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Updated: May 27, 2025
Athanaric had vowed never to set foot on Roman soil, and after defending himself against the Huns, retired into the forests of 'Caucaland. Good Bishop Ulfilas and his converts looked longingly toward the Christian Empire. Surely the Christians would receive them as brothers, welcome them, help them. The simple German fancied a Roman even such a one as themselves.
Many of their young men hired themselves to fight as soldiers in the Roman army; and they were learning Christianity, but only as Arians. It was for them that their Bishop Ulfilas translated the Gospels into Gothic, and invented an alphabet to write them in. A copy of this translation is still to be seen at Upsal in Sweden, written on purple vellum in silver letters.
Would not the Moeso-Gothic of Ulfilas have been all but unintelligible to the Goth who, upon the old theory, remained in Gothland of Sweden? But were there not more causes than mere want, which sent them south? Had the peculiar restlessness of the race nothing to do with it?
The Romans had owned so many slaves that they had lost the habit of work and were glad to hire these foreigners. STORY OF ULFILAS. Many of the Goths who lived north of the Danube had forsaken their old gods and become Christians. They were taught by Bishop Ulfilas, once a captive among them, afterward a missionary.
As for the Germanic languages, one at least was reduced to writing even before the break-up of the Empire. In order to carry on his work, Ulfilas translated a great part of the Bible into Gothic, using the Greek letters to represent the sounds. With the single exception of the Gothic, there is no example of writing in any German language before Charlemagne's time.
Ulfilas went on embassy to Antioch, to Valens the Emperor. Valens, low- born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the opportunity of making converts. He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas, and torment him into Arianism. When he arrived, Valens tormented him himself.
Varying as it does from age to age in historic value, it remains the first vernacular history of any Teutonic people, and save for the work of Ulfilas who found no successors among his Gothic people, the earliest and most venerable monument of Teutonic prose.
Ulfilas civilised as well as Christianised the Goths of Bulgaria, and was responsible for the earliest Gothic alphabet the Moeso-Gothic. After a century of peace war broke out again between the Goths and the Roman Empire which may now be called rather the Greek Empire in A.D. 369. The course of the war was at first favourable to the Emperor Valens.
For these Goths, the greater number of them at least, were by this time Christians, or very nearly such. Good Bishop Ulfilas, brought up a Christian and consecrated by order of Constantine the Great, had been labouring for years to convert his adopted countrymen from the worship of Thor and Woden. He had translated the Bible for them, and had constructed a Gothic alphabet for that purpose.
The story of Ulfilas, who Christianized the pagan Goths in the last half of the fourth century, is really the first chapter not alone in the history of Gothic civilization but in that of the German and English literatures; which, with their vast riches, had their origin in the strange achievement of Ulfilas.
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