mercian,
Northumbrian,
West Saxon and
Kentish. Based on Bede's description of where the Jutes settled, Kentish was spoken in what are now the modern-day counties of
Kent,
Surrey, southern
Hampshire and the
Isle of Wight. However, historians are divided on what dialect it would have been and where it originated from. The Jutish peninsula has been seen by historians as a pivotal region between the
Northern and the
Western Germanic dialects. It has not been possible to prove whether Jutish has always been a Scandinavian dialect which later became heavily influenced by West Germanic dialects, or whether Jutland was originally part of the West Germanic
dialectal continuum. An analysis of the Kentish dialect by linguists indicates that there was a similarity between Kentish and Frisian. Whether the two can be classed as the same dialect or whether Kentish was a version of Jutish, heavily influenced by Frisian and other dialects, is open to conjecture. ==Notes==