Ermanaric

Ermanaric[a] (died 376) was a Greuthungian Gothic king who before the Hunnic invasion evidently ruled a sizable portion of Oium, the part of Scythia inhabited by the Goths at the time.

[4] According to Ammianus, Ermanaric was "a most warlike king" who eventually committed suicide, faced with the aggression of the Alani and of the Huns, who invaded his territories in the 370s.

Jordanes also states that the king put to death a young woman named Sunilda (Svanhildr) with the use of horses, as punishment for her husband's treason.

Edward Gibbon gives the version of Ammianus and Jordanes as historical, reporting that Ermanaric successively conquered, during a reign of about 30 years from AD 337 to 367, the west-goths, the Heruli, the Venedi and the Aestii, establishing a kingdom which ranged from the Baltic to the Black Sea;[7] and died aged 110 of a wound inflicted by the brothers of a woman whom he had cruelly executed for her husband's revolt, being succeeded by his brother Vithimiris.

In the Norse Thidreks Saga, translated from Low German sources, Ermanaric is ill-advised by his treacherous counsellor Bicke, Bikka, Sifka, or Seveke (who wants revenge for the rape of his wife by Ermanaric),[12] with the result that the king puts his own wife to death for supposed adultery with his son;[13] he is thereafter crippled by his brothers-in-law in revenge.

[15] The early modern Low German poem Ermenrichs Tod recounts a garbled version of Ermanaric's death reminiscent of the scene told in Jordanes and Scandinavian legend.