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Concept
Oium
Summary
Oium was a name for Scythia, or a fertile part of it, roughly in modern Ukraine, where the Goths, under a legendary King Filimer, settled after leaving Gothiscandza, according to the Getica by Jordanes, written around 551.
It is generally assumed that the story reproduced by Jordanes contains a historical core, although several scholars have suggested that parts of it are fictional.
Jordanes does not give an etymology, but many scholars interpret this word as a dative plural to a noun, widespread in the Germanic languages, whose Proto-Germanic reconstruction is *awjō and which means 'well-watered meadow' or 'island'. (The same noun is also found in Scatinauia, the Latinised name of an island in Northern Europe mentioned in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia, from which the names of Scandinavia and Scania originate.) This noun is generally derived from the Proto-Germanic word *ahwō 'water; stream, river' (whence Gothic aƕa 'river'), which is cognate with Latin aqua 'water'. This is seen as consistent with the description Jordanes gave of the Goths delight in this region's fertility.
As mentioned for example by Dennis H. Green Jordanes describes another place with a similar name — the place where the Goths' relatives the Gepids lived:
XVII (96) These Gepidae were then smitten by envy while they dwelt in the province of Spesis on an island surrounded by the shallow waters of the Vistula. This island they called, in the speech of their fathers, Gepedoios [emphasis added]; but it is now [in the 6th century] inhabited by the race of the Vividarii, since the Gepidae themselves have moved to better lands. The Vividarii are gathered from various races into this one asylum, if I may call it so, and thus they form a nation. (97) So then, as we were saying, Fastida, king of the Gepidae, stirred up his quiet people to enlarge their boundaries by war. He overwhelmed the Burgundians, almost annihilating them, and conquered a number of other races also.
A problem with Jordanes' account is that he dates the arrival of the Goths in Oium well before 1000 BCE (approximately 5 generations after 1490).
Official source
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