Palæography / Notes upon the History of Writing and the Medieval Art of Illumination

by Bernard Quaritch

The name Germani is, as Zeuss suggests, Gallic for "Neighbours," and was pronounced Gármani by the Gauls, who had first been asked by the Romans how their neighbours 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 Latinised 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 walesc (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 Christianised state, in the lands north and south of the Danube. Wulfila, or Ulfila, a Goth, said to have been born 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 Christianise 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, l, p, and ch have their Greek uncial shapes, the a, b, e, f, 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 centre stood for hw; and the vowels O and U appear as

and

. The Gothic 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 w 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.

Irish and British writing

Of the various species of national writing which were evolved from Roman calligraphy, and which, from the seventh century onwards, are divided by palæographers into Lombardic and Visigothic, Frankish (Merowingian), and Irish (Hibernian and Anglo-Saxon), the Irish was probably the first to attain a distinct type of its own. There would be inherent probability in the notion that the Irish alphabet and the Irish style of ornament were created in Britain and transferred to Ireland in the fifth century when the English arrived. Professor Westwood seemed to regard the idea with favour but hesitated in giving it full expression. He says "it may be observed that the earliest of the sculptured Christian stones of Wales exhibit the same system of ornamentation, as well as the same style of writing, as the Irish MSS. which are, in all probability, of a somewhat more recent date." One will naturally seek to test the value of this observation by examining the writer's Lapidarium Walliæ. In that work, however, no substantiation will be found. There are a couple of instances in which sculptured stones bearing names, which are assigned by Bishop Stubbs to the ninth century, are said by Prof. Westwood to be perhaps of the sixth or seventh; and that is all. On the contrary, the one salient fact observable in the Lapidarium is, that all the inscriptions of the Roman and early post-Roman time are in pure Roman capitals, while the inscriptions upon sculptured stones in minuscules resembling the Irish alphabet, all belong to the period when the Angles and Saxons were in full possession of Irish calligraphic and artistic models—that is, after the seventh century. The Britons of the fifth century, at least all over the Southern half of the island, were a Romanised people as much as the Gauls, and it would be ridiculous to expect Celtic provincial art in the home of Roman culture. They were exterminated or absorbed in the east and middle of the island by the Germanic invaders, and they were harried out of the west by their Cumri kindred from the north, and by pirate Scots from Ireland. The latter part of the fifth century and the whole of the sixth and part of the seventh, formed a period during which the inhabitants of Cambria can have produced little or nothing in the way of letters or art. It was probably not till the beginning of the eighth century that the Cumri began to identify themselves with the ancient Britons, and to gather up the legends and historical traditions of the British remnant as their own. There is a clear testimony that the Cumri and the Britons were closely akin as a race, but not identical, in the fact that names beginning with V in British use down to the fifth century are found to begin with Gu (Gw) in the language of the Welsh. Guend and Vend were of course two phases of an old Celtic word, but the former is necessarily the older. Consequently the people who have used Gw from the fifth to the nineteenth century cannot be the same as those who had already reached the V-stage in the first century. They were close relatives undoubtedly, but had little in common beyond their racial affinity and the original homogeneity of their speech. It may be surmised that the Briton found no more kindness in his Cumric stepbrother, or his Irish cousin, than in the fierce strangers who called him a Welshman (because they found him talking Welsh, i.e. Latin).