ABSTRACT
Fredegar had the good fortune to fall into the hands of the great family of the Nibelungen, close connections of the Carolingians through Alpaida, mother of Charles Martel; or rather, into the hands of a scribe employed by them to put together a chronicle of Frankish events as seen through Carolingian eyes. Fredegar wishes it to be understood that he has not just accepted the chronicles of the wise men whose command of language was so far beyond his own. Fredegar is very skilled at working his interpolations of barbarian history into the fabric of Jerome and Hydatius. Although Fredegar gets the name of the eastern emperor wrong, there seems to lie behind his tale a tradition that Childeric, recently described by Professor Charles Verlinden as ‘only the chief of a warrior band’, actually owed his rule in Gaul to imperial backing as a rival candidate to the rebel Aegidius.
