the Venedi, a people mentioned by Tacitus, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy, with the Slavs of the 6th century. Since as early as 1844, this passage has been used by some scholars in eastern Europe to support the idea that there was a distinct Slavic ethnicity long before the last phase of the Late Roman period. Others have rejected this view because of the absence of concrete archaeological and historiographical data. The book is important to some medieval historians because it mentions the campaign in Gaul of one Riothamus, "King of the Brettones," a possible source of inspiration for the early stories of King Arthur. One of the major questions concerning the historicity of the work is whether the identities mentioned are as ancient as Jordanes states or date from a later time. The evidence allows a wide range of views, the most skeptical being that the work is mainly mythological, or that, if Jordanes did exist and was the author, he described peoples of the 6th century only. According to the latter view, the credibility of his main source, Cassiodorus, is questionable for a number of reasons. First, a large part of the material was derived by culling ancient Greek and Latin authors for descriptions of peoples who might have been Goths. Second, it seems that Jordanes distorted Cassiodorus's narrative by presenting a cursory abridgement of it mixed with 6th-century ethnic names. Some scholars claim that, while acceptance of Jordanes' text at face value may be too naive, a totally skeptical view is not warranted. For example, Jordanes writes that the Goths originated in Scandinavia in 1490 BC. One Austrian historian, Herwig Wolfram, believes that there might be a kernel of truth in the claim, if we assume that a clan of the Gutae left Scandinavia long before the establishment of the Amali in the leadership of the Goths. This clan might have contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Gutones in eastern Pomerania (see Wielbark culture). Another example is the name of King Cniva, which David S. Potter thinks is genuine because, since it doesn't appear in the fictionalized genealogy of Gothic kings given by Jordanes, he must have found it in a genuine 3rd-century source. On the other hand, a Danish scholar, Arne Søby Christensen, claims that the Getica is an entirely fabricated account, and that the origin of the Goths that Jordanes outlines is a construction based