Ethnic Affiliation
Except for the fact that he was not considered "Roman," Odoacer's ethnic origins are not completely known. Both the Anonymus Valesianus and John of Antioch state his father's name was Edeko. However, it is unclear whether this Edeko is identical to one—or both—men of the same name who lived at this time: one was an ambassador of Attila to the court in Constantinople, and escorted Priscus and other Imperial dignitaries back to Attila's camp; the other, according to Jordanes, is mentioned with Hunulfus as chieftains of the Scirii, who were soundly defeated by the Ostrogoths at the river Bolia in Pannonia sometime in the late 460s. Since Sebastian Tillemont in the 17th century, all three have been considered to be the same person. Jordanes describes Odoacer as king of the Turcilingi (Turc-ilingi or Torcilingorum rex). However, in his Romana Jordanes also describes him as a member of the Rugii (Odoacer genere Rogus). The Consularia Italica calls him king of the Heruli, while Theophanes appears to be guessing when he calls him a Goth. Marcellinus Comes calls him "the king of the Goths" (Odoacer rex Gothorum).
More recently Reynolds and Lopez explored the possibility that Odoacer was not Germanic in their 1946 paper published by the American Historical Review, making several convincing arguments that his ethnic background might lie elsewhere. One of these is that his name, "Odoacer", for which an etymology in Germanic languages had not been convincingly found, could be a form of the Turkish "Ot-toghar" ("grass-born" or "fire-born"), or the shorter form "Ot-ghar" ("herder"). "If Ratchis could become Radagaisus, why could Ot-toghar or Ot-ghar not have become Odoacer or Odovacer?" they ask. Other sources believe the name Odoacer is derived from the Germanic Audawakrs, meaning "watchful of wealth"
Odoacer's identity as a Hun was then accepted by a number of authorities, such as E. A. Thompson and J.M. Wallace-Hadrill—despite Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen's reasonable objection that personal names were not an infallible guide to ethnicity. Subsequently, while reviewing the primary sources in 1983, Bruce Macbain pointed out several uncomfortable silences in the primary sources, and proposed that while his mother might have been Scirian and his father Thuringian, in any case he was not a Hun.
Most sources today claims that he were most likely of Germanic stock.
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