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The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture

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This is a remarkable work. It has all the bearings of a lifetime's achievement, all too noticable in the unfinished nature of the book. Maenchen-Helfin died before it was finished and the book was edited together by Max Knight from the author's papers. It is encyclopedic. If you want to know anything about the Huns then consult this book, E A Thompson's "The Huns" formerly "Attila and the Huns" and P Heather's section in the Cambridge Ancient History Vol. XIII. If it's not in these books then it's not worth knowing. This book, more than the others, is indispensible but difficult to use. It is patchy and often unwieldy but breathtaking in scope and vision. I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know about the Huns who also has the time to work with the book to get the information out.

This is truely a masterpiece on the Huns. The sad part is that it is incomplete. It is far superior to the work of Thompson in the Huns even in this incomplete state. The analytical methodical scholarship, typical of savants of the German school, is seen throughout the book. This is supported by the author's firsthand experience amidst the Altaic nomads. One can only imagine the out come if Maenchen-Helfen had lived longer. I do not see scholars of his stature anymore in Central Asian studies.

I've had this book for years but never read it through, only looking up specific references. But it's been cited as a basic work in so much of my recent reading on the period (Heather, Wolfram, et al.) that I felt it finally deserved a sit-down read-through. It is...problematic.

First off, Maenchen-Helfen died before completing his manuscript; Knight, the editor, did a pretty good job assembling the author's remaining notes into coherent chapters, but from time to time you run across notes like "[The manuscript breaks off here in mid-sentence]" or footnotes that lead nowhere. Not fair to judge the total worth of the book by how well it's organized, is what I'm saying.

The first half, covering the history, economy, society, and so on, of the Huns is good and readable (even if I don't always agree with it). The later chapters on religion, art, and language are less so: they become just catalogues, pages and pages of items, more than enough documentation for the one- or two-paragraph summary conclusion. If anyone out there wants to specialize in Hunnish cauldrons, or loop-mirrors, or onomastics, and to compare and contrast them with Turkic, Sarmatian, and Mongol cauldrons, loop-mirros, or onomastics, then these chapters will be crucial for them; for the general historian, not so much. The chapter on Race, mostly citing studies of skull measurements by German scholars of the 30s and 40s, is just embarrassing to read nowadays.

I was right all along: a good reference book, a great one for some particular topics of material culture; incredibly important groundwork in the field, especially illuminating the problems with our primary sources; copious notes and superlative bibliography; but ultimately the tree:forest ratio is just too high.

Which is not to say Maenchen-Helfen can't turn a nice phrase from time to time. For example:
"No Greek or Roman knew where the Attilanic Huns came from. Ammianus Marcellinus placed their home beyond the Maeotis, the Sea of Azov, 'near the ice-bound Ocean' (XXXI, 3, 1), which sheds some light on his geographic notions but none on the Huns." -- p. 444, "Early Huns in Eastern Europe."

The volume by Otto J. Maenschen-Helfen, "The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture" remains one of the definitive treatments of its topic. Like other classic studies of Roman-empire topics published in the 1970s, such as G. Alföldy's volume on the province of Noricum, it pays proper attention to the growing archaeological data while, at the same time, remaining devoted primarily to the close analysis of the ancient written sources. Studies of this kind are, therefore, invaluable as baselines against which to evaluate more recent works that are more heavily reliant on archaeological material, anthropological theory, and deconstructionist approaches.

I was very pleased to be able to acquire this item in near-perfect condition at a very low price. Judging by the long list of offerings that I saw when I ordered my copy, many other copies in similar condition at similar prices are available, if anyone is interested.

In contrast to other reviewers, I found Otto Maenchen-Helfen's compendium on the Huns to be fun to read. It is always amusing to see a magisterial scholar speak frankly about lesser mortals. Maenchen-Helfen certainly considered E.A. Thompson, the best known of the few English historians of the Huns, to be a slipshod scholar and -- unkindest cut of all in Oxford -- a poor Latinist.

Well, all these scholars are long gone. But the myths than Maenchen-Helfen worked so hard to explode live on. One in particular is standard fare in recent books: that the Huns in eastern (and briefly western) Europe were the same as the Hsiung-nu on the borders of China. This error creates a gigantic transcontinental Hunnic empire in the 4th or 5th centuries that never existed.

Maenchen-Helfen also explodes the story still taught, at least in Catholic school histories, that the bold and holy Leo III confronted Attila and saved Rome. This, too, never happened.

It turns out that despite their well-earned fearsome reputation, the Huns were a passing fad in history and not much of a military force. Masters of the compound bow and mounted, they were hideous raiders. But they won few big battles against the Romans (more properly, Germans in Roman pay) and were often slaughtered. From the time they showed up around 370 to their disappearance was hardly more than 70 years.

Maenchen-Helfen is suitably agnostic about most details, including their language, which may have been a kind of Turkish, their religion, their political organization etc. One of the few things certain is that they boiled mutton in poorly manufactured copper kettles.

Maenchen-Helfen himself is an attractive character. As a young scholar, he spent some months with the last of the "wild" Turkic tribes in Mongolia. That was in 1929. A few years later, he evacuated Germany. His friends who assembled this volume from his papers after his death do not say he was rejecting Hitlerism, but that is the implication. Few enough among German scholars, especially in such a racially charged field as Hunnic studies, showed such humanity.

In exile in California for the rest of his life, he seems to have maintained intellectual integrity in a field where ax-grinding, by German, Soviet, Slav and sometimes Turkish students was rife.

It is odd enough that practically every educated American "knows" a bit about the Huns, though few have even heard of the Sarmatians, who were their more important predecessors. This is thanks to the effect, still lingering after nearly 1,500 years, of outrageously dishonest Christian propaganda. Odder that everything we were taught was wrong. Those who dislike being abused by bad teachers will want to know this book, even if they care little about what the Huns did or who they were.