Haliurunas

The account tells that the early Goth king Filimer found witches among his people when they had settled north of the Black Sea, and that he banished them to exile.

They were impregnated by unclean spirits and engendered the Huns, and the account is a precursor of later Christian traditions where wise women were alleged to have sexual intercourse and even orgies with demons and the Devil.

[1] However, others are of the same opinion as Müllenhoff, and analyse the second element as runas, and so it is considered to be cognate with Old English, hellerune ('seeress' or 'witch') and OHG hellirûna ('necromancy') and hellirunari ('necromancer').

[6][7] Orel follows this interpretation and reconstructs it as the Proto-Germanic form *χalja-rūnō(n) in which the first element is *χaljō 'hel, the abode of the dead',[4] and the second is *rūnō ('mystery, secret').

[13] They were in the words of Wolfram "women who engaged in magic with the world of the dead", and they were banished from their tribe by Filimer who was the last pre-Amal dynasty king of the migrating Goths.

[14] We learn from old traditions that their origin was as follows : Filimer, king of the Goths, son of Gadaric the Great, who was the fifth in succession to hold the rule of the Getae after their departure from the island of Scandza — and who, as we have said, entered the land of Scythia with his tribe — found among his people certain witches, whom he called in his native tongue Haliurunnae.

[15]The Haliurunnae found refuge in the wilderness where they were impregnated by unclean spirits from the Steppe, and engendered the Huns, which Pohl compares with the origin of the Sarmatians as presented by Herodotus.

[17] Suggesting that the account is not authentic, Goffart has proposed the following conversation between Cassiodorus, making up stories, and his Goth saio adjutant: "By the way, Giberich, how does one say 'witch' in your language?"

[20] Pohl adds that it is commonly assumed in contemporary mediaeval studies that such stories contribute to the shaping of ethnic identities, and he dates the Halirunnae legend to post-375 (see the Christianization of the Goths).

[21] A pagan society banished people who had used sorcery to violate norms, and so the women performed rites that were either not yet accepted or had ceased being so.

It is possible that the migrating Goths encountered new shamanistic rites when they reached the Black Sea c. 200 AD, but it is also possible that the Gothic elite decided to enforce a change in cult.

Both the Vinnili and the Vandals were ready to transform themselves into more successful model of a migrating army, and consequently to reject their old Vanir (fertility) cult and embrace Odin as their leader.

It is the women that sacrifice their past and their traditional cult in order to save their tribe under the leadership of their priestess Gambara and their goddess Freyja.

[24] Enright (1996) comments that the seeresses served the wishes and the interest of a Germanic warlord, like Filimer, by divination and the casting of lots, which is in fact a propaganda tool that is very sophisticated.

Instead the firmness of purpose and morale of the Germanic armies depended on the warlord's reputation for success, cleverness and personal bravery.

[28] Damico (1984) connects haliurunae, which she translates as 'demons' and 'sorceresses', to the word helrūnan, which is glossed as Valkyrie, as a grim spirit of battle,[29] and that it also appears in Beowulf as a name for Grendel, and for his mother by implication.

there is an incident of a doe that is hesitant to enter the swamp, which appears to be a variation on the hart that is trapped with its hooves on the border of Grendel's mere (Beowulf lines 1368–1372).

He claimed to use a text by Antoninus of Florence as a source, and Antoninus was said to have used Vincent and Sigilbert as sources:[33] [Filimer] found some sorceresses living among the people there, women who are called in Gothic "alirumnae," and because he suspected them he drove them from the midst of the people, forcing them to flee far away from his army and to wander in the desert.