The Goths and Germans

       The people who in the fourth century after Christ called themselves Gut-tJiiuda, i.e. Goth-people, had been for many centuries the most easterly branch of the Germanic race. Down at least to the second century B.C. their tribes occupied the regions bordering on the Vistula and the Dniester, extending from the Bay of Dantzig to the Black Sea. At the north-western end of the line they were in the time of Tacitus known as Guthones; those at the other end were called Bastarnaa by Polybius and Strabo, and recognized as Germans. The latter people were the first of their race to become acquainted with civilization. The amber-trade was already in the time of Herodotus a vigorous traffic, carried on between the Baltic and the Greek settlements on the Euxine. It passed through the lands of the Guthones and the Bastarnse, and led undoubtedly to the growth of the form of notation called Runes. The Runic alphabet, inscriptions in which are numerous in Scandinavia, was evidently deformed from the Greek, and must have originated about the Dniester some five or six centuries before Christ. As time went on, that alphabet naturally drifted further and farther north; the Goths and Germans, nearest to the Greeks, having, of course, less need of it according as their knowledge increased. From the shores of the Baltic it was carried into Scandinavia, and became the earliest form of writing in Northern Europe. Mr. George Stephens claims for the oldest of the extant Norse Runes an antiquity exceeding that of our era, but a more moderate Scandinavian writer sets the earliest date at about A.D. 300. In any case, it must be allowed that some form of writing was obtained by Gothic tribes from Greek traders before the time of Christ, and that it afterwards found a home in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The name of Runes is equivalent to that of ciphers or riddles or mysteries, and we may infer that its real origin was in the cutting of strokes to express numbers. Runic letters never reached the pen-and-ink stage of other alphabets, and their records are hardly more than inscriptions upon tombstones. For that and similar purposes they continued to be occasionally employed, both in England and Scandinavia, long after the use of Roman or modified Roman letters had been established in all countries. The singular variations in form and number and value between runes of different dates and different places, are easily accounted for by the circumstance that. there can have been no continuous practice of such inscriptions in any country in which Christianity had already

established a simpler script.

       Runes do not seem to have come into use among the Western Germans, that is, the tribes which occupied the region which we now call Germany. Hrabanus Maurus, in the tenth century, wrote about the runes of the Marcomanni, and gave figures of them. This has led German writers to assert the existence of Runic letters among the Suevi in the early days of the Roman empire ; but Hrabanus adds to " Marcomanni " the gloss "quos nos Northmannos vocamus." His Marcomanni were not the Marchmen of the Roman period. Bede is also said to have formulated a list of the runes of the Northmen. One reason which retarded the educational advancement of the Western Germans was that

they never came into contact with the Romans till the beginning of the first century B.C., and even then only for a short time, in the invasion of the republic by the Cimbri and Teutones. They were shut away from the Roman frontiers by the buffer states of Celtic countries, and it was only after the conquest of Gaul, Rhaetia, and Noricum that the Romans came into continuous conflict with Marcomanni and Suevi. It was Cassar who first made the name of Gerrriani historical, and Tacitus who invented Germania as the name of the country.

       The name Germani is, as Zeuss suggests, Gallic for "Neighbors," and was pronounced Gdrmani by the Gauls, who had first been asked by the Romans how their neighbors were called. It is curious that even in this country the Britons called the invading English Garmani, by what Bede supposed to be a corruption of speech. (The Celts in later days were not Latinized Britons, and knew nothing of Germans. They made no distinction between Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but called them all Saxons.)

       The name by which the Germans call themselves is not a race name, but merely the adjective meaning national, native, vernacular. Just as the Italians afterwards used the phrase in volgare to mean " in Italian," as distinguished from Latin, so the Germans had the word diutisc or thiutisc (deutsch) to mean vulgar, as opposed to walahisc or ivalesc (welsch), which meant Latin. The two adjectives became in time proper names, with the sense of German and Roman. The Western Germans had nothing to do with writing till they conquered the Welshmen of Gaul. Consequently, we proceed to the Gothic alphabet.

       After repeated attacks on the Roman empire in the third century, and repeated defeats, the Goths had extended their seats southwards, and were resident, in a partly Christianized state, in the lands north and south of the Danube. Wulfila, or Ulfila, a Goth, said to have been bora in Cappadocia, a man of great ability, who was able to preach in Gothic, in Greek, and in Latin, thought the time had come to Christianize his countrymen completely. For that purpose he translated the Bible into the Gothic language, and created an uncial alphabet, derived partly from Greek, partly from Latin, and partly from Runic. Of his twenty- seven letters, two are merely numerals. In the twenty-five that were used for writing, the c (g), d, I, p, and ch have their Greek uncial shapes, the a, b, e, /, h, i, k, m, n, r, s, t, and z may be called Latin uncials ; the q resembles our capital u, but is plainly an adaptation of the Greek koppa, the th seems to be modified from the Greek ph, but may have easily been the Greek th; a Roman G is inserted in the alphabet in the place of the Greek Ksi, and seems to have been used as gh or Y consonant; a Greek Y is used for the Runic angular P which represented the Teutonic w; an o with a dot in the center stood for hw; and the vowels o and u appear as and n. The Gothie th, hw, w, o, and u are found in the Runic alphabet, from which Ulfila must have borrowed them. So far as it was possible to him he avoided the letters of his pagan ancestors, but for certain sounds existing in Gothic, and not in Greek or Latin, he was compelled to fall back upon the Runes. Just in a similar way, the Anglo-Saxons two hundred years later, when adopting the Irish-Roman alphabet, were obliged to add the necessary th and tv from the same Runic source.

       The Gothic letters of Ulfila were used for about two centuries by the so-called Ostrogoths, all the extant manuscripts of the Gothic Bible having been written in Italy in the sixth century, the famous Silver Gospels of Stockholm included. Of the Visigoths who had preceded the Ostrogoths in Italy, but gone onward thence to fix their rule in Southern Gaul and Spain, we have nothing to show that they ever made use of the Ulphilan alphabet. Their coins of the sixth and seventh centuries bear inscriptions in debased Roman capitals ; and the so-called Visigothic writing in manuscripts of the eighth to the twelfth centuries is simply Spanish-Roman. The use, in modern times, of the word Gothic to indicate special forms of writing and architecture is very absurd, but the phrase has become convenient. In so far as writing is concerned, we may continue to use the word gothic (with a small g) to denote the angular "black letter" of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, You Are Reading Chapter 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 chapters

Plates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22