[gothic-l] Lars Munkhammar Two

[Bertil Häggman]

The Goths were a Germanic people and the Gothic language 
was a Germanic language. As the Goths were wandering, many 
foreign words were adapted to their language. And as the Goths 
met the Romans very often and lived together with Romans for 
long times, the influence of Latin was important to the Gothic 
language. The Goths were not a writing people, and our possibility 
today to study their language is very limited. What the Goths 
left to posterity of literature is a translation of the Bible and 
more-over very few fragments of text. Even the Bible translation 
is very fragmentarily preserved: the Silver Bible, a Gospel book, 
even that in fragments. Then we can understand the great importance 
of this manuscript as a source for philological research! 

Beside the Silver Bible, we can find Gothic text today in a few 
palimpsests, some marginal notes in a manuscript, and some 
small fragment of a Gothic manuscript. The palimpsests are the 
Codex Carolinus in Wolfenbüttel, the Codices Ambrosiani in Milan, 
the Codex Taurinensis in Torino, and the Skeireins in Milan and 
in the Vatican Library. The marginal notes are found in the so called 
Codex Veronensis, and a short fragment is for instance the Codex 
Gissensis, a Gothic-Latin dubble leaf found in Egypt and destroyed 
by a flood in Giessen in Germany in the nineteen-forties. 

The Gothic bible translation was made by the Visigothic bishop 
Wulfila. His name means »the little wolf«. Wulfila, who died in 381 
or some years thereafter, was bishop of »Gothia«, for those 
Christians who lived in the Gothic settlement north of the river Danube. 
Wulfila was an Arian Christian, and the Goths were Arians. We cannot 
deal with the concept here, but it meant that Wulfila did not accept the 
doctrine of the Trinity such as it had been stated at the Council of Nice 
in 325. Wulfila translated the Bible from Greek, and he seems to have 
used several Greek versions. The tradition tells that he translated the 
entire Bible except for the books of Kings. They were too martial, and 
the Goths did not need any martial encouragement. One important task 
for Wulfila beside the translation seems to have been the Christian 
mission. Like many other missionaries after him, Wulfila was a typographic 
pioneer, if we can use this term for the era of hand-writing. Probably it was 
he, who constructed the Gothic alphabet, and probably he did it for the 
Gothic Bible translation. The Goths had earlier used the runic alphabet. 
The runes has also contributed to Wulfila's Gothic alphabet with some 
characters, but on the whole this is based on the Greek alphabet. 

So, back to the Ostrogoths in Italy! Theodoric the Great was the 
Ostrogothic king during the first period of the Gothic hegemony in 
Italy. He was born in the middle of the fifth century, and he died in 
526. He was the king of the Goths in Italy, but also the king of the 
Romans in Italy. He used the title Gothorum romanorumque rex. 
He was the leader of a tribe of barbarians, warriors and Arians 
the Ostrogoths were still Arians as bishop Wulfila once had been. 
But Theodoric in Italy is not just a king, he acts like a Roman emperor. 
He builds churches and palaces, he stamps coins with his own picture, 
he uses the purple colour with permission from the Eastern Emperor. 
He builds his capital Ravenna with Constantinople as a pattern. He 
gives the Romans panem et circensem, and they call him »Trajan« 
and »Valentinian«. The civil administration in Theodoric's Italy was 
Roman, and its language was Latin. Theodoric's prime minister was 
Cassiodorus, a noble Roman magistrate, later one of the early cloister founders in Italy. 

It was a question of great Gothic national prestige, that the Arians 
should have as splendid churches as the Catholics. But the ecclesiastical 
life required not only impressive buildings and beautiful liturgical dresses. 
It also required the sacred Scriptures, preferably in magnificent books. 
The Silver Bible was such a book. Perhaps the most beautiful one, but 
we do not know for sure. And so Ravenna began to be a center even 
for book-writing. 

Within thirty years after Theodoric's death in 526 the Gothic empire in 
Italy was over. The Eastern Empire had conquered the land during the 
long so-called »Gothic war«. What happened to the Silver Bible? We 
do not know. In the monastery Werden upon Ruhr the manuscript was 
discovered in the middle of the sixteenth century, probably by two theologians 
from Cologne, Georg Cassander and Cornelius Wouters. At least they 
knew about it, which we can see from their correspondence with other scholars. 
How did the manuscript wander from Ravenna to Werden? We do not know. 
This is the Mystery of the Thousand Years. Many scolars have been occupied 
with this mystery, and when the Speyer leaf - or the Haffner leaf, as it is 
called after its finder was discovered in 1970, the speculations started again, 
and were much connected to the question of how and when the Haffner leaf 
was separated from the manuscript. There are in principal three main theories. 

To be continued


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