Gothic History Section
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Who or What was a Goth?
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We might call them so, but the Goths never used that name. I really can't say for sure where the word comes from. There seems to be some argument back and forth over it among those who know more about historical linguistics than myself. There are two major theories popular among those that study these types of things.
One is that the term came from the name of a group of people in Sweden - The Geats. In Old Norse, that word was Gotar and it was Gauta in early German. If you look at the way some English words developed over time it's not that far a stretch of the imagination by any means.
The other theory is that the word is derived from Guthones which came from Greek and had the root Gut. The Guts lived on an island off Scandinavian coast and spoke a language called Gutnish. This seems to be as close a word to Gothic as it the rest. This is also a logical jump to me. I leave it to the experts, but present them both for your consideration and enlightenment.
The Goths, on the other hand, had names that were - what else - of Gothic origin. Tribes that settled near the Black Sea called themselves the Greutungi, the ones who settled in the area which is now Romania referred to themselves as the Tervingi or Vesi. Romans may have called them Goths because they couldn't say their real nationalities without making fools of themselves. Our own historians have to go and confuse the issue even further and refer to the Greutungi as the Ostergoths and the Tervingi as the Visigoths.
The history of the Gothic empire is a study in irony. They were regarded as uncivilized, in fact, we still regard them as such...yet the era they dominated was a high point in European culture which is often copied today. Many of our currently cherished political ideas (presumption of innocence, democracy, women's rights) came from the Goths and yet the Roman Empire often gets the credit for our political structure. The leader of the Goths once saved the Roman Empire...yet the result of that act was the fall of Rome and the beginning of feudalism. When they came into their own, they broke the yoke of the Roman Empire and still incorporated much of that culture into their own. They were very zealous for the faith once converted to Christianity and the first to translate the Bible into their native tongue...yet eventually their particular brand of Christianity (Aryanism) was pronounced a heresy. They laid the groundwork for the Europe of the Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation periods and yet are associated with very little other than war.
