Who are the Germanic Peoples?

First of all let us start with the Germanic peoples. There is a certain amount of controversy amongst scholars as to the identity of the ancient Germanic peoples with the peoples we consider to be Germanic today and I dare say there will never be a conclusive answer to this problem but nevertheless we have to start somewhere.
Tacitus writing
late in the 1st century CE has this to say about the boundary of the Germanic peoples:

"Germania as a whole is seperated from the Gauls and from the Raeti and Pannonii by the Rhine and Danube rivers, and from the Sarmatians and Dacians by mutual fear or mountains; the Ocean surrounds the rest, enveloping broad peninsulas and islands of immense expanse: various clans and kings have only recently become known to us, revealed by war." [Germania 1.1]

As for the Germanic peoples themselves he wrote:

"The Germani themselves are indigenous, I believe, and have in no way been mixed by the arrivals and alliances of other peoples, because in the past those who have sought to exchange their old territory for new did not come by land but were carried by fleets, and the Ocean beyond Germania, immeasureable and so to speak hostile, is visited by very few ships from our parts. Moeover, quite apart from the danger of a rough and unknown sea, who would abandon Asia and Africa or Italy and seek out Germania, with its unlovely landscape and harsh climate, dreary to inhabit and behold, if it were not one`s native land?"
[Germania 2.1]

Of their appearance he wrote:

"For myself, I agree with the views of those who think that the inhabitants of Germania have not been tainted by any intermarriage with other tribes, but have existed as a distinct and pure people, resembling only themselves. Consequently, they also all have the same physical appearance, so far as can be said for so numerous a people: fierce blue eyes, tawny hair, bodies that are big but strong only in attack."
[Germania 4.1]

Like Tacitus Caesar writing in the mid 1st century BCE in his The Gallic War also defines the territory of Germania to the east of the Rhine.

Purely on linguistic grounds the descendants of the ancient Germanics or Teutons are mainly to be found in Germany, Austria, German speaking Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, Flemish and German speaking Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
However in future articles we will explore how closely the link is between contemporary Teutons and those of ancient times.

Donald A. Mackenzie in his Teutonic Myths and Legends states:
"Both Celts and Teutons were blends of the same ancient races-the Alpine `broadheads` and the Northern `long heads`. They had therefore a common heritage of fused tribal beliefs, which must have varied, of course, in different districts. It may be that the westward-moving Celts, who absorbed the Mediterranean peoples of the late Stone Age, were, in turn, strongly influenced by their intellectual life, and that the Teutons came more directly under the spell of Asiatic modes of thought. At any rate it is evident that predominating fundamental conceptions of divergent origin exercised supreme control over the mental habits of the seperated sub-races."

Like all indigenous peoples the Teutons have a creation myth to account for the origins of their people. According to Germania 7 Mannus is the mythical Ur-ancestor of the Germanic peoples.
Mannus had a son Tuisto who in turn had three sons who gave their names to the three-fold division of the Germanic peoples into the Ingaevones, Herminones and the Istaevones. This genealogical structure is also found in the cosmogeny of the Edda where Buri-Borr-Odin/Vili/Ve are said to be the ancestors of the Germanic gods.