The reputation of the Goths has followed a strange trajectory, such that the adjective formed from their name now means (variously): a people; their language; a medieval style of architecture; the modern revival of that architectural style; a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century mode of novelistic literature (the chief concern of this essay); a sanserif printing font; and a contemporary youth subculture centred on a particular sort of rock music and a penchant for black clothing and make-up. We might begin by asking: who were they?

Edward Thompson provides a textbook answer: the Goths were ‘a Germanic people who left their original homes in southern Scandinavia about the beginning of the Christian era, and settled around the lower Vistula [in Poland] … in the period ad 150–200 they migrated to the lands north of the Black Sea and in 238 at latest they began to raid the Roman Empire’. They divided into two groups: Visigoths and Ostrogoths. The Visigoths, who warred and settled along the Danube, moved into Greece, and thence to Italy, where (under the leadership of Alaric I) they sacked Rome in 410, finally settling in southern France. The Ostrogoths built a large empire in what is now the Ukraine, and after various military victories their king, Theodoric, ruled Italy from the beginning of the sixth century. By the end of the sixth century rule in Italy passed to another Scandinavian/Germanic people, the Lombards; but by this time the Goths had colonized much of Europe and, through interbreeding with other peoples, became simply European.