Traveling by train some years ago, I decided that I wanted to learn the Gothic language. And this became one of those things I have sporadically undertaken in my spare time since then. Most of us will associate the term Gothic – as a moniker for a group of peoples and their language, as opposed to the similarly named literary, architectural and vibe genres – with the Roman Empire.¹ And this is understandable, as the Goths rose to prominence during late antiquity and most of our sources come from this period.² And their language, for most intents and purposes, seems to have largely died out in the second half of the first millennium CE.³ But what struck me when researching the Goths, is the longevity of one branch of their language in Eastern Europe, which survived way longer than the commonly perceived end point of Gothic and that we are primarily aware of because of one sedulous letter writer from the sixteenth century CE. Thus, today we will discuss the drawn-out demise of the Gothic language.

To do so we will first need to know more about the Goths and their language. Because, like many of the peoples who have interacted with the Roman Empire in one of its iterations on not always too friendly of terms, the Goths have been the subject to prejudices as well as fascination for all the wrong reasons.⁴ By the way, if you yourself decide that you want to learn Gothic, on a train or elsewhere, then I would recommend starting with Thomas Lambdin’s excellent textbook An Introduction to the Gothic Language.⁵ There is also a relatively recent and frankly monumental reference grammar, The Oxford Gothic Grammar by D. Gary Miller.⁶ This grammar has precisely been structured like I prefer such books – with lots and lots of historical examples, which elucidate the finer philological points that are being made.

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The Goths and Gothic

The origins of the Goths are still debated.⁷ They are, for example, associated with Scandinavia in historical accounts and through toponomy, but scholars still do not agree if they came from there, or just went that way from somewhere else.⁸ What is undisputed, is their presence around the Black Sea and their subsequent migrations through Europe and around the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea.⁹ From there they went on to bother the Roman Empire, be it united or split into a Western and Eastern variety. Ironically, the Goths themselves are also customarily divided in eastern and western branches, the respective Ostrogoths and Visigoths.¹⁰ And in the centuries during which we can follow the fortunes of these peoples, we learn of great conquests, dramatic dynastic troubles and – when fate allowed for it – domestic bliss.¹¹ During this time of prominence on the political stage of late antiquity, the Goths can be said to have left an indelible impression. The aspect of their legacy that I find most fascinating, as you could have guessed by now, is their language.

Many of the languages that are or were spoken are part of so-called language families. That is to say, they share a common predecessor language with other languages from which they have split off at one time or another.¹² This is the reason that English, Dutch, and German can feel so similar, for example. (In addition, of course, to the experience of similar influences due to being close in geography and time.¹³) All three – English, Dutch, and German – are part of the so-called Germanic branch of the larger Indo-European language family. As such, they also share a relatively close kinship with Gothic.¹⁴ We have therefore ended up with the word for wind, being ‘wind’ in English, ‘wind’ in Dutch, and ‘Wind’ in German, while it is ‘winds’ in Gothic.¹⁵ Despite such instances of serendipity there are also many differences, as Gothic is an eastern Germanic language as opposed to English, Dutch, and German being western Germanic languages. Thus Gothic parted ways much earlier with the last predecessor language that they had in common than the other three.¹⁶ It therefore had more time and opportunity to evolve in a different direction. Though, as nothing last forever, that time did not persevere until the present.

The End of the Gothic Language?

After holding sway over large parts of Europe and especially around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the Goths slowly faded into obscurity between the sixth and the eighth centuries CE.¹⁷ And with the reversal of the Goths’ political fortunes, their language also lost prominence.¹⁸ The Gothic language was one of the earliest Germanic tongues from which we have a sizeable text corpus. This corpus consists primarily of religious texts, most prominently the Christian Bible.¹⁹ So if you take the time to learn Gothic, you might be able to skip Sunday school! Through its age and the sheer volume of texts, the Gothic language has been very useful to the study of the development of Germanic languages.²⁰ And as such, it can be called a veritable loss that in the second half of the first millennium CE, the Gothic language largely disappears from the written record – and probably also from daily use.²¹

The memory of the Goths, though, never entirely faded. Today, as alluded to above, we are all familiar with the architecture, novels, and the like that are denoted as Gothic.²² But even as a people, there remained aspirants to membership for an astoundingly long time. As Kristoffer Neville writes: “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Gothicism, or a self-identification with the ancient Gothic people, was a deeply important phenomenon.”²³ To trace one’s lineage back to the Goths acquired a certain prestige in those times.²⁴ And the material heritage of the Goths also got attention. But with regards to their language, many of the relevant attempts never seem to have gotten much past the study of the remaining rune inscriptions – though parts of the Gothic Bible translations were published and studied.²⁵ This study, however, was regularly embedded in a more general appreciation of the Germanic languages and the history of late antiquity.²⁶ There were nonetheless persons with a genuine appreciation for the Gothic language an sich – and rightly so. And those connoisseurs that lived from the sixteenth century CE onwards came to have access to a remarkably useful source in this regard. That being descriptions of a descendant – or enduring close relative – of the ancient Gothic tongue as it had continued to be spoken throughout the second millennium CE.

An Enduring Variant of Gothic

This last survivor is colloquially known as Crimean Gothic.²⁷ Whereas the Gothic language from late antiquity is primarily known to us through religious texts, we know that one enduring variety of this tongue first and foremost from a series of letters.²⁸ It was a sixteenth century CE Flemish diplomate, one Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who encountered two speakers of Gothic on the Crimean peninsula.²⁹ And it is perhaps fitting that the last vestige of Gothic could be found in the general area where we can place its first speakers with any sense of certainty! De Busbecq subsequently wrote a list with a number of lexical entries in a letter from 1562. And that letter was published in Paris in 1589.³⁰ The Gothic recorded by our sedulous letter writer differs, though, from the more famous variant that we know from late antiquity.³¹ And this is no surprise. As D. Gary Miller notes, there is a not only a millennium separating the two, but De Busbecq’s contacts may not have been native speakers and the Flemish diplomate both made transcription errors as well as interpreting what he heard through the lens of his own language.³² Though it is beyond doubt that we have here a variety of Gothic. And it is perhaps even more mind-blowing that, even though our documentation in this regard is limited, this tongue might have endured well into the eighteenth century CE!³³

The enduring memory of the Goths, especially the advent of more or less serious scholarly interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth century CE, meant that the study of their language also has a long history.³⁴ And it is crazy to think that one of the classic grammars of the Gothic language appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century CE, when there may have still have been some left who could remember its last speakers.³⁵ As such, like many things that feel out of time – including the fact that there were still mammoths around when the great pyramids of Giza were built in ancient Egypt – one of the enduring aspects of the Roman Empire, their contact with the Goths and the language these persons spoke, lasted way longer than you probably thought before you started reading this blog.³⁶

Conclusion: The importance of unassuming sources

As Rolf Hachmann wrote some fifty-odd years ago: “The history of the Goths is a debate without end.”³⁷ And the same can probably be said about the language they spoke, especially with previously unknown ancient manuscripts and palimpsests still turning up.³⁸ Luckily we are not only dependent on such findings, but also have other and more unexpected sources. Like the letters of De Busbecq. The importance of many historical sources that are now at our disposal, would not be realized when they were first created or written down. Naturally there are royal inscriptions and other artefacts that were expected to last for all time. And some of those did even manage that – up until now, at least. Like the law codex of the Babylonian monarch Ḫammurabi or the temple inscriptions of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II.³⁹ But many of our currently cherished historical sources have not only survived by chance but were also created more or less unwittingly.

Thus, what did we learn today? Well, there is certainly no harm in keeping a diary writing letters, and recording one’s experiences and encounters. Because you never know whether you are to be one of the unassuming cogs in the great labor of historiography. A blog might also contribute to recording information that can be of use for future historians, so next week – and the weeks following that one, to be honest – I will just carry on and deliver more stories from history, whether they are already part of the past or will be someday!

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References

1. Matthew M. Reeve, “Gothic”, Studies in Iconography 2012, 33 (1), p. 233-246; Karl Spracklen & Beverley Spracklen, The Evolution of Goth Culture: The Origins and Deeds of the New Goths (Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited), p. 20. Jep, it is one of those weeks that I make you think about the Roman Empire again.
2. Matthew Kneale, Rome: Een Geschiedenis van de Stad in Zeven Plunderingen (Houten: Spectrum, 2018), p. 45-47, 105-113.
3. Thomas O. Lambdin An Introduction to the Gothic Language (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2006), p. ix-x.
4. Reeve, “Gothic”, p. 233-234.
5. Lambdin An Introduction to the Gothic Language.
6. D. Gary Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
7. Michael Kulikowski, Rome’s Gothic Wars: From the Third Century to Alaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 60-68.
8. Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar, p. 2.
9. Ibidem.
10. Ingmar Söhrman, “What Is Visigothic and What Is Frankish in Medieval and Later Spanish?”, in: John Ole Askedal & Hans Frede Nielsen (eds.), Early Germanic Languages in Contact (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015), p. 128; Norman Davies, Europe: A History (London: The Bodley Head, 2014), p. 224.
11. Ibidem, p. 224, 229-233; Kneale, Rome, p. 45-47, 105-113; John Man, Barbarians at the Wall: The First Nomadic Empire and the Making of China (London: Penguin/Random House, 2020), p. 271-272; Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Auckland: Harper Perennial, 2022), p. 8-10, 139; Söhrman, “What Is Visigothic and What Is Frankish in Medieval and Later Spanish?”, p. 129.
12. Lambdin An Introduction to the Gothic Language, p. xi.
13. For a more nuanced version of this statement, see: Joshua Bousquette & Joseph Salmons, “Germanic”, in: Mate Kapović (ed.), The Indo-European Languages, 2^nd Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 389.
14. Mate Kapović, “Indo-European Languages: Introduction”, in: Mate Kapović (ed.), The Indo-European Languages, 2^nd Edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), p. 5.
15. Lambdin An Introduction to the Gothic Language, p. 4.
16. Jean Marco, The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons: Decoding the Ancestry of the English (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 110-112; Bousquette & Salmons, “Germanic”, p. 389-390.
17. Frits Naerebout & Henk Singor, De Oudheid: Grieken en Romeinen in de Context van de Wereldgeschiedenis (Amsterdam: Ambo, 2010), p. 440. This may have to do with the structure of their regimes in these regions, see: Marco, The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons, p. 199.
18. Lambdin An Introduction to the Gothic Language, p. ix-xi; Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar, p. 4.
19. Lambdin An Introduction to the Gothic Language, p. x-xi.
20. Bousquette & Salmons, “Germanic”, p. 387.
21. On the persistence of (some) Gothic influence on the languages that continued to be spoken in these areas, see: Söhrman, “What Is Visigothic and What Is Frankish in Medieval and Later Spanish?”, p. 125.
22. Supra note 1.
23. Kristoffer Neville, “History and Architecture in Pursuit of a Gothic Heritage”, in: Karl A.E. Enenkel & Konrad A. Ottenheym (eds.), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture (Leiden: Brill, 2019), p. 619; Robert W. Rix, “Runes and Roman: Germanic Literacy and the Significance of Runic Writing”, Textual Cultures 6 (2011) 117.
24. Neville, “History and Architecture in Pursuit of a Gothic Heritage”, p. 619-621.
25. Ibidem, p. 222; Rix, “Runes and Roman”, p. 130. See more in general: Carsten Bach-Nielsen , “The Runes: Hieroglyphs of the North”, in: Gerhard F. Strasser & Mara R. Wade (eds.), Die Domänen des Emblems. Außenliterarische Anwendung der Emblematik (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz Verlag, 2004), p. 157–172.
26. Rix, “Runes and Roman”, p. 117.
27. Bousquette & Salmons, “Germanic”, p. 388. See also: MacDonald Stearns, Crimean Gothic: Analysis and Etymology of the Corpus (Saratoga: Anna Libri, 1978).
28. Cor van Bree, Leerboek voor de Historische Grammatica van het Nederlands – Deel 1: Gotische Grammatica, Inleiding, Klankleer (Leiden: Universiteit Leiden, 2016), p. 38-39.
29. Bernerd C. Weber, “A Diplomat of the Sixteenth Century: Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (1522-1592)”, Social Science 1953, 28 (2), p. 95.
30. Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar, p. 4.
31. Though a variant of the Gothic that we know from late antiquity appears to have still been in use in this area around the ninth century CE, see: Hans Frede Nielsen, “The Phonological Systems of Biblical Gothic and Crimean Gothic Compared”, in: Jana Krüger et al (ed.), Die Faszination des Verborgenen und Seine Entschlüsselung: Rāði Sāʀ Kunni (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter), p. 277–278.
32. Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar, p. 6.
33. Ibidem, p. 4; MacDonald Stearns, “Das Krimgotische”, in: Heinrich Beck (ed.), Germanische Rest- und Trümmersprachen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), p. 187.
34. Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar, p. xix.
35. Ibidem.
36. This remark on pyramids and mammoths deserves its own blog, but the period when the famous pyramids of Giza were build, seems to indeed coincide with the survival of some mammoth populations, see: Laura Arppe et al, “Thriving or surviving? The Isotopic Record of the Wrangel Island Woolly Mammoth Population”, Quaternary Science Reviews 2019, 222, 105884:11; Marc van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 58-61. For more general information on the final extinction of the mammoths, see: Russell W. Graham et al, “Timing and Causes of mid-Holocene Mammoth Extinction on St. Paul Island, Alaska”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2016, 113 (33), p. 9310–9314.
37. “Die Geschichte der Goten, eine Diskussion ohne Ende”, see: Rolf Hachmann, Die Goten und Skandinavien (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970), p. 1.
38. Miller, The Oxford Gothic Grammar, p. xvii.
39. Dominique Charpin, Hammurabi of Babylon (New York: I.B. Taurus & co, 2012), p. 152-159; Van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 216-222.