Getae and Dacians? Are they the same? Or is this unknowable?

[Rumo]

Hello Alan,

I am abusing your patience with one more quote from an aforementioned book by Andrew Merrills (p. 121):

• If Gothic settlement in Scythia had long been recognized from the Mediterranean, the genesis of the group remained frustratingly obscure. Jordanes’ is the earliest known work explicitly to associate the Goths with Scandza and his interpretation was merely one among several. Thule and Britain were probably also cited as possible homelands of the group in near contemporary works.

So how come these historians of the Goths argued for a Scandinavian origin? The answer seems rather straightforward. Writing to a mostly Roman audience they couldn't argue for a Trojan origin because no one would have believed them. So they had to choose to argue for one of the legends circulating in their day. My own guess is these were Roman stories not Gothic stories (or better said, they became Gothic stories as the Goths became a part of the Roman empire), as it was the perceptions of the Romans that the savage Goths came from edge of the world (like the Huns), from Thule, Britain or Scandza. Jordanes worked hardly quoting Greek and Roman authors to persuade his audience. The entire geographic framework of Getica is derived from such authors and that is the first signal of non-authenticity. The "Gothic" Scandza is a quasi-mythical island as it was known in the Mediterranean world, not the land we would expect to be known by its real inhabitants, in legends or true accounts.
Another indirect evidence comes from Isidore of Seville, a learned man who lived in Visigothic Spain. He wrote on the origin of the Goths in early 7th century (less than a century after Jordanes) and he found the Goths to be an ancient people coming from Scythia. What happened to the Gothic tradition and their Scandinavian origins?
If stories from Getica were born in Gothic Italy, then perhaps they echoed some contemporary propaganda trying to counter Roman claims. The Romans viewed the Goths as barbarians from a remote and savage north, the Goths answered with a history of heroic deeds using Roman authoritative sources. So the Goths too were worthy masters of the Roman lands.

As quoted above, Halsall astutely pointed out that the advocates of authentic, ancient Gothic traditions tend to ignore inconvenient passages like V.44 where the Goths (the husbands of the Amazons) fought the Egyptians. The decision of what's authentic largely belongs to modern interpreters, so in your own words, it's also just a theory. We have no contemporary Gothic songs, nor any other confirmation that Jordanes' story was a real Gothic legend of their origins, gaining substance as they migrated southward and coagulated their identity.

Other learned people believe (to this day) that we all extended from the Garden of Eden. And that's the most popular "literary tradition" going, still a best seller.

If a view is popular it doesn't mean it's true or authentic. We have no evidence we all came from the Garden of Eden and no evidence the Goths came from Scandinavia. In both cases we have an appeal to tradition, but the appeal is much more recent than the alleged event.

Of course they had mixed tongues, but the dominent one was Gothic. Either that or Ulfilas was writing to an incredibly small minority.

Ulfilas certainly was writing for an insignificant minority, but a quite verosimile one. Goths were mostly illiterate and also it is highly unlikely Ulfilas and his disciples preached to every single soul in Gothia, between Danube, Don and Carpathians. Their audience was only a small group of Goths. Thus this episode can't prove an East Germanic dialect was the dominant or the most spoken language in the entire ?ernjachov area.

And Gothic is considered by linguists to be East Germanic, not something else

The language recorded by Ulfilas, not the language(s) spoken by the ?ernjachov inhabitants in the 3rd-4th centuries CE.

I'll be preparing another post for Getae, Thracians, Balkans and languages surviving cultural assimilation.