Gothic paganism

Information on the form of Germanic paganism practiced by the Goths before Christianisation is thus limited to a comparatively narrow and sparsely-documented time window in the 3rd and the 4th centuries.

In 376, the Romans allowed a number of ostensibly-Christian Goths, including bishops and priests, to cross the Danube and to be granted asylum.

It became the word for the Christian God in the Gothic Bible with its grammatical gender changed from neuter to masculine only in the new sense.

[1] The Goths had a cult of a god of war, identified by the Romans with Mars, presumably cognate to the Proto-Germanic Tīwaz, perhaps called *Teiws in Gothic, on the basis on the corresponding letter names.

[citation needed] Among the Tervingi, perhaps also known as the Terwing, the tribe's mythical, eponymous ancestor, possibly related also to the Týrfingr lost sword legend, 'the finger' of the god Týr, which on touch caused sudden death to its enemies.

[citation needed] There was also Gaut or Gapt, the ancestor of the Amali dynasty and presumably eponymous of the entire people of the "Goths".

It may also be significant that in the Prose Edda, Odin himself is said to have come to the north from the Black Sea region, referred to as Turkland, the lands that some believe were formerly and later inhabited by some ancestors of the Goths.

The Spearhead of Kovel (early 3rd century)
A drawing of the Elder Futhark inscription from the Ring of Pietroassa (3rd or 4th century), read as ᚷᚢᛏᚨᚾᛁᛟᚹᛁ ᚺᚨᛁᛚᚨᚷ (gutani[o]wi hailag) . The seventh letter, here substituted as ᛟ ( o ), was destroyed when the ring was cut in half by thieves in 1875. The reading of the damaged part is disputed, but it is clear that the inscription begins with the name of the Goths ( Gutani ) and ends with the word for "holy, sacred" ( hailag ).