THE ORIGIN OF THE GOTHS

Abstract

Witold Manczak has argued that Gothic is closer to Upper German than to Middle German, closer to High German than to Low German, closer to German than to Scandinavian, closer to Danish than to Swedish, and that the original homeland of the Goths must therefore be located in the southernmost part of the Germanic territories, not in Scandinavia (1982, 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1992). I think that his argument is correct and that it is time to abandon Iordanes’ classic view that the Goths came from Scandinavia. We must therefore reconsider the grounds for adopting the latter position and the reasons why it always has remained popular. The reconstruction of Gothic history and the historical value of Iordanes’ Getica have been analyzed in detail by Peter Heather (1991: 3-67). As he points out about this prime literary source (p. 5): “Two features have made it central to modern historical reconstructions. First, it covers the entire sweep of Gothic history. [...] Second, there is a Gothic origin to some of the Getica’s material, which makes it unique among surviving sources.” Iordanes’ work draws heavily on the lost Gothic histories of Ablabius and Cassiodorus, who “would seem to have been in the employ of Gothic dynasts and had to produce Gothic histories of a kind that their employers wished to hear” (Heather 1991: 67). As to the origin of the Goths and their neighbors, the Gothic migrations and the great kings of the past, oral history is the most likely source of the stories. This material must therefore be handled with particular care: “Oral history is not unalterable, but reflects current social configurations; as these change, so must collective memory” (Heather 1991: 62). It appears that Iordanes knew of several alternative accounts of early Gothic history, and Heather concludes (1991: 66): “There was thus more than one version of Gothic origins current in the sixth century. Jordanes, as we have seen, made his choice because he found written confirmation of it, but this is hardly authoritative: the Scandinavian origin of the Goths would seem to have been one sixth-century guess among several. It is also striking that Jordanes’ variants all contained islands: Scandinavia, Britain, ‘or some other island’. In one strand of Graeco-Roman ethnographic and geographic tradition, Britain, Thule, and Scandinavia are all mysterious northern islands rather than geographical localities. ‘Britain’ and ‘Scandinavia’ may well represent interpretative deductions on the part of whoever it was that recorded the myths. The myths themselves perhaps referred only to an unnamed, mysterious island, which the recorder had then to identify. The Scandinavian origin-tale would thus