Names of the Goths

The Goths were an East Germanic people, two of whose branches, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, played an important role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the emergence of Medieval Europe. The Goths dominated a vast area, which at its peak under the Germanic king Ermanaric and his sub-king Athanaric possibly extended all the way from the Danube to the Don, and from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea.

The Goths spoke the Gothic language, one of the extinct Eastern Germanic languages, last spoken in Crimea in the 18th century by the Crimean Goths; the least-powerful, least-known, and almost paradoxically, the longest-lasting of the Gothic communities.

In the Gothic language they were called the Gut-þiuda, most commonly translated as "Gothic people", but only attested as dat. sg. Gut-þiudai, or Gutans Inferred from gen. pl.(?) gutani in Pietroassa inscription. In Old Norse they were known as the Gutar or Gotar, in Latin as the Gothi, and in Greek as the Γότθοι, Gótthoi.

The Goths have been referred to by many names, perhaps at least in part because they comprised many separate ethnic groups, but also because in early accounts of Proto-Indo-European and later Germanic migrations in the Migration Period in general it was common practice to use various names to refer to the same group. The Goths believed (as most modern scholars do) that the various names all derived from a single prehistoric ethnonym that referred originally to a uniform culture that flourished around the middle of the first millennium BC, i.e. the original Goths.

The exact origin of the ancient Goths is unknown. Evidence of them before they interacted with the Romans is limited. The traditional account of the Goths' early history, based on the writings of the Ostrogoth Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman bureaucrat and historian, was that the earliest migrating Goths sailed from what is now Sweden to what is now Poland, and replaced inhabitants there, forming the Wielbark culture. Modern academics have generally abandoned this theory. Today, the Wielbark culture is thought to have developed from earlier cultures in the same area. Archaeological finds show close contacts between southern Sweden and the Baltic coastal area on the continent, and further towards the south-east, evidenced by pottery, house types and graves. Rather than a massive migration, similarities in the material cultures may be products of long-term regular contacts. However, the archaeological record could indicate that while his work is thought to be unreliable, Jordanes' story was based on an oral tradition with some basis in fact.

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