Origin of the Goths

Concerning the origin of the Goths before the 3rd century CE, there is no consensus among scholars. In the 3rd century the Goths began to be mentioned by Roman writers as an increasingly important people living north of the lower Danube and Black Sea, in the area of modern Romania, Republic of Moldova, and Ukraine. The Goths replaced other peoples who had been dominant in the region, especially the Carpi, and the Germanic-speaking Bastarnae. However, while some scholars, such as Michael Kulikowski, believe there is insufficient evidence to come to strong conclusions about their earlier origins, the most commonly accepted proposal is that the Goths known to the Romans were a people whose traditions derived to some extent from the Gutones who lived near the delta of the Vistula in what is now Poland in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. More speculatively, the Gutones may have been culturally related to the similarly named Gutes of Gotland and the Geats of southern Scandinavia, known from much later historical periods.

The Goths of late antiquity were seen by classical authors as one of a group closely related "Gothic peoples". Procopius (c. 500 - 565), for example, remarked that the Vandals and Gepids who, like the Goths, originally lived north of the Carpathian Mountains, used the same Gothic language. Examples of this language have survived and it is classified by modern scholars as a Germanic language. However, classical writers did not call the Goths "Germanic", but rather categorized them as Scythians and Getae, linking them to their predecessors in the regions they lived in, whose customs they believed to have been similar. Modern scholars agree that the 3rd-century Goths can be seen as one dominant group within an ethnically diverse region, indistinguishable in their material culture from their neighbours north of the lower Danube and of the Black Sea.

Among the different types of evidence which are considered most relevant to tracing Gothic origins are their name, their written language, artistic and archaeological evidence of links between regions, and classical Greco-Roman ethnographic literature. The Germania of Tacitus, written c. 98 CE, has played an important role because it mentions the Gutones as living in the area of present-day Poland. The only surviving Roman account of Gothic origins, the Getica of Jordanes, written c. 551 CE, continues to exert a strong influence.

Since the Second World War, most scholars, accepting parts of the "ethnogenesis" model associated with the Vienna school, have tended to emphasize that the name, language and traditions of Goths of the 3rd century need not imply any a single large-scale migration of, or similar ancestral connection to, the Gutones or other peoples with similar names. Some historians, such as Peter Heather, while partly accepting this argument, have nevertheless argued that there must have been a significant stream of movement from Poland towards Ukraine over a long period of time.