I fully agree with you.
Here in the Netherlands, the national myth is that we descend straight from the tribe of the Batavii. Which is not true -- the core of our nation, the provinces of South and North Holland, are inhabited by people who descend from the tribe of the Frisii.
Now, the Frisii were a tribal confederation which was very old, and which expanded in the time of the Great Migrations. Its tribes lived all along the Waddenzee, which is that part of the North Sea which runs from the 'corner' between Denmark and Germany to the southernmost of the islands of the Netherlands, Texel. Their main territorial advance, if one could even call it that, was into what is now Noord- and Zuid-Holland. Subsequently this tall, fair-skinned tribe forms the basis of the people from the provinces of Holland. And that is only those two provinces, I haven't even begun about the other fourteen. And that for such a small piece of land
Personally one could call me a Frank. This is for two reasons: my family on my mother's side are Huguenots, thus they come from France, in this case Southern France, around Toulouse. They stayed pretty French in character, since where they live there is a large amount of people of Huguenot descent. The second reason is because my family on my father's side comes from the southern Netherlands, which was part of the Frankish heartland of Austrasia (its name under the Merovingians and Carolingians, but the region itself, and its Frankish character, existed long before Clodovech came along) from the time the Franks became
foederati of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD. And to say that 'part' of me is purely Frankish is bullocks -- the Franks mixed with Celts, Romans, and anything else they found in Austrasia at the time. And the term 'pure' is a wrong word to begin with, but I use it because of the lack of alternatives.
But, mind you, that's the so-called 'ethnic' character of myself. The term itself is biased, but I simply mean of which peoples the blood which runs in my veins descends. And no-one can claim that is pure, for that is an impossibility. Pure itself is a wrong term anyways. In any case, being technically a Frank (with 25% Jewish blood as well; yes, I'm a mixed bag
), my nationality is Dutch. And even that isn't fully true -- I was born and grew up on the Dutch Antilles. Now there's a brain-teaser, isn't there?
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