Swedes (Germanic tribe)

The Swedes (Swedish: svear; Old Norse: svíar / suar (probably from the PIE reflexive pronominal root *s(w)e, "one's own [tribesmen/kinsmen]";Old English: Sweonas) were a North Germanic tribe.

The first author who might have written about the tribe is Tacitus, who in his Germania, from 98 CE mentions the Suiones. Jordanes, in the sixth century, mentions Suehans and Sueones.

According to early sources such as the sagas, especially Heimskringla, the Swedes were a powerful tribe whose kings claimed descendence from the god Freyr. During the Viking Age they constituted the basis of the Varangian subset, the Vikings that travelled eastwards (see Rus' people).

On the name

As the dominions of the Swedish kings grew, the name of the tribe could be applied more generally during the Middle Ages to include also the Geats. Later it again meant only the people inhabiting the original tribal lands in Svealand, rather than the Geats.

In modern North Germanic languages, the adjectival form svensk and its plural svenskar have replaced the name svear and is, today, used to denote all the citizens of Sweden. The distinction between the tribal Swedes (svear) and modern Swedes (svenskar) appears to have been in effect by the early 20th century, when Nordisk familjebok noted that svenskar had almost replaced svear as a name for the Swedish people. Although this distinction is convention in modern Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese do not distinguish between svíar (Icelandic) or sviar (Faroese) and sænskir (Icelandic) or svenskarar (Faroese) as words for modern Swedes.