Hercynian Forest

The Hercynian Forest was an ancient and dense forest that stretched eastward from the Rhine River across southern Germany and formed the northern boundary of that part of Europe known to writers of antiquity. The ancient sources are equivocal about how far east it extended. All agree that the Black Forest, which extended east from the Rhine valley, formed the western side of the Hercynian.

Across the Rhine to the west extended the Silva Carbonaria and the forest of the Ardennes. All these old-growth forests of antiquity represented the original post-glacial temperate broadleaf forest ecosystem of Europe.

Relict tracts of this once-continuous forest exist with many local names: the Schwarzwald ("Black Forest"), Odenwald, Spessart Rhön, Thüringerwald (Thuringian Forest), Harz, Rauhe Alb, Steigerwald, Fichtelgebirge, Erzgebirge, Riesengebirge, the Bohemian Forest, and the forested Carpathians. The Mittelgebirge seem to correspond more or less to a stretch of the Hercynian mountains.

Hercynian has a Proto-Celtic derivation, from perkuniā, later erkunia. Julius Pokorny lists Hercynian as being derived from *perkʷu- "oak" (compare quercus). He further identifies the name as Celtic. Proto-Celtic regularly loses initial *p preceding a vowel, hence Hercynia (the H- being prothetic in Latin, the Latin y signifying a borrowing from Greek). The corresponding Germanic forms have an f- by Grimm's Law: Old English firgen = "mountains", Gothic faírguni = "mountain range". The assimilated *k^werk^wu- would be regular in Italo-Celtic, and Pokorny associates the Celtiberian ethnonym Querquerni, found in Hispania in Galicia.

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