A friend and I were having a discussion the other day about Germanic languages, as one does, and I mentioned Gothic, which he was not familiar with. Thinking about this extinct language made me wonder again about how we ended up attaching the label Gothic to a variety of artifacts. Let’s have a look, shall we?
To start, there were Germanic tribes and a Gothic language. Here’s a simplified story. The Germanic languages are a branch of the whole Indo-European family of languages, which incorporates most of the European languages, Persian, a swath of languages spoken across Asia, and major languages in the Asian subcontinent:
Within this uber-family, the Germanic languages consist of three branches (red in the diagram):
- North Germanic. This branch evolved into Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.
- West Germanic. This branch became German, Dutch, English, and some others, like Yiddish.
- East Germanic. Read on.
The East Germanic languages are all now extinct. At one time, though, the East Germanic languages were spoken by Germanic tribes who (as the name implies) lived in the east, probably near the Baltic Sea. These included the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Ostrogoths, and the Visigoths. Our name Goth is related to what they called themselves: Gut-thiuda, the “Goth-people.” The Gut part might be etymologically related to the name Geats, a North Germanic people who show up in Beowulf and left their name in various places, such as Gothland in Sweden.
Except for the Ostrogoths, the East Germanic tribes migrated westward in the time of the Roman Empire; in fact, the Visigoths sacked Rome in 412 AD. Visigoths ended up with a kingdom in what is now Spain, and the Vandals made it all the way to northern Africa.
Gothic, the language, is probably the language of the Ostrogoths. It’s known to us from a single textual source—a fragmented bible translation that was done in the fourth century. The other tribes left behind only records of names and some loanwords into Iberian languages. Beyond this, the languages vanish, with their speakers conquered or absorbed into the languages of the lands they migrated to. With one intriguing exception—there are scattered reports of Germanic-speaking people in the Crimea, including a list of words recorded in 1562 by a Flemish diplomat that sure look like they might have been Gothic-esque. But those people also eventually disappeared.
The term goth has occasionally been used to mean “barbarian” or “barbarous” because the (Visi)goths were the barbarians who knocked over the Roman Empire. Compare vandal, which likewise was the name of an East Germanic tribe that came, saw, and conquered. Hold that thought.
Next up is architecture. Gothic refers to a style that was used in northern Europe in the Middle Ages. The style includes pointed arches, flying buttresses, gargoyles, and big stained-glass windows. Think Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. (There’s a good description of these elements in a page on the How Stuff Works site.)
The label Gothic for architecture was intended pejoratively. Giorgio Vasari, a Renaissance Italian artist and architect, referred to this as the “barbarious German style” (barbarians again) and he “attributes various architectural features to the Goths, whom he held responsible for destroying the ancient buildings after they conquered Rome, and erecting new ones in this style.” (Wikipedia.)
(From Development and Character of Gothic Architecture by Charles Hebert Moore, 1906)
But Vasari was wrong; the Goths did not build Gothic cathedrals, which were established centuries after the Goths had disappeared. (Christopher Wren, the English architect, correctly describes features such as the pointed arch as having been probably having been adapted from Islamic architecture.)
Gothic architecture gave way to Renaissance and then Baroque styles. However, in Victorian times a new enthusiasm developed for the Gothic style—the “Gothic Revival”—and Gothic-looking features were incorporated into churches, government buildings, and grand houses. For example, the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington in Seattle was built in the 1920s in the so-called Collegiate Gothic style:
Moving on to literature. In the 1700s a style of fiction emerged that’s known as Gothic literature or Gothic horror. The genre emerged from the Romantic movement with its emphasis on emotion, but “is characterized by its darkly picturesque scenery and its eerie stories of the macabre” (source) plus the spiritual and supernatural. The first work that’s considered to be in this genre was The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story by Horace Walpole in 1765, so the progenitor of the genre also gave it a name. The genre led to works like Frankenstein and Dracula plus lots of stuff by Edgar Allen Poe.
Walpole used the term Gothic to invoke the ideas of “barbarous” and the Middle Ages. His book, and those to follow, used settings like spooky, ruined castles from the medieval era. (It probably helps to remember that Henry VIII dissolved a lot of monasteries that were in the Gothic style, so England had itself some nice Gothic ruins.) The book Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a modern take on this genre. The elements of Gothic literature were also blended into other genres, such as the contemporary genre of Gothic romance.
Speaking of writing, we also have Gothic script, also known as blackletter, a style of writing that was used in northern Europe in the Middle Ages. This script originated as a form of handwriting that was efficient and compact so that scribes could keep up with the increasing demands for written materials. The efficiency of the script, however, did not make for very legible writing. Italian scribes didn’t like it (see if you can detect a pattern here) and considered it “barbaric,” and they went on to develop a different style of writing that came down to us with the label humanist. It wasn’t just the Italians, though; Erasmus also hated Gothic script (“the reader completely rejects it or is utterly worn out”).
When handwriting gave way to moveable type, Gothic script was translated into a variety of typefaces that looked like the handwriting they were replacing. Some of these are Blackletter, Old English, and Fraktur. In Germany, Fraktur typefaces were in use for everyday texts like newspapers until the 1940s(!).
However, in the world of typography, Gothic also got a new meaning: it’s another term for sans serif typefaces like Helvetica. This is particularly obvious in the names Century Gothic and Franklin Gothic:
The first sans serif fonts were created in the early 19th century, mostly as display typefaces (that is, not for books) and were called Grotesque because they were considered awkard-looking in comparison to the type conventions of the time. (“Basically, they were the punk to the serif as disco,” per Greta Harding.)
The term Gothic was applied to sans serif typefaces “probably” (Wikipedia) based on the architectural term because the style contrasted with Roman and Greek styles. The term Gothic was also associated with northern Europe and Germany; sans serif typefaces were particularly popular in German(ic)-speaking regions, including Switzerland (=Helvetica).
Finally, there’s the term goth as used for the subculture that involves fashion and music. This genre emerged from punk in the 1980s, though I suppose it’s arguable that Charles Addams, whose cartoons inspired the Addams Family TV show and movies, was an early embracer of goth aesthetics. Anyway, rather than explain the origins, I’ll refer you to the blog entry The Never-Ending Goth Debate by Jillian Venters, aka Lady of the Manners, who has a book and a blog all about goth-iness.
So what have we learned? The Gothic people, who spoke Gothic, knocked over Rome, and a lot of people considered this to be “barbaric.” When ornate styles in architecture and writing emerged in the Middle Ages in northern Europe, some who didn’t like these styles derisively labeled them “Gothic” in part due to the mistaken belief that Goths had torn down elegant Roman buildings and erected their own “barbarous” ones, or that they’d corrupted an elegant Roman hand. When Walpole wrote a moody novel set in a spooky castle, he labeled it “Gothic” to invoke the distant and mysterious past represented by tumble-down (Gothic) churches. When people developed sans serif typefaces, which were originally “grotesque,” they became associated with the aesthetics of Gothic architecture and specifically with German-speaking (“Gothic”) areas.
So there is a through line to the word Gothic: Germanic, “barbarous,” non-classical. The term has been creatively applied to a succession of styles. But it’s stuck around and has, I think, outlived the initial derision that was originally intended. Here’s to the words and all the things it’s been applied to.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.