Established in 1811, this association of artists and intellectuals (which had antecedents in their student life) took the name of the southern-Swedish Gothic tribe, which since the days of the humanists had provided Sweden with a claim to primordial importance in Europe’s ethnic history. The members cultivated, semi-playfully, the nativism of ancient Swedish society, taking sobriquets or “club names” derived from Nordic mythology or medieval Nordic history, and using the informal and “ancient” greeting Hej! amongst themselves. Against the universal, post-Enlightenment Romanticism of the “phosphorists”, their outlook was nationally Swedish and, given the common-Nordic nature of their cultural historicism, Scandinavist, with Oehlenschläger as an inspiration.

The instigator of Götiska förbundet was the antiquary Jacob Adlerbeth, and the association's main aim was to investigate the antiquities of the ancient Geats. To this end they brought out a magazine for learned and literary topics, Iduna. Knowledge production moved in the field of antiquarianism, and folk-song collection (the antiquarian collector Rääf was a member, as were Geijer and Afzelius). In addition,  artistic production manifested itself in the poetry of their leading member, Esaias Tegnér (notably Frithiofs Saga, which initially appeared in Iduna), and the oversized sculptures of Nordic deities exhibited by Bengt Erland Fogelberg in 1818.

By this time, however, the use of Nordic myth and history was becoming a point of debate. It had been propounded by Per Henrik Ling, the gymnastics advocate, in lectures, and practised in his epic poem Asarne (1816-33, a rendition of mythological themes from the Edda tale Gylfaginning in Ossianic prose) and in a stream of plays: Agne (1812), Eylif den göthiske and Gylfe (1814), Riksdagen 1527 (1817), Den heliga Birgitta (1818), Blot-Sven (1824), Styrbjörn Starke and Ingiald Illråda och Ivar Widfamne (1824). By 1818, Geijer began to query this insistent and exclusive Nordic nativist historicism, and after a controversy, Ling left the Association. Iduna ceased appearing in 1824, and the death of Adlerbeth in 1844 signalled the final dismantling of Götiska förbundet. Over its active period, some 100 artists and intellectuals were associated with it.