had few men
with him, and being taken unawares, he had no time to summon his
brethren to his aid. But he held his own bravely: the warriors of his
nation had time to gather round him; and at last, after he had long
wearied the enemy with his defensive tactics, he made a sudden onset,
destroyed the greater part of the Hunnish army, and sent the rest
scattered in hopeless flight far into the deserts of Scythia.[14]

[Footnote 14: Jordanes (cap. iii) says that the fugitive Huns "sought
those parts of Scythia past which flow the streams of the river Dnieper
which the Huns in their own tongue call 'Var' (the river)". If this is
correctly stated it is almost certain that it must describe some battle
which happened _before_ the great Western migration of the Ostrogoths,
which was mentioned in the last chapter, for it would be impossible, if
the Gepidae were in Trans-danubian Hungary and the Ostrogoths in Pannonia
that the Ostrogoths should have driven the Huns into the countries
watered by the Dnieper. I am rather inclined to believe that this
reference of the battle to an earlier period may be the correct
explanation. But Danapri (Dnieper) may be only a blunder of Jordanes,
who is often hopelessly wrong in his geography.]

Walamir at once sent tidings of the victory to his brother Theudemir.
The messenger arrived at an opportune moment, for on that very day
Erelieva, the unwedded wife of Theudemir, had given birth to a
man-child. This infant, born on such an auspicious day and looked upon
as a pledge of happy fortunes for the Ostrogothic nation, was named
Thiuda-reiks (the people-ruler), a name which Latin historians,
influenced perhaps by the analogy of Theodosius, changed into
Theodoricus, and which will here be spoken of under the well-known form
THEODORIC.[15]

[Footnote 15: Jordanes wavers between Theod_e_ricus and Theod_o_ricus.
The Greek historians generally use the form (Greek: Theuderichos).
German scholars seem to prefer Theoderich. As it is useless now to try
to revert to the philologically correct Thiuda-reiks, I use that form of
the name with which I suppose English readers to be most
familiar--namely, Theodoric.]

It will be observed that I have spoken of Erelieva as the unwedded wife
of Theudemir. The Gothic historian calls her his concubine,[16] but this
word of reproach hardly does justice to her position. In many of the
Teutonic nations, as among the Norsemen of a later century, there seems
to have bee