gothalptext1

Before the invention of printing and photography, the method used for reproducing books was simply copying them by hand.
The copyist, usually a learned monk, would, I imagine, work in a room which is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, barely lit with a candle,
furnished with a large desk, while papers are strewn all over.
He would diligently study the old manuscript and carefully prepare the new one.
While at work, he might have corrected mistakes done by earlier copyists, constructed words sentences and paragraphs not visible any more to the naked eyes,
added explanations here and there and omitted what in his opinion was irrelevant, dated or simply too hard to reproduce.
In fact, he had become an editor.
As a result of this kind of process, we often have nowadays ancient manuscripts with the same titles but different from each other.
The Gothic manuscripts escaped this process.
The main reason is that most of them did not survive at all.
The Goths had the historical misfortune of being Arians and in this case on the losing side of the great Christian debate of the forth century of the Common Era.
Their books were either burnt, let to rot, or cleaned with pumice, washed with water and overwritten in Latin.

There was one exception - the Codex Argenteus.
Being written probably in the sixth century for royal use (for the history of the Codex see Lars Munkhammar's article , 1998),
it was never copied.
However, starting in the 17th century, it was transcribed and while rewriting it, some changes were made.
The original Gothic text was written in scriptio continua, that is no white spaces between words and no dashes when a word is broken between two lines.
The transcribers added all those and also inserted the division of the biblical writings into chapters and verses, a practice introduced long after the Gothic translation of the Bible was done.
In addition, the text was no longer written in the fonts devised by Wulfila himself but with Old English script.

Below is a comment form a person trying to reproduce the codex onto cd rom

In summmer 1998 I have prepared, in co-operation with the library of Uppsala University, a CD-ROM edition of the 1927 facsimile edition of Codex Argenteus.
As part of my work I have decided to take upon myself the tedious task of preparing a digitized text of Codex Argenteus,
making it as close to the original as possible.
The original digitized text I use was prepared by Project Wulfila.
As for the style, I follow the steps of Uppstr�m (1854) with few changes.
For example, I move the markings of the abbreviations and the consonant gradation into the bottom of the page as comments instead of inserting them in italics
inside the text.
I also incorporate the corrections done by Otto von Friesen
and Anders Grape (1928).
The story of this alphabet is a little odd.
The Goths had an alphabet which was later modified by Bishop Ulfilas during the fourth century.
Ulfilas combined th Gothic alphabet with that of the Greek alphabet written in cursive lettering to create a script which could be used to write with.
The result was the alphabet which would become the Gothic alphabet itself.
Although there were many books written using this alphabet,
many were destroyed by order of the Council of Toldeo in 1018 because they felt that the alphabet was Pagan
and thus should be destroyed - even though the alphabet itself was devised by a bishop.