Lectures on the Science of Language

by F. Max Müller

There is little more to be learnt about Ulfilas from other sources. What is said by ecclesiastical historians about the motives of his adopting the doctrines of Arius, and his changing from one side to the other, [pg 186] deserves no credit. Ulfilas, according to his own confession, was always an Arian (semper sic credidi). Socrates says that Ulfilas was present at the Synod of Constantinople in 360, which may be true, though neither Auxentius nor Philostorgius mentions it. The author of the Acts of Nicetas speaks of Ulfilas as present at the Council of Nicæa, in company with Theophilus. Theophilus, it is true, signed his name as a Gothic bishop at that council, but there is nothing to confirm the statement that Ulfilas, then fourteen years of age, was with Theophilus.

Ulfilas translated the whole Bible, except the Books of Kings. For the Old Testament he used the Septuagint; for the New, the Greek text; but not exactly in that form in which we have it. Unfortunately, the greater part of his work has been lost, and we have only considerable portions of the Gospels, all the genuine Epistles of St. Paul, though again not complete; fragments of a Psalm, of Ezra, and Nehemiah.[172]

Though Ulfilas belonged to the western Goths, his translation was used by all Gothic tribes, when they [pg 188] advanced into Spain and Italy. The Gothic language died out in the ninth century, and after the extinction of the great Gothic empires, the translation of Ulfilas was lost and forgotten. But a MS. of the fifth century had been preserved in the Abbey of Werden, and towards the end of the sixteenth century, a man of the name of Arnold Mercator, who was in the service of William IV., the Landgrave of Hessia, drew attention to this old parchment containing large fragments of the translation of Ulfilas. The MS., known as the Codex Argenteus, was afterwards transferred to Prague, and when Prague was taken in 1648 by Count Königsmark, he carried this Codex to Upsala in Sweden, where it is still preserved as one of the greatest treasures. The parchment is purple, the letters in silver, and the MS. bound in solid silver.

In 1818, Cardinal Mai and Count Castiglione discovered some more fragments in the Monastery of Bobbio, where they had probably been preserved ever since the Gothic empire of Theodoric the Great in Italy had been destroyed.

Ulfilas must have been a man of extraordinary power to conceive, for the first time, the idea of translating the Bible into the vulgar language of his people. At his time, there existed in Europe but two languages which a Christian bishop would have thought himself justified in employing, Greek and Latin. All other languages were still considered as barbarous. It required a prophetic [pg 189] sight, and a faith in the destinies of these half-savage tribes, and a conviction also of the utter effeteness of the Roman and Byzantine empires, before a bishop could have brought himself to translate the Bible into the vulgar dialect of his barbarous countrymen. Soon after the death of Ulfilas, the number of Christian Goths at Constantinople had so much increased as to induce Chrysostom, the bishop of Constantinople (397-405), to establish a church in the capital, where the service was to be read in Gothic.[173]

The language of Ulfilas, the Gothic, belongs, through its phonetic structure, to the Low-German class, but in its grammar it is, with few exceptions, far more primitive than the Anglo-Saxon of the Beowulf, or the Old High-German of Charlemagne. These few exceptions, however, are very important, for they show that it would be grammatically, and therefore historically, impossible to derive either Anglo-Saxon or High-German, or both,[174] from Gothic. It would be impossible, for instance, to treat the first person plural of the indicative present, the Old High-German nerjamês, as a corruption of the Gothic nasjam; for we know, from the Sanskrit masi, the Greek mes, the Latin mus, that this was the original termination of the first person plural.

Gothic is but one of the numerous dialects of the German race; some of which became the feeders of the literary languages of the British Isles, of Holland, Friesia, and of Low and High Germany, while others became extinct, and others rolled on from century to century unheeded, and without ever producing any [pg 190] literature at all. It is because Gothic is the only one of these parallel dialects that can be traced back to the fourth century, whereas the others disappear from our sight in the seventh, that it has been mistaken by some for the original source of all Teutonic speech. The same arguments, however, which we used against Raynouard, to show that Provençal could not be considered as the parent of the Six Romance dialects, would tell with equal force against the pretensions of Gothic to be considered as more than the eldest sister of the Teutonic branch of speech.

There is, in fact, a third stream of Teutonic speech, which asserts its independence as much as High-German and Low-German, and which it would be impossible to place in any but a co-ordinate position with regard to Gothic, Low and High German. This is the Scandinavian branch. It consists at present of three literary dialects, those of Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, and of various local dialects, particularly in secluded valleys and fiords of Norway,[175] where, however, the literary language is Danish.

It is commonly supposed[176] that, as late as the eleventh century, identically the same language was spoken in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and that this language was preserved almost intact in Iceland, while in Sweden and Denmark it grew into two new national dialects. Nor is there any doubt that the Icelandic skald recited his poems in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, nay, even among his countrymen in England and Gardariki, without fear of not being understood, till, as it is said, William introduced Welsh, i.e. French, into England, [pg 191] and Slavonic tongues grew up in the east.[177] But though one and the same language (then called Danish or Norrænish) was understood, I doubt whether one and the same language was spoken by all Northmen, and whether the first germs of Swedish and Danish did not exist long before the eleventh century, in the dialects of the numerous clans and tribes of the Scandinavian race. That race is clearly divided into two branches, called by Swedish scholars the East and West Scandinavian. The former would be represented by the old language of Norway and Iceland, the latter by Swedish and Danish. This division of the Scandinavian race had taken place before the Northmen settled in Sweden and Norway. The western division migrated westward from Russia, and crossed over from the continent to the Aland Islands, and from thence to the southern coast of the peninsula. The eastern division travelled along the Bothnian Gulf, passing the country occupied by the Finns and Lapps, and settled in the northern highlands, spreading toward the south and west.

The earliest fragments of Scandinavian speech are preserved in the two Eddas, the elder or poetical Edda, containing old mythic poems, the younger or Snorri's Edda giving an account of the ancient mythology in prose. Both Eddas were composed, not in Norway, but in Iceland, an island about as large as Ireland, and which became first known through some Irish monks who settled there in the eighth century.[178] In the ninth century voyages of discovery were made to Iceland by Naddodd, Gardar, and Flokki, 860-870, and soon after the distant island, distant about 750 English miles from [pg 192] Norway, became a kind of America to the Puritans and Republicans of the Scandinavian peninsula. Harald Haarfagr (850-933) had conquered most of the Norwegian kings, and his despotic sway tended to reduce the northern freemen to a state of vassalage. Those who could not resist, and could not bring themselves to yield to the sceptre of Harald, left their country and migrated to France, to England, and to Iceland (874). They were mostly nobles and freemen, and they soon established in Iceland an aristocratic republic, such as they had had in Norway before the days of Harald. This northern republic flourished; it adopted Christianity in the year 1000. Schools were founded, two bishoprics were established, and classical literature was studied with the same zeal with which their own national poems and laws had been collected and interpreted by native scholars and historians. The Icelanders were famous travellers, and the names of Icelandic students are found not only in the chief cities of Europe, but in the holy places of the East. At the beginning of the twelfth century Iceland counted 50,000 inhabitants. Their intellectual and literary activity lasted to the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the island was conquered by Hakon VI., king of Norway. In 1380, Norway, together with Iceland, was united with Denmark; and when, in 1814, Norway was ceded to Sweden, Iceland remained, as it is still, under Danish sway.