Lectures on The Science of Language 21

Lectures on The Science of Language 21

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