New Books

[llama_nom]

Okay, this isn't a new book, but I'm in a critical mood now...

Language and History in the Early Germanic World. By D.H. GREEN.
Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 444 pp.

"The position of OE is remarkable, since it is the only Germanic
language to regularly apply three of the technical runic terms (stæf
`letter', writan `write', rædan `read') to Christian writing in the
Latin alphabet.  [...]  At the opposite extreme to OE stands Gothic,
where none of the terms was used by Wulfila with regard to his Gothic
Christian script" (358).

But no Gothic text survives in which any author even mentions the
Gothic script!  Besides which, what terms may have existed in Gothic
for runic reading and writing, if any, and whether they differed from
the terms used for reading and writing in the New Testament, is also
completely unknown. *

"the Gothic word blotan has been safely Christianised by a change of
construction: it no longer governs the dative (`to sacrifice to a
god'), but the accusative (`to worship God') [...].  Wulfila therefore
retained no trace of worship by means of sacrifice and has extracted
the word from its pagan origins" (22).  Yet the cognate ON blóta,
which retained its non-Christian connotations, shows exactly the same
grammar as the Gothic verb, accusative for the god, dative for the
means of worship, such as sacrificed animals.

Green proposes that the use of different words for `holy' in the
Christian sense in OE and Gothic was a deliberate choice: "Wulfila may
therefore have shunned *hailagaz because of its combination of the
physical and the metaphysical.  He may also have taken offence at a
particular type of secular function performed by *hailagaz (concerning
assistance in battle, victory)" (360-361).

But what was there to take offense at when Christian scripture
ascribed the same function to its god: `thanks be to God who has given
us victory' (1Cor 15:57), whose attributes were likened to weapons
(Eph 6:17), service of and faith in whom was described in terms of
armed combat (2Cor 10:4, 1Thess 5:8), under whom was set a heavenly
host (L 2:13), and whose favour was called the prize of victory, Go.
sigislaun (1Cor 9:24, Php 3:14).

Similarly Green states that "what Wulfila objected to was not the
secular use of *drauhtins as such (frauja also had a secular
function), but rather its military function and the suggestion, if he
had used it, that Christ could be regarded as a military leader"
(361-362).

Yet independently--it would seem--of a Greek model, the Gothic Bible
uses frauja in exactly this sense of a military leader: drauhtinonds
frauja = STRATEUOMENOS `serves as a soldier' (2Tim 2:4), and in a
positive sense, extolling the virtues of discipline.

In each of these instances, another possibility is that the choice of
terms in the various Germanic languages may have been quite arbitrary
and that the pagan or secular connotations of the word not
chosen--where such connotations existed--arose after the fact; not
every aspect of language use is deliberate.  A third possibility is
that the word not chosen was obsolete in the particular variety of
Gothic or OE, even if it did exist in other dialects, in specialised
uses, or in compounds and derivatives.  Or it could be that, in each
case, the word not chosen was current in the language, but rejected
for reasons other than those proposed by Green, or those suggested
here, reasons which may or may not be recoverable to us, and not
necessarily the same reasons for each word.

Lama Nom

* Go. stafs occurs twice translating Gk. STOICEION `element', which
also has the meaning `letter of the alphabet'.  No cognate of OE
writan occurs in Gothic, except for the derivative writs `stroke of
the pen'.  Prefixed verbs derived from *redan occur, though nowhere
attested with the meaning `read'.  Instead Gothic has boka `letter',
meljan `write', anakunnan, (us)siggwan `read'.


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