Philostorgius tells us, were of Cappadocian origin, and had been carried
away by the Goths as captives from a place called Sadagolthina, near the
town of Parnassus. It was under Valerian and Gallienus (about 267) that
the Goths made this raid from Europe to Asia, Galatia, and Cappadocia, and
the Christian captives whom they carried back to the Danube were the first
to spread the light of the Gospel among the Goths. Philostorgius was
himself a Cappadocian, and there is no reason to doubt this statement of
his on the parentage of Ulfilas. Ulfilas was born among the Goths; Gothic
was his native language, though he was able in after-life to speak and
write both in Latin and Greek. Philostorgius, after speaking of the death
of Crispus (326), and before proceeding to the last years of Constantine,
says, that “about that time” Ulfilas led his Goths from beyond the Danube
into the Roman empire. They had to leave their country, being persecuted
on account of their Christianity. Ulfilas was the leader of the faithful
flock, and came to Constantine, (not Constantius,) as ambassador. This
must have been before 337, the year of Constantine’s death. It may have
been in 328, when Constantine had gained a victory over the Goths; and
though Ulfilas was then only seventeen years of age, this would be no
reason for rejecting the testimony of Philostorgius, who says that
Constantine treated Ulfilas with great respect, and called him the Moses
of his time. Having led his faithful flock across the Danube into Mœsia,
he might well have been compared by the emperor to Moses leading the
Israelites from Egypt through the Red Sea. It is true that Auxentius
institutes the same comparison between Ulfilas and Moses, after stating
that Ulfilas had been received with great honors by Constantius. But this
refers to what took place after Ulfilas had been for seven years bishop
among the Goths, in 348, and does not invalidate the statement of
Philostorgius as to the earlier intercourse between Ulfilas and
Constantine. Sozomen (H. E. vi. 3, 7) clearly distinguishes between the
first crossing of the Danube by the Goths, with Ulfilas as their
ambassador, and the later attacks of Athanarich on Fridigern or Fritiger,
which led to the settlement of the Goths in the Roman empire. We must
suppose that after having crossed the Danube, Ulfilas remained for some
time with his Goths, or at Constantinople. Auxentius says that he
officiated as Lector, and it was only when he had reached the requisite
age of thirty, that he was made bishop by Eusebius in 341. He passed the
first seven years of his episcopate among the Goths, and the remaining
thirty-three of his life “in solo Romaniæ,” where he had migrated together
with Fritiger and the Thervingi. There is some confusion as to the exact
date of the Gothic Exodus, but it is not at all unlikely that Ulfilas
acted as their leader on more than one occasion.
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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
The old poetry which flourished in Norway in the eighth century, and which
was cultivated by the skalds in the ninth, would have been lost in Norway
itself had it not been for the jealous care with which it was preserved by
the emigrants of Iceland. The most important branch of their traditional
poetry were short songs (hliod or Quida), relating the deeds of their gods
and heroes. It is impossible to determine their age, but they existed at
least previous to the migration of the Northmen to Iceland, and probably
as early as the seventh century, the same century which yields the oldest
remnants of Anglo-Saxon, Low-German, and High-German. They were collected
in the middle of the twelfth century by _Saemund Sigfusson_ (died 1133).
In 1643 a similar collection was discovered in MSS. of the thirteenth
century, and published under the title of _Edda_, or Great-Grandmother.
This collection is called the old or poetic Edda, in order to distinguish
it from a later work ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (died 1241). This, the
younger or prose Edda, consists of three parts: the mocking of Gylfi, the
speeches of Bragi, and the Skalda, or _Ars poetica_. Snorri Sturluson has
been called the Herodotus of Iceland; and his chief work is the
“Heimskringla,” the world-ring, which contains the northern history from
the mythic times to the time of King Magnus Erlingsson (died 1177). It was
probably in preparing his history that, like Cassiodorus, Saxo
Grammaticus, Paulus Diaconus, and other historians of the same class,
Snorri collected the old songs of the people; for his “Edda,” and
particularly his “Skalda,” are full of ancient poetic fragments.
The “Skalda,” and the rules which it contains, represent the state of
poetry in the thirteenth century; and nothing can be more artificial,
nothing more different from the genuine poetry of the old “Edda” than this
_Ars poetica_ of Snorri Sturluson. One of the chief features of this
artificial or skaldic poetry was this, that nothing should be called by
its proper name. A ship was not to be called a ship, but the beast of the
sea; blood, not blood, but the dew of pain, or the water of the sword. A
warrior was not spoken of as a warrior, but as an armed tree, the tree of
battle. A sword was the flame of wounds. In this poetical language, which
every skald was bound to speak, there were no less than 115 names for
Odin; an island could be called by 120 synonymous titles. The specimens of
ancient poetry which Snorri quotes are taken from the skalds, whose names
are well known in history, and who lived from the tenth to the thirteenth
century. But he never quotes from any song contained in the old
“Edda,”(179) whether it be that those songs were considered by himself as
belonging to a different and much more ancient period of literature, or
that they could not be used in illustration of the scholastic rules of
skaldic poets, these very rules being put to shame by the simple style of
the national poetry, which expressed what it had to express without effort
and circumlocution.
We have thus traced the modern Teutonic dialects back to four principal
channels,—the _High-German_, _Low-German_, _Gothic_, and _Scandinavian_;
and we have seen that these four, together with several minor dialects,
must be placed in a co-ordinate position from the beginning, as so many
varieties of Teutonic speech. This Teutonic speech may, for convenience’
sake, be spoken of as one,—as one branch of that great family of language
to which, as we shall see, it belongs; but it should always be borne in
mind that this primitive and uniform language never had any real
historical existence, and that, like all other languages, that of the
Germans began with dialects which gradually formed themselves into several
distinct national deposits.
We must now advance more rapidly, and, instead of the minuteness of an
Ordnance-map, we must be satisfied with the broad outlines of Wyld’s Great
Globe in our survey of the languages which, together with the Teutonic,
form the Indo-European or Aryan family of speech.
And first the Romance, or modern Latin languages. Leaving mere local
dialects out of sight, we have at present six literary modifications of
Latin, or more correctly, of ancient Italian,—the languages of Portugal,
of Spain, of France, of Italy, of Wallachia,(180) and of the Grisons of
Switzerland, called the Roumansch or Romanese.(181) The Provençal, which,
in the poetry of the Troubadours, attained at a very early time to a high
literary excellence, has now sunk down to a mere _patois_. The earliest
Provençal poem, the Song of Boëthius, is generally referred to the tenth
century: Le Bœuf referred it to the eleventh. But in the lately discovered
Song of Eulalia, we have now a specimen of the Langue d’Oil, or the
ancient Northern French, anterior in date to the earliest poetic specimen
of the Langue d’Oc, or the ancient Provençal. Nothing can be a better
preparation for the study of the comparative grammar of the ancient Aryan
languages than a careful perusal of the “Comparative Grammar of the Six
Romance Languages” by Professor Diez.
Though in a general way we trace these six Romance languages back to
Latin, yet it has been pointed out before that the classical Latin would
fail to supply a complete explanation of their origin. Many of the
ingredients of the Neo-Latin dialects must be sought for in the ancient
dialects of Italy and her provinces. More than one dialect of Latin was
spoken there before the rise of Rome, and some important fragments have
been preserved to us, in inscriptions, of the Umbrian spoken in the north,
and of the Oscan spoken to the south of Rome. The Oscan language, spoken
by the Samnites, now rendered intelligible by the labors of Mommsen, had
produced a literature before the time of Livius Andronicus; and the tables
of Iguvio, so elaborately treated by Aufrecht and Kirchhoff, bear witness
to a priestly literature among the Umbrians at a very early period. Oscan
was still spoken under the Roman emperors, and so were minor local
dialects in the south and the north. As soon as the literary language of
Rome became classical and unchangeable, the first start was made in the
future career of those dialects which, even at the time of Dante, are
still called _vulgar_ or _popular_.(182) A great deal, no doubt, of the
corruption of these modern dialects is due to the fact that, in the form
in which we know them after the eighth century, they are really Neo-Latin
dialects as adopted by the Teutonic barbarians; full, not only of Teutonic
words, but of Teutonic idioms, phrases, and constructions. French is
provincial Latin as spoken by the Franks, a Teutonic race; and, to a
smaller extent, the same _barbarizing_ has affected all other Roman
dialects. But from the very beginning, the stock with which the Neo-Latin
dialects started was not the classical Latin, but the vulgar, local,
provincial dialects of the middle, the lower, and the lowest classes of
the Roman Empire. Many of the words which give to French and Italian their
classical appearance, are really of much later date, and were imported
into them by mediæval scholars, lawyers, and divines; thus escaping the
rough treatment to which the original vulgar dialects were subjected by
the Teutonic conquerors.
The next branch of the Indo-European family of speech is the _Hellenic_.
Its history is well known from the time of Homer to the present day. The
only remark which the comparative philologist has to make is that the idea
of making Greek the parent of Latin, is more preposterous than deriving
English from German; the fact being that there are many forms in Latin
more primitive than their corresponding forms in Greek. The idea of
Pelasgians as the common ancestors of Greeks and Romans is another of
those grammatical mythes, but hardly requires at present any serious
refutation.
The fourth branch of our family is the _Celtic_. The Celts seem to have
been the first of the Aryans to arrive in Europe; but the pressure of
subsequent migrations, particularly of Teutonic tribes, has driven them
towards the westernmost parts, and latterly from Ireland across the
Atlantic. At present the only remaining dialects are the Kymric and
Gadhelic. The _Kymric_ comprises the _Welsh_; the _Cornish_, lately
extinct; and the _Armorican_, of Brittany. The _Gadhelic_ comprises the
_Irish_; the _Galic_ of the west coast of Scotland; and the dialect of the
_Isle of Man_. Although these Celtic dialects are still spoken, the Celts
themselves can no longer be considered an independent nation, like the
Germans or Slaves. In former times, however, they not only enjoyed
political autonomy, but asserted it successfully against Germans and
Romans. Gaul, Belgium, and Britain were Celtic dominions, and the north of
Italy was chiefly inhabited by them. In the time of Herodotus we find
Celts in Spain; and Switzerland, the Tyrol, and the country south of the
Danube have once been the seats of Celtic tribes. But after repeated
inroads into the regions of civilization, familiarizing Latin and Greek
writers with the names of their kings, they disappear from the east of
Europe. Brennus is supposed to mean king, the Welsh _brennin_. A Brennus
conquered Rome (390), another Brennus threatened Delphi (280). And about
the same time a Celtic colony settled in Asia, and founded Galatia, where
the language spoken at the time of St. Jerome was still that of the Gauls.
Celtic words may be found in German, Slavonic, and even in Latin, but only
as foreign terms, and their amount is much smaller than commonly supposed.
A far larger number of Latin and German words have since found their way
into the modern Celtic dialects, and these have frequently been mistaken
by Celtic enthusiasts for original words, from which German and Latin
might, in their turn, be derived.
The fifth branch, which is commonly called _Slavonic_, I prefer to
designate by the name of _Windic_, _Winidae_ being one of the most ancient
and comprehensive names by which these tribes were known to the early
historians of Europe. We have to divide these tribes into two divisions,
the _Lettic_ and the _Slavonic_, and we shall have to subdivide the
Slavonic again into a _South-East Slavonic_ and a _West Slavonic_ branch.
The _Lettic_ division consists of languages hardly known to the student of
literature, but of great importance to the student of language. _Lettish_
is the language now spoken in Kurland and Livonia. _Lithuanian_ is the
name given to a language still spoken by about 200,000 people in Eastern
Prussia, and by more than a million of people in the coterminous parts of
Russia. The earliest literary document of Lithuanian is a small catechism
of 1547.(183) In this, and even in the language as now spoken by the
Lithuanian peasant, there are some grammatical forms more primitive, and
more like Sanskrit, than the corresponding forms in Greek and Latin.
The _Old Prussian_, which is nearly related to Lithuanian, became extinct
in the seventeenth century, and the entire literature which it has left
behind consists in an old catechism.
_Lettish_ is the language of Kurland and Livonia, more modern in its
grammar than Lithuanian, yet not immediately derived from it.
We now come to the _Slavonic_ languages, properly so called. The eastern
branch comprehends the _Russian_ with various local dialects; the
_Bulgarian_, and the _Illyrian_. The most ancient document of this eastern
branch is the so-called Ecclesiastical Slavonic, _i.e._ the ancient
Bulgarian, into which Cyrillus and Methodius translated the Bible, in the
middle of the ninth century. This is still the authorized version(184) of
the Bible for the whole Slavonic race; and to the student of the Slavonic
languages, it is what Gothic is to the student of German. The modern
Bulgarian, on the contrary, as far as grammatical forms are concerned, is
the most reduced among the Slavonic dialects.
_Illyrian_ is a convenient or inconvenient name to comprehend the
_Servian_, _Croatian_, and _Slovinian_ dialects. Literary fragments of
_Slovinian_ go back as far as the tenth century.(185)