Roman authors mention Gothic inhabitants of Scandinavia, which is farther confirmed by accounts in some of the oldest Icelandic Sagas, and chronicles of the North. It is there said, that Denmark, in the earliest time, was called Eygotland (the island of the Goths) and Reiðgotland, (the continent of the Goths,) or, by one name, Gotland. In the fifth century the Goths (Jütes) went over to England from Jutland, which country was still, in the ninth century, called by the Anglo-Saxons Gotland. "From Svea and Götaland the kingdom of Sweden has been formed in pagan times," says the old Swedish lawbook. As therefore the remains of the bronze-period necessarily extend to the sixth and seventh centuries, there can be very little doubt, that the inhabitants of Denmark, in the bronze-period, were a Gothic tribe. It has however been said, that they were a Gotho-Germanic, and not a Gotho-Scandinavian race; and that they were quite subdued or expelled from Sweden and Denmark, by the Scandinavian people. But against this we have not only, as already shewn, the testimony of the monuments, but also the testimony of the history of Scandinavia. A general review of the iron-period will further prove, that this Gothic tribe must necessarily have been the first Scandinavian people, who settled in the North.
§ 3. The Iron-period.
The numerous remains belonging to the iron-period in Norway and Sweden must, without all doubt, be ascribed to the same people as the present Swedes, and Norwegians, (Svear og Nordmænd;) who, according to all tradition, came from the East, and who on their arrival in the northern parts of Scandinavia, either completely subdued the nomadic Finnic tribes living there, or drove them to the most northern part of Europe, where remnants of them exist to this day. Already, in the first century of the Christian era, Tacitus mentions the "Sviones" (Svear?) as having settlements in the North, on the borders of the Ocean. But if it is not to be supposed that the Svioncs
