Actually, no, that's not what I meant. "Real" history is just as questionable as "popular" history, when you get right down to it. At least when you go beyond the last few centuries and the source material gets sketchier and sketchier.

It is possible, in some cases - not all - to know what happened with a reasonable degree of certainty. It's next to impossible to know for sure why something happened. It's also possible to overcompensate, and just because history is inaccurate doesn't mean it's not influential on a present course of events. The ethnographers who looked into the question of race in the early medieval period and explored precisely what they thought it meant to be 'Germanic' certainly weren't expecting nationalist theorists (and later, the Nazis) to pick it up and run with it to new and scary places.

...good God, I'm lecturing. Someone stop me.