Menia

   Find A Grave ID: 193945218

  General Notes:

Menia (fl. c. 500) was the queen of the Thuringians by marriage and the earliest named ancestor of the Gausian dynasty of the Lombards. She became a legendary figure after her death, strongly associated with gold and wealth.

Menia's marriage is recorded only in the Historia Langobardorum codicis Gothani. According to that source, she was the second wife of Bisinus, King of the Thuringians. The same source and the other Lombard chronicles make Bisinus the father of Raicunda, first wife of Wacho, king of the Lombards. She the daughter of Menia and based on her year of birth, Bisinus. (although some have said her father was Count Pitzia.)

Frankish sources, such as Venantius Fortunatus, make Bisinus the father of the three brothers who ruled Thuringia in the 520s: Hermanafrid, Bertachar (father of Saint Radegund) and Baderic. They are were sons of Menia and Bisinus . (NOTE: Basina left Bisinus c 0463 to marry Childeric, by whom she had 2 sons and 2 daughters). Many scholars, however, reject Bisinus' marriage to Basina as ahistorical, leaving Menia as his only known wife.

By a relationship with an unnamed man (Count Pitzia?) of the Gausian family\emdash a Gausus, perhaps a Geat, according to the Historia Langobardorum\emdash she was the mother of Audoin, king of the Lombards from 546. She also had a daughter from whom the later dukes of Friuli were descended. Audoin was in turn the father of Alboin, who led the Lombards into Italy.

As an ancestor of Lombard royalty, Menia seems to have entered the oral tradition and from there various Germanic epic traditions, such as the Icelandic Poetic Edda. She is a gold-grinding giantess in Grottasöngr and in Sigurðarkviða hin skamma her name is part of a kenning (Meni góð, "Menia's goods") meaning gold. She is also featured in the Byzantine tradition. In the Greek Life of Saint Pankratios of Taormina, she is the wife of the Lombard Rhemaldos who kills the mother of Tauros and then marries him. She learns alchemy and turns base metals into gold. The entire legend is used to explain how the city of Taormina (Tauromenia) got its name.

7 SourcesReferences

[1]
Wolfram Brandes, "Das Gold der Menia: Ein Beispiel transkulturellen Wissenstransfers", Millennium 2 (2005): 175\endash 226, esp. 181ff.
[2]
Philip Grierson, "Election and Inheritance in Early Germanic Kingship", Cambridge Historical Journal 7, 1 (1941): 1\endash 22.
[3]
Jörg Jarnut, "Thüringer und Langobarden im 6. und beginnenden 7. Jahrhundert", in Helmut Castritius; Dieter Geuenich; Matthias Werner (eds.). Die Frühzeit der Thüringer: Archäologie, Sprache, Geschichte (De Gruyter, 2009), pp. 279\endash 290.
[4]
Ian Mladjov, "Barbarian Genealogies", in Prokopios; H. B. Dewing (trans.); Anthony Kaldellis (eds.), The Wars of Justinian (Hackett, 2014), pp. 560\endash 566.
[5]
Martina Hartmann, Die Königin im frühen Mittelalter (Kohlhammer Verlag, 2009), p. 13.
[6]
Christian Settipani (2015). Les Ancêtres de Charlamagne. 2nd edition (in French). P&G, Occasional Publications 16. pp. 234\endash 35. ISBN 978-1-900934-16-9.
[7]
Cynthia Stallman-Pacitti, The Life of Saint Pankratios of Taormina: Greek Text, English Translation and Commentary (Brill, 2018), p. 498.

Menia married Bisinus King of Thuringia. (Bisinus King of Thuringia was born in 440 in , , Thuringia, Germany and died in 510 in , , Thuringia, Germany.)