According to Jordanes in his account of the history of the Goths, Getica the Goths originated in Scandinavia, the famous womb of nations, and migrated to the mainland and slowly worked their way towards Roman territory, where they divided into the Visigoths and Ostrogoths.He claims to be basing his source on Cassiodorus, a well known historian from Late Antiquity, however his work has not survived down to the modern day, so it is sadly impossible to compare the two accounts for their similarities and differences.

There are also later, much later, accounts from Scandinavian Sagas that also support a Scandinavia origin for the Goths, but to be quite frank these sorts of sources can be safely dismissed given their distance temporally and they were undoubtedly influenced by earlier accounts.

Recent scholarship takes some umbrage with this traditional view however. Peter Heather in Empires and Barbarians (I REALLY need his book on the Goths tbh) does identify the Goths with Wielbark culture in Poland and Ukraine in a stretch of Germanic influenced material culture stretching roughly from the Baltic to the Black Sea. This matches with Jordanes's description roughly, however, the account of the Goths arriving across the Baltic from Sweden with three ships is a tad too troptastic and, well mythical, to be taken seriously. This also matched the description provided by Tacitus, his Guthones have been identified, for rather obvious reasons, with the Goths on the Baltic Coast in the 1st century AD.

Any earlier claims on Gothic homelands are somewhat suspect, and there is certainly not enough evidence to firmly support their origins in Gotland or in Southern Sweden. All that can be said with certainty is that they are identified with the Germanic influenced Wielbark culture in Eastern Europe as well as some tentative identifications in earlier Roman sources on the Baltic coast before arriving on Roman borders in later times in the Empire.