Ancient DNA backs Jordanes on one point: the Goths came from the north. That is about 2% of his book.

The departure from the north was real#

The study published in Nature on 28 October 2026, with 712 new ancient genomes, also analysed people of the Wielbark culture in northern Poland, from almost 2,000 years ago, a culture archaeologists usually link to the early Goths. Their ancestry looks most like that of people in eastern Scandinavia in the Bronze and Iron Ages.

Of the 27 Wielbark people analysed, 24 fall into the genetic groups of Scandinavia and the Baltic. The authors write that this supports the Goths’ own story of an emigration from eastern Scandinavia.

On the map each circle is a cemetery; its size shows how many people were analysed, its colour the share assigned to northern genetic clusters. A genetic group is not an ancestry percentage.

The Goths buried in Spain and Italy were mostly southerners#

The same study found something else among later Goths. Of the 16 people from graves the authors’ table associates with the Ostrogoths and Visigoths, in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Crimea, only 2 fall into Scandinavian or Baltic genetic clusters. The authors model the others’ ancestry as local.

The authors find the results consistent with a two-step model. First a group of people left Scandinavia. Then many others became Goths: they took up the language, the name and the way of life. “Goth” became an identity people could join.

The study has no genomes from the Romanian cemeteries of the Sântana de Mureș culture. At Sântana de Mureș only bone isotopes have been analysed, for 26 people. The study includes two people of Ukraine’s Chernyakhov culture, both in the northern groups.

Now, the book itself#

The Getica has 316 paragraphs, almost 20,000 Latin words. On screen each line is a paragraph, in Jordanes’s order, coloured by what it tells.

For 238–540 most events can be checked against other writers of the time, and historians still use the book, minding its legendary details. The big trouble is the start.

The part the DNA confirmed: about two words in a hundred#

The departure from Scandza under King Berig and the march to the Black Sea fill four paragraphs (25–28), plus one on the Gepids. That is between 1.4% and 2.6% of the book, depending on how you count the paragraphs at the edges.

Ex hac igitur Scandza insula quasi officina gentium aut certe velut vagina nationum cum rege suo nomine Berig Gothi quondam memorantur egressiNow from this island of Scandza, as from a hive of races or a womb of nations, the Goths are said to have come forth long ago under their king, Berig by name. (§25, tr. Mierow)

The DNA confirms a movement of people from eastern Scandinavia to the southern Baltic. It cannot confirm the king, the three ships or the year.

Jordanes gave the Goths 2,030 years#

Near the end, Jordanes writes that the Gothic kingdom fell in 540 “in almost its 2,030th year” (§313). That puts the start around 1490 BC, more than seven centuries before Rome.

On screen, the paragraphs now sit on Jordanes’s own clock. To fill 1,700 years without Goths, he took other peoples’ stories: those of the Getae and Dacians (red), the Scythians and Greek legend (violet).

Originem Gothicam historiam fecit esse RomanamHe made the origin of the Goths into Roman history. So King Athalaric praised, in 533, the book by Cassiodorus that Jordanes summarised. (Cassiodorus, Variae 9.25)

On real dates, the book shrinks#

Goths appear securely in Roman writers only in the 1st century AD, near the Vistula: “Gutones” in Pliny, “Gotones” in Tacitus. Their first attack on the Danube is in 238.

On screen, the paragraphs now sit at the year of the events they tell. The departure from the north moves 1,500 years later, into the first centuries AD, where archaeology and the DNA put it. The legends leave the timeline for the corner: they have no date. The red block stays put: it tells of other peoples, sometimes real events, sometimes uncertain or legendary ones.

Burebista was not a Goth#

Ancient writers often called the Goths “Getae” or “Scythians”, after the peoples who had lived in the same lands before them. Orosius even wrote: “the Getae, who are now the Goths”. Jordanes went further and moved everything he found about the Getae into Gothic history.

That is how Zalmoxis, Deceneus, Burebista, Comosicus and Coryllus, probably the Dacian king Scorilo, became Goths. It shows most clearly in the king who defeated the Roman general Fuscus in AD 86 or 87 (§76). Jordanes’s own source, Orosius, calls him Diurpanei Dacorum regis, “Diurpaneus, king of the Dacians”. Jordanes wrote “Goths” for “Dacians”.

The irony: almost everything told about Deceneus’s teachings, the astronomy, the 346 stars, the written laws and the capped priests, comes from Jordanes, who thought he was a Goth. Strabo mentions him only briefly, as Burebista’s priest and adviser, who had learned in Egypt.

The Goths and the Trojan War#

Jordanes wanted to tie the Goths to the most famous story of the ancient world as well. Once through legend: he makes a Gothic king of Telephus, son of Hercules, who in myth fights the Greeks on their way to Troy (§59–60). Telephus became a Goth because Jordanes confused Mysia in Asia Minor, Telephus’s land, with Moesia on the Danube. And once through history: in §108, Goths raiding Asia Minor in the 260s pass through “Troy and Ilium”, two names for one city, which, he says, had barely recovered from the war with Agamemnon.

vastantes itinere suo Troiam Iliumque, quae vix a bello illo Agamemnoniaco quantulum se reparantes rursus hostili mucrone deletae suntsacking Troy and Ilium on the way. These cities, which had scarce recovered a little from the famous war with Agamemnon, were thus destroyed anew by the hostile sword. (§108, tr. Mierow)

The Gothic raids in the Aegean are real. Ilium was then a prosperous Roman town, and the line about Agamemnon jumps 1,400 years. Whatever the Goths touched, if anything, was a Roman town built on the site of Homer’s Troy.

The Goths on Romanian soil#

The Getae were not Goths. But Goths did live on what is now Romanian soil, for about 150 years, from around 230–270 until 376. Archaeologists link the Goths to the Sântana de Mureș–Chernyakhov culture, named after a village near Târgu Mureș and one near Kyiv, which other peoples shared too.

In 376, fleeing the Huns, the Goths of Wallachia and Moldavia asked to cross the Danube. Their children and grandchildren entered Rome with Alaric on 24 August 410. It was Rome’s first capture by a foreign army in almost 800 years. Claudian, court poet of Emperor Honorius, wrote that Alaric had been raised by barbara Peuce, an island in the Danube Delta.

And Jordanes’s own grandfather was secretary to Candac, whose people had been given Scythia Minor, today’s Dobrogea, and Lower Moesia (§265–266).

On the map: the Goths’ places in Romania and along the Danube. Tap a point.

Read any paragraph#

Tap any line in the picture to read that paragraph in Latin, with Charles Mierow’s 1915 English translation.

The colour shows the kind of story. The buttons in the window take you to the paragraph before or after.