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

[Rumo]

If they came from Scandia, if they worshiped Germanic gods, if they read a Bible in the Germanic language, if they themselves spoke a Germanic tongue, and if the ruling families had Germanic names? What should we think? Perhaps they were Spaniards just practicing a foreign language so they could visit the Temple of Walhalla without being too conspicuous.

But if they showed up north and west of Black Sea, having mixed tongues and names, what should we think?

The biggest bandwagon theory is that they originated "somewhere else," not Scandinavia.

Based on the same literary tradition, some learned people once believed the Danes and the Swedes came from Dacia.

Rumo swallows this stuff, but the serious scholars, men like Herwig Wolfram, who knew his subject and the languge, equated the Goths with the Gutones and the many linguistic variations. Of course, today postulating anything remotely "Germanic" is persona non grata.

Isn't actually Peter Heather persona non grata in this thread for questioning "Germanicity"?

The upside to all of this is we end up with "entertainers" like Professor Heather-- good for a belly laugh.

For Matthews, Goffart, Christensen, Curta or Halsall (to keep the list short, I could easily expand it to few dozen names) there's no belly laugh about Heather's work. Oh, perhaps they are not "serious scholars" (whatever that means, because Heather is referenced also by Wolfram) :mrgreen: