ABSTRACT
The name of the Vandals is one among a number of ethnonyms (along with those of the Goths, Burgundians and Rugians) that appear in identical or similar form in eastern Germania in the first and second centuries AD, as post-Roman kingdoms in the fifth century, and as regional or tribal names in medieval Scandinavia (and/or as islands in the Baltic Sea).1 In traditional scholarship, the interpretation was simple: these were peoples who had migrated from prehistoric Scandinavia across the Baltic Sea to the continent where they settled in the early imperial age, marching on into Roman provinces in the course of the Great Migration of the fourth to sixth centuries. Debate was limited to the chronology of migrations, and whether parts of a people had stayed behind in Scandinavia, or wandered back at a later date.2
