Crivens, don’t tell me me you, too, have developed a bit of curiosity and defensiveness about the Goths, Phyllis?
I’ve certainly found out what Professor Tolkien meant about “the tragic history of the Visigoths” and how ironic it was that, in Iberia, they should end up as the last bearers of a form of civilisation that did nothing but abuse them horrendously. As for the Ostrogoths, I wish we knew more about Queen Amalasuintha. Ostrogothic bibles washed up in Carolingian Gaul contemporary with King Alfred the Great so, although there is no direct evidence, these could be amongst what King Alfred had in mind when he wrote of how “all the Christian peoples turned some part of them into their own language”. In my Alfred the Great companion ( Penguin Classics ISBN 0-14-04409-2 1986) Simon Keynes doubted this in favour of the German Diatessarion but I can’t help wonder how much more Gothic-language material survived then than has, since.
Anything that sheds more light on the Goths popping up at St Catherine’s would please me.
Or anything else! During one of the breaks in that AethelFest conference in 2018 in Tamworth I got chatty enough with Vanessa King, one of the lady scholars who delivered a lecture, to ask her what she thought could, or what she hoped might, come to light there. “Q,” she quipped. With a certain alacrity. “... Well,” I breathed, struggling to get my breath back, “that... that would be a turn up for the books, wouldn’t it?” Who’d need palaeography or MSI? We'd hear the sh*t hitting the fan from here!
As it is, even those scrolls from Herculaneum look like holding out on us for a while yet, maybe forever. No chance of the Stoic version of Polis being recovered, so we’re still stuck with everyone thinking Plato’s Republic is the one and only even though the Stoics were the first to launch the idea of a Brotherhood of Man at least 200 years before the birth of Christ. Seriously because there is so much historical accident to which texts have survived, and like scientififc phrenology this has shaped the Western mind. Just about any lost, but big-hitting scientific, philosophical etc. tract from Herculaneum could have revolutionary implications.
So... that’s me off to cry...
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The moral right of the author to be identified parachuting into the Republic of Gilead, with a wave of fully trained SOE agents, to call down the guns and the goodies for the girls, has been asserted. We'll see about a choice of incidental music that makes sense too, whilst we're about it.