*Kóryos
The Männerbund (German: 'alliance of men') refers to the theoretical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for several years, as a rite of passage into manhood, before their full integration into society.
Scholars such as Kim McCone[1] and Gerhard Meiser[2] have theorized the existence of the Männerbund based on later Indo-European traditions and myths that feature links between landless young males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in war-bands sent away for part of the year in the wild, then defending the host society for the rest of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between vulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.
[3][4] Some writers, including Harry Falk, Jan N. Bremmer and Stefan Zimmer, argue that it can be misleading since these war-bands were made up of adolescent males, not grown-up men.
[23] Some toponyms in Western Europe, such as Cherbourg in France or Heerlen in the Netherlands, may stem from historical ethnic groups whose name contained the Celtic noun *koryo- 'army, troop', as proposed by Pierre-Yves Lambert.
[27][28][29][30] The concept of the Männerbund was developed in the early 20th century by scholars such as Heinrich Schurtz (1902), Hans Blüher (1917), Lily Weiser-Aall (1927), Georges Dumézil (1929), Richard Wolfram (1932), Robert Stumpfl (1934), Otto Höfler (1934), Stig Wikander (1938), and Henri Jeanmaire [fr] (1939).
Scholarship from the later part of the 20th century has pointed out the far-right ideological foundations of most of the earlier works, but has also yielded new evidence supporting the existence of brotherhoods of warriors in Vendel Period Scandinavia.
[9][33] On the basis of ethnographic evidence, scholar Gerhard Meiser has proposed the following basic characteristics of the (Proto-)Indo-European Männerbund: war bands of young males organized into age-based cohorts, typically including prominent youths and primarily focused on military duties.
According to Zimmer, such groups "may well have been part of [Proto-Indo-European] social life, and may be postulated with good reason, but this assumption can in no way be considered probable, as the sources simply are insufficient to bear the weight of argument needed".
[9] In documented Indo-European cultures used to reconstruct the Männerbund concept, the war bands were generally composed of adolescent males, usually coming from prominent families and initiated together into manhood as an age-class cohort.
[37] Social behaviour normally forbidden, such as stealing, raiding, or sexually assaulting women, were therefore tolerated amongst Männerbund members, as long as the malevolent acts were not directed at the host society.
[37][40] A tradition of epic poetry celebrating heroic and violent warriors conquering loot and territories, which were portrayed as possessions the gods wanted them to have, probably participated in the validation of violence among the Männerbund.
[44] According to David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown, the Männerbund may have served "as an organization promoting group cohesion and effectiveness in combat, as an instrument of external territorial expansion, and as a regulatory device in chiefly feast-centred economies.
"[45] In Europe, those oath-bound initiatory war-bands were eventually absorbed by increasingly powerful patrons and kings during the Iron Age, while they were downgraded in ancient India with the rise of the Brahmin caste, leading to their progressive demise.
[47] Raids headed by those young warriors could have led to the establishment of new settlements on foreign lands, preparing the ground for the larger migration of whole tribes including old men, women and children.
They could therefore have served as an incentive for the recruitment of outsiders into social positions that offered vertical mobility, horizontal reciprocity, and the possibility of immortality through praise poetry, made more attractive by generosity at patron-sponsored public feasts.
[63] According to military historian Michael P. Speidel, the scene 36 of Trajan's Column, which shows bare-chested, bare-footed young men wearing only a shield, could be a depiction of Germanic berserkers.
[72] The Roman historian Tacitus (1st c. AD) mentions the Germanic Harii, whose name could derive from *kóryos, as "savages" wearing black shields, dyeing their bodies, and choosing dark nights for battle.
However, this approach has been criticized by other experts like Stefan Zimmer, who argues that the sources reference various distinct institutions from different time periods, all loosely connected to the general concept of a "war band".
[11] Some Vedic families began initiating young boys at 8 years old, studying heroic poetry about past ancestors and practicing their hunting and fighting skills.
[66] After their leader was determined by a dice game, the initiated youths were cast away in the wild for four years to live as dogs, stealing animals, women, goods and territory, until the summer solstice ended the raiding season.
[79][80] In Ancient Greece, the traditional war-bands lost some of the frenzy attributes that characterize shape shifters in other Indo-European cultures, but they still maintained the terror-inspiring appearance and the tricky war tactics of the original Männerbund.
His descendant, Aram, interpreted as the "second image of Hayk", heads an army of 50,000 norati ('youths') warriors extending the borders of the territory on every side to create a new, superior Armenia.
