Who or what did the term Goth originally refer to?

Answer 1

The Goths were a large group of people from Eastern Europe who invaded the Roman Empire in the 300s and 400s. Some Gothic groups allied with the Romans and others allied with the Huns, another group of "barbarians". Eventually as the Roman Empire in the West collapsed, Gothic kingdoms were formed in northern Italy and in Spain. Eventually the Goths were absorbed into other peoples such as the Lombards and the Franks, and their language disappeared. During the Renaissance, the name "Goth" became associated with the "Dark Ages" image of the middle ages. From the Renaissance perspective, the middle ages were rife with barbarism, ignorance, superstition and violence. It is for this reason that the architecture of the 11th to 14th centuries was dismissed as "Gothic", or merely barbaric in the Renaissance; the name stuck and the architectural style is now called Gothic Architecture. Somewhat later, in the mid-1700s, the English writer Horace Walpole described his novel The Castle of Otranto, the first novel we would describe as a "Horror story", as a "Gothic story", as it was set in the middle ages with all the trappings of superstition, the macabre, and the supernatural associated with that era by the people of the Renaissance. That label stuck too, so the many horror works of the nineteenth century were described as "Gothic". It was this association which gave the subculture its name.