Rundling
A Rundling is a form of circular village, now found only in Northern Germany, typical of settlements in the Germanic-Slav contact zone in the Early Medieval period.
File:RundlingSatemin2.jpg|thumb|View of the Rundling Satemin, 3 km west of Lüchow in the Wendland
The Rundling was a relatively common village form created by German law, but housing Slav farmers. It usually comprises a central, circular village green owned in common with individually owned farmsteads radiating out around it like the spokes of a wheel. The best examples are now only in a small area of Lower Saxony in Germany near to the town of Lüchow. Nineteen of these villages were put forward as an ensemble for consideration as a possible World Heritage Site, but the decision in December 2023 Elbe-Jeetzel Zeitung 4.12.2023 was negative and there are no plans for resubmitting.
At the City Hall in Oslo on 11 June 2015 the Rundlingsverein was awarded the Grand Prix for the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Award 2015. This was in recognition of 46 years of voluntary work in preserving these ancient settlements.
Such villages were originally found across a strip of central Germany from Kiel to Bohemia, often indicated by village names ending in -itz, -ow and -thin. Virtually all such Rundlinge are now only to be found in the small area of Wendland.
History and origins
There are no contemporary historical records of the founding of these circular villages, but a consensus has arisen in recent decades that they were founded in the 12th century, on land that had not been previously cultivated, probably because of its essentially low lying boggy nature, its tendency to be flooded and the relative poverty of its sandy soil. The current leading theory is that of Professor Dr Wolfgang Meibeyer, who believes that all the Rundlinge were developed at more or less the same time in the 12th century, to a model developed by the then Germanic nobility as suitable for small groups of mainly Slavic farm-settlers. Whether these settlers were there by choice, by conquest or by forced settlement is no longer known. It does seem to have happened without much bloodshed, and the following centuries showed a living together of Germans and Slavs. This eventually led to an assimilation and eventual disappearance of the Slavs as a separate ethnic group with their own language, Wendish or Polabian, which is the language used for the majority of the Rundling names, and still to this day for certain unusual features of local rural architecture and land-use.In other parts of Europe, outside of Wendland, different terms might be in use. In Slavic languages the term was "opole". Opole etymology is "around" + "the field". The village green in the middle was called the "maydan". There does not appear to be a connection between opole and rundlinge, although the Germanised population still often bears surnames such as Kophal, Ribeck and similar. They can also be found elsewhere, such as Byšičky in the Czech Republic. In present and formerly Slavic speaking countries in Central/East Europe many references to the opole can still be found, like the cities of Opole in Poland, Opolye in Russia, Opole Ter in Hungary or Apoldu du Jus in Romania, which is indicative of the Slavic origin of the concept, as German colonisation never reached the most eastern parts of the Slavic lands where the "opole"-toponymns still exist.
This separate Slavic language remained more generally in use in the region of Lüchow until the 18th century, and there is a written chronicle and dictionary still in existence drawn up by Johann Parum Schultze of the village of Süthen, in around 1725, which marks the increasing loss of the old language. The area of its historical use is now often called Wendland after those Slavic peoples who were called the Wends, and it corresponds more or less with the current administrative boundaries of the district of Lüchow-Dannenberg. Two related Slavic ethnic groups were the Wenden of the Spreewald and the Lusatian Sorbs of Upper Lusatia, together making a group of about 60,000 who still are said to be able to speak Sorbian in the Spreewald, an area of Eastern Germany near the Polish border around the towns of Bautzen and Cottbus.
Appearance
There are very many circular shaped villages all across the world, but only those created by the Ostsiedlung in the 12th and 13th century should use the name Rundling. Although superficially similar to the Opole in Poland, or the villages around a village green in the UK, they do not have the same genesis and history as the Rundlinge of central Germany. The key is the division of village land into triangular "slices of cake" shapes, between wet pasture land and drier arable land, and the creation of exactly calculated strip farming on the arable land, to ensure absolute fairness of division between farmers, equal under the law. The illustration from the Heidelberger Sachsenspiegel of 1300, shows the relationship between the nobility, the local landlords and the farmers, who clear the undergrowth of bush, and build the villages on greenfield sites. Later the local landlords act as administrators carrying out the wishes of the nobility, and creating churches and infrastructure. It was exactly so that the rundling villages were created.These villages were usually small, with only a few farmsteads, averaging perhaps around 5–7, and built away from tracks or roads, around an open central village green, which was a part of the commons, not allocated to any one particular farmer. The leading farmer, called a Schulze, had a slightly better plot, set in the centre opposite the entrance to the village, and usually extra land outside the circle called by its Wendish name Güsteneitz. They are almost always to be found on the border between low-lying wetter land near to water and higher drier land more suitable for cultivation, called here geest.It is striking that most Rundlinge are situated on the 20 meter above sea-level line. Slavic settlers seem to have chosen this level so that they had access to both arable and pasture land. Access was from the higher Geest land, where there were through paths, and the villages originally were cul-de-sacs.The villages were fairly densely scattered across the area to be colonized, with each one barely a kilometre from its neighbour. This means that there were very many, fairly small, settlements. In very very few cases have they been amalgamated into larger villages or subsumed as suburbs of towns.
Even today this pattern has continued. Of the 324 named settlements in today's Lüchow-Dannenberg, over 200 are or were once Rundlinge, and virtually none have been swallowed up by the encroachment of towns, or have been amalgamated into larger villages, although since the reforms of 1972, most have lost their political separateness. Prior to 1972 each village had its own separate political status, which led to there being 230 entities, Gemeinden, in what was then and still is one of the most sparsely settled areas of modern Germany, East or West. The smallest of the 230 was Liepehöfen, which had the princely
number of 3 adult voters. Instead of 230 there are now 27 Gemeinden.
Subsequent circular shape
The original shape of the Rundlinge was semi-circular or horse-shoe shaped. Most became circular through a period of time in the later Middle Ages, probably between 1500 and 1550, when population densities increased. This led to the original farmsteads being split into two, three or four, and additional wedge-shaped land being made available at the open entrance to the village, in effect closing the village in and allowing only one track in from outside. This development appears to have been ordained from above, rather than being the result of more than one son taking over a farmstead. This gives us the tightly packed Rundling of today with up to 20 farmsteads. The greater prosperity, and therefore greater population density of the Rundlinge of those times may have been related to the increasing addition of flax-weaving to the incomes of the farmers. In any event most of the originally semi-circular villages became more nearly circular, although there were in fact many slightly differently shaped solutions. Some of the Rundlinge today are more oval in shape, others more irregularly shaped. The original "one entrance to the village green" model was in some cases altered to take account, say, of a path to the local church or one to the local mill, and in later years these paths may have been widened to take vehicles, and may today form a route through the village.Although very many Rundlinge of today have retained their separateness, many have expanded during the last century and have modern houses added, typically in one direction away from the original round. This occasionally leads to an elongated village with the old Rundling at the end.
External location of churches
One anomaly, which marks out these villages from others in other parts of Europe, is that the Rundling villages virtually never have a church in them. There are churches, even quite ancient ones, but they and their burial grounds are almost always well outside the Rundling itself. This could have come about because the Rundlinge were usually built only just above the water-table, whereas the churches needed higher ground to give enough depth for their burials. It could also be as a result of each village being too small to maintain a church, so the church had to serve several villages. However most researchers believe that it shows that Christianisation came late to the villages, after their basic structure had been created. There are reports by the church authorities of practices well into modern times.It also suggests that, even where it had been possible to add a church to the village circle, they did not do so. There must have been a sense that it was not appropriate to do so, or there would be examples among the 200+ villages in Wendland, and there are not, even in the villages set on higher ground.
Not only are there no churches, there are no schools or communal buildings, no shops and virtually no trade outlets. The villages are made up entirely of farm dwellings.