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Concept
Thervingi
Summary
The Thervingi, Tervingi, or Teruingi (sometimes pluralised Tervings or Thervings) were a Gothic people of the plains north of the Lower Danube and west of the Dniester River in the 3rd and the 4th centuries.
They had close contacts with the Greuthungi, another Gothic people from east of the Dniester, and they also had significant interactions with the Roman Empire. They were one of the main components of the large movement of Goths and other peoples over the Danube in 376, and they are seen as one of the most important ancestral groups of the Visigoths.
Name of the Goths
According to a proposal made by Moritz Schönfeld in 1911, and still widely cited, the name Tervingi was probably related to the Gothic word "triu", equivalent to English "tree", and thus means "forest people". Herwig Wolfram agrees with the older position of Franz Altheim that such geographical names were used to distinguish Gothic peoples living north of the Black Sea both before and after Gothic settlement there, and that the Thervingi sometimes had forest-related personal names such as Vidigoia, Veduco and Vidimir, the first part of whose names he believes to be cognate with English "wood". In contrast, the name of the other Gothic people known from this period, the Greuthungi, may mean "steppe-people", with an etymology connected to a word for sand or gravel. Both names are only found from the 3rd century until the late 4th or early 5th. (After these times, Gothic peoples are recording with new names, most notably the Visigoths and Ostrogoths.)
Some scholars have proposed that the name "Thervingi" may have pre-Pontic, Scandinavian, origins. Wolfram cites the example of J. Svennung who believed that the Tervingi were Scandinavian "ox people".
The Thervingi were possibly among the Goths who invaded the Roman Empire in the year 268. This invasion overran the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Illyricum and even threatened Italia itself. However, the Goths were defeated in battle that summer near the modern Italian-Slovenian border and then routed in the Battle of Naissus that September.
Official source
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