me
i've searched long and hard and cannot find anybody else that has seen any relevance in the fact that ptolemy places a tribe called the marvingi at the confluence of the rhine and the main. could this have anything to do with merovingian (and therefore frankish) ancestry? one may note that the fact that the franks did not retain germanic legends of descent from odin is unusual if they were indeed a german confederation, and further note that the dominant religious practices in clovis' time were gallo-celtic (arduina) in nature. then again, i suppose a gallic continuity hypothesis is just too simplistic, isn't it?

Til Eulenspiegel
It's not whether or not it's simplistic - it's whether or not this is in any WP:RS. If it is, no problem citing it. If it's not, please see WP:OR.

me
well, ptolemy was an ancient roman geographer writing from egypt. you need to be careful with him. what i'm doing here is throwing out a request for somebody in the field to address the issue, because i've never seen it addressed. i can't just jump from "ptolemy identified marvingi near the rhine" to "the marvingi ptolemy identified were the frankish merovingians", especially considering that the accepted scholarly opinion is that they were riparian (atlantic) franks. it's just that there are a lot of holes in the idea, and a lot of myths surrounding their origin. it's an idea, not an assertion.

Srnec
I made an edit to Merovingian dynasty with a source. Some other stuff comes up at Google Books, but I don't have access to those books.

me
thank you.

and just to follow up on this: gregory of tours (who is usually considered the better source, apparently) claims the franks originated in pannonia rather than belgium. this is generally discarded as "nonsense" because it doesn't fit other evidence, but perhaps that dismissal is a little too hasty and ought not to be total. there's a source here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=yhaSRVnI1Y4C&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=franks+from+pannonia&source=bl&ots=hBrvPEEJcY&sig=_iUp9GQb-EDmH6Mh-dmrXOUO1WY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q_brUrmaKuS22gXU9oGQAw&ved=0CG8Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=franks%20from%20pannonia&f=false (sorry for the ridiculous link) that briefly deconstructs the myth as incorporating tribes that moved from the east into the frankish confederacy. it doesn't mention the marvingi explicitly, but it's consistent with the idea that a large of amount of the frankish ethnogenesis was composed of tribes that do not have an extended history in the low countries. it's still not direct evidence, but it's building up towards a hypothesis.

i'm going to leave this alone, now, in hopes that somebody picks it up as a research topic and reports back here about it.

...except to point out that there's a historical movement of alans from pannonia to france that fits the entire narrative and could have merged with a few german tribes along the way. it's discussed in a relatively recent book, Deutschlands unbekannte Jahrhunderte, Geheimnisse aus dem Frühmittelalter by Richard Schmoekel (i can't read german).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Franks#marvingi_.2F_merovech)