Conversion to Christianity

Evidence suggests that before the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, none of the great Germanic peoples was converted to Christianity while still living outside the Roman frontier, but that all the Germanic peoples who moved into the Roman provinces before that date were converted to Christianity within a generation. The Vandals seem to have been converted when in Spain in 409–429, the Burgundians when in eastern Gaul in 412–436, and the Ostrogoths when in the province of Pannonia about 456–472. In all these cases the Germans embraced the Arian form of Christianity (Note 9); none of the major Germanic peoples became officially Catholic until the conversion of the Franks under Clovis (496) and of the Burgundians under Sigismund. The reason for their adoption of Arianism rather than Catholicism is very obscure. The last Germanic people on the European continent to be converted to Christianity were the Old Saxons (second half of the 8th century), while the Scandinavian peoples were converted in the 10th century. England had been converted in the 7th century.

Germanic Alphabets and Old Germanic Writings

Germanic tribes used 3 different alphabets for their writings which partly succeeded each other in time.

The earliest of these was the Runic alphabet (Note 10) each separate letter being called a rune. The word rune originally meant ‘secret’, ‘mystery’ and hence came to denote inscriptions believed to be magic. According to scholars, this alphabet was derived either from Latin or from some other Italic alphabet, close to Latin, in the 2^nd c. A.D. somewhere on the Rhine or the Danube where the Germanic tribes came into contact with Roman culture. This alphabet was used by such tribes as the Goths, Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. The runes were used as letters, each symbol indicating a separate sound. Besides, a rune could also represent a word beginning with that sound and was called by that word. For example, the rune denoted the sound [θ], [ð] was called ‘thorn’ and could stand for OE Þorn(NE thorn). The letters of the runic alphabet are angular, straight lines are preferred, curved lines are avoided. This is due to the fact that runic inscriptions were cut in hard material: stone, bone or wood. The shapes of some letters resemble those of Greek and Latin; others have not been traced to any known alphabet.

The number of runes in different OG languages varied from 28 to 33 runes in Britain against 16 or 24 on the continent. That is the number of runes in England was larger: new runes were added as new sounds appeared in English. Neither on the mainland nor in Britain were the runes ever used for everyday writing or for putting down poetry and prose works. Their main function was to make short inscriptions on objects, often to bestow on them some special power or magic.

The two best known runic inscriptions in England are the earliest extant OE written records. One of them is an inscription on a box called the ‘Franks Casket, the other is a short text on a stone cross known as the Ruthwell Cross. The Franks Casket was discovered in the early years of the 19^th c. In France, and was presented to the British Museum by a British archeologist A.W. Frank. The Casket is a small box of whale bone; its four sides are carved: there are pictures in the centre and runic inscription around. The longest of them, in alliterative verse, tells the story of the whale bone, of which the Casket is made.

The Ruthwell Cross is a 15ft tall cross inscribed and ornamented on all sides. The principal inscription has been reconstructed into a passage from an OE religious poem” The Dream of the Rood”, in which Christ’s Passion is told from the point of view of the Cross on which he was crucified. The Cross speaks: Ic wæs miÞ blodi bistemid (Old English translation) (I was with blood bedewed).

Many runic inscriptions were preserved on weapons, coins, amulets, tombstones, rings, various cross fragments. Some runic insertions occur in OE manuscripts written in Latin characters. The total number of runic inscriptions in OE is about 40; the last of them belong to the end of the OE period.

Next came Ulfiala’s Gothic alphabet used in his translation of the Bible. It’s a peculiar alphabet based on the Greek alphabet with some admixture of Latin and Runic letters. (The Gothic alphabet should not be confused with the so-called Gothic script which is used in German writings and is a modified version of Latin script).

The latest alphabet to be used by the Germanic tribes is the Latin alphabet. It superceded both the Runic and the Gothic alphabets when a new technique of writing was introduced, namely that of spreading some colour or paint on a surface instead of cutting or engraving the letters. The material used for writing was either parchment or papyrus. Introduction of the Latin alphabet accompanied the spread of Christianity and Christian religious texts written in Latin. Since the Latin alphabet was adequate to represent all the sounds of Germanic languages, it was adapted to the peculiar needs of the separate languages. For example, to denote the dental fricative [θ], [ð] the runic Þ was used (derived from Latin D).

Ulfilas’s Bible, otherwise called the Silver Code (Codex Argenteus) is kept in Sweden. Along with other OG writings, next comes the Old High German Song of Hilderbrandt, a fragment of an epic, 8^th century, and the Beowulf, an OE epic, probably written in the 8^th c. Then come Old Icelandic epic texts collected in the so-called Older Edda comprising songs written down in the 13 c.

A most important role in the history of the English language was played by the introduction of Christianity. The first attempt to introduce the Roman Christian religion was made in the 6^th century during the supremacy of Kent. In 597 a group of missionaries from Rome dispatched by Pope Gregory the Great landed on the shore of Kent. They made Canterbury their centre and from there the new faith expanded to Kent, East Anglia, Essex, and other places. The movement was supported from the north; missionaries from Ireland brought the Celtic variety of Christianity to Northumbria. In less than a century practically all England became Christianized.

The introduction of Christianity gave a strong impetus to the growth of learning and culture. Monasteries were founded all over the country, with monastic schools attached. Religious service and teaching were conducted in Latin. A high standard of learning was reached in the best English monasteries, especially in Northumbria as early as the 8^th and 9^th centuries. During the Scandinavian invasions the Northumbrian culture was largely wiped out and English culture shifted to the southern kingdoms, most of all to Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great. From that time till the end of the OE period, Wessex with its capital at Winchester remained the cultural centre of England.

OE scribes used two kinds of alphabet: runic and Latin. The bulk of the OE records is written in Latin characters but the scribes made certain modifications and additions to indicate OE sounds. Like any alphabetic writing, OE writing was based on a phonetic principle: every letter indicated a separate sound. This principle, however, was not always observed, even at the earliest stages of phonetic spelling. Some OE letters indicated two or more sounds; some letters stood for positional variants of phonemes: a and æ. Fricatives stood for 2 sounds each: a voiced and a voiceless consonant.

The letters could indicate short and long sounds. The length of the vowels is shown by a macron or by a line above the letter; long consonants are indicated by a double letter.

Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1349