Paw Prints Across a Continent When we lost the heart of our home, we spread across the European continent. With us came the nomadic Germanic people, the humans that accounted for most of our Kinfolk. Or maybe you could say that we traveled with them; it makes little difference. We spread across the continent and took many territories for our own, and we held them. In particular, the bitter North of Scandinavia became almost exclusively our own — for almost no other Garou were hardy and determined enough to call such a place home. You want to know why the others say that the heart of our tribe is in Scandinavia? Because there was never any other force, whether mortal, werewolf, Fera or even the damnable Wyrmspawn, that was able to wrest even a portion of those lands from us. The Germanic Peoples This is not meant to be a history lesson, nor a treatise on the history of the Germanic peoples. However, there are some points of human history that require highlighting. The most popular view is to closely associate the Get of Fenris with the Norse, the tribes of Germanics that lived in Scandinavia. But the Fenrir are more accurately broadly associated with the Germanic people as a whole, not just one small branch of a larger tree. Tribes of Germanics migrated into Northern Europe about nine thousand years ago, around the end of the last Ice Age, together with their Fenrir guardians and Kin. As the ice slowly retreated from those hitherto ice-covered lands of Scandinavia, it revealed fertile ground and plenty of game and fish, and as the art of cultivation reached the nomadic tribes, they settled, mainly on the Scandinavian Peninsula, around the Baltic Sea and Denmark, and modern day Northern Germany. It is also vital to note that since the Fenrir are not necessarily associated with every tribe of Germanic peoples, there is no point in explaining the spread of the all the Germanic tribes and their subsequent history. In order to avoid having to name every people in every relevant sentence, those tribes associated with the Fenrir will be referred to as Germanics, as a simple nominator. (And, of course, in the modern day the Get of Fenris have no real allegiance to any ethnic group as a whole.) Get of Fenris Many of the human tribes eventually settled there with us, of course; we are no Talons, and care nothing for mating with wolves alone. They had to work very hard to make the most of the land there, but they found that the soil was very fertile, as it had been locked under the ice for many an age. Our forefathers let them work to make the land support them more than it would naturally — a failing, perhaps, as this gave some power to the Weaver even there. But it would take many years for our kind to discover how those seeds would grow. We aided in the creation of great caerns, and we formed powerful septs. The most famed of our septs were the Sept of the Blood Fist in Schwarzwald, Germany, at the place where Great Fenris himself spent his last days on Earth before departing into the Umbra, and the Sept of the Fimbul Winter Night, our Tribal Caern in Uppsala, Sweden. Many of our holdings were later lost, and new ones established, but the Sept of the Blood Fist remains still — though it is under siege. The reason we bring this up is to both explain that the Fenrir are more than “Viking werewolves,” but also to clarify that going into great depth on peoples that we know very little about is a slippery affair. There were simply too many of them. The Germanic tribes were responsible for the population of much of Europe, and later evolved as quite different peoples, becoming your modern day French, Spaniard, Czech or, of course, German. As tribes migrated south to Europe around 700 BCE, the Germanic people as a group split into three smaller factions; the North-Germanics, and the Eastand West-Germanics. Further schisms spawned many tribes, most of which differed, at first, mainly in deity worship. Common for most is an equivalent of the pantheon found in Norse mythology (which is the best known), with different names as the languages evolved away from each other. If the student of history finds one or two of his favorite tribes missing from this book, he needn’t worry about it. Maybe the Fenrir never bothered with the tribe; maybe they did. Most likely, they just didn’t bother to keep track of all the names of their human relatives, any more than they’ve kept careful genealogical records of their wolf Kin that stretch back to the dawn of time. It’s really not that important in the grand scheme of things. Chapter One: Voices of Thunder
Get of Fenris · Werewolf