Wulfila and the Gothic alphabet: the silver Bible of Uppsala

In the library of Uppsala University, in Sweden, a manuscript with purple pages covered in silver and gold letters is on display. It is the Codex Argenteus, the «Silver Bible», the main witness to the Gothic language. The text it contains goes back to a fourth-century bishop, Wulfila, who, in order to translate the Scriptures into the language of his people, first had to invent its script.

The bishop of the Goths

Wulfila, whose name means «little wolf», was born around 311 north of the Danube, among the Goths, in a family descended, according to the sources, from Christian captives taken in Cappadocia. Around 341 he was consecrated bishop by Eusebius of Nicomedia and returned to preach among the Goths. He adhered to the Christian current that held the Son to be like, but not equal to, the Father, a position later condemned as Arian.

Around 348, because of a persecution launched by a Gothic chieftain, Wulfila led some of his faithful across the Danube into Moesia, within the Roman Empire. There he lived for more than thirty years, preaching and translating. He died in Constantinople around 383. His disciple Auxentius of Durostorum left a memory of him in a letter preserved in fragmentary form.

Greek, Latin and runic letters

To write Gothic, Wulfila created an alphabet of twenty-seven signs, two of which were used only as numerals. Its basis was the Greek capital script of his time, but he added some letters taken from the Latin alphabet and, according to many scholars, from the runes, the traditional script of the Germanic peoples. Each letter had a Gothic name, handed down in a later manuscript.

The historian Philostorgius relates that Wulfila translated all the Scriptures except the books of Kings, because they told of wars, and the Goths were already far too fond of battle. The story may be an anecdote, but it reveals how contemporaries imagined the bishop's work. Of his translation there survive mainly parts of the Gospels and of Paul's letters, as well as fragments of the Old Testament.

The journey of the Codex Argenteus

The Codex Argenteus was probably produced in Ravenna at the beginning of the sixth century, when the city was the capital of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. It contains the four Gospels, written in silver ink on parchment dyed purple, while the first lines of each section are in gold. Of the roughly three hundred and thirty original leaves, one hundred and eighty-eight survive.

The later history of the codex is adventurous. In the sixteenth century it was at the abbey of Werden, in Germany; it then passed into the collections of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, where in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, it was taken as booty by Swedish troops. In 1669 Count Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie donated it to Uppsala University. In 1970 a further leaf was found in Speyer Cathedral.

Gothic died out as a spoken language, but thanks to Wulfila it is the oldest documented Germanic language with substantial surviving texts. Without that translation, born of a religious purpose, we would know much less about the history of the Germanic languages, from English and German to the Scandinavian tongues. Every page of the silver codex thus preserves the voice of a vanished people.