Gothic literature

Gothic literature refers to literature written in the Gothic language of late antiquity. It is unfortunately very incomplete, with not enough material available to completely reconstruct the language. The material that survives are for the most part translations or glosses of texts originally written in Latin or Greek, and so has likely been influenced by foreign linguistic elements.

The only lengthy texts that are available are all Biblical in theme, taken from the priest Wulfila's commissioned translation of the Greek bible. These are gathered in a number of codices, all of them incomplete. The Codex Argenteus is the most lengthy surviving work, with 188 leaves extant of an original 336; it contains the Gospels and is a translation from Greek. The second-largest surviving work is the Codex Ambrosianus, with 196 surviving leaves, which has some scattered portions of the Gospels and the Epistles as well as a few fragments of the Old Testament. It also contains the Skeireins, commentaries on the Bible, that are believed to represent the only surviving work originally composed in Gothic by a native speaker.

There are a half-dozen other extant leaves from biblical sources, as well as a number of inscriptions, calendars, glosses, and other such texts, some of which are doubted to actually represent the Gothic language. One particularly interesting work is a short dictionary and untranslated song collected in the mid-16th century by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Habsburg ambassador to the court of the Ottoman Empire, which documents the Crimean Gothic language which seems to have survived into the 18th century. Although fascinating from a comparative linguistics perspective, the words in question were collected a millennium after the other texts, and as such can't really be considered representative of the language of Wulfila and his contemporaries.