Hello, my friend. You came back. I'm so glad.
Pull up a chair. I've been saving this one for you.
Last time, we were in Boston with Samuel Adams, that rumpled, restless man who never had much money but always had a pen. He wrote letters, pamphlets, and newspaper essays under a dozen made-up names. He passed words from town to town until a whole colony was thinking the same thoughts at the same time. Words, carried hand to hand, lit a revolution.
But here's something I've always wondered about. Before you can change the world with written words, someone has to invent the letters.
Today we're going back much further, more than sixteen hundred years, to the banks of a great river. We'll meet a man who took a language no one had ever written down and gave it letters of its own.
It is evening in the hills of Moesia, just south of the Danube, around the year 369.
I remember the sheep bells most of all. They clanked softly outside, as the flocks settled for the night. There was woodsmoke, and the smell of lanolin and damp wool. And inside a small stone house, a single oil lamp was burning.
An old man sat beside it. He was nearly sixty, with ink-stained fingers and Greek scrolls piled at his elbow. In his hand he held a wax tablet and a bronze stylus.
I was there, though no one saw me.
He was doing something no one had ever done. He was writing down Gothic, the language of his people. Until that night it had lived only in the air: in songs around fires, in shepherds calling across hillsides, in grandmothers telling stories to children who would one day tell them again. It had never once been written.
He frowned. There was a sound in Gothic, a breathy hw, like wind through a gap in a wall, and no Greek letter could hold it. So he pressed the stylus into the wax and made a new one.
Then, slowly, he wrote the opening of the prayer every Christian knew.
Atta unsar þu in himinam.
Our Father, who art in heaven.
Say it with me. Unsar. Doesn't it sound a little like "our"? And himinam, can you hear "heaven" hiding inside it? Those are your words, my friend, or their very old cousins, on a wax tablet, by lamplight, a long time ago.
He looked up then, toward the dark window, toward the north, where the Danube ran wide and cold. He had crossed that river once, running for his life.
Soon, others would cross it too, in numbers no one had ever seen.
Now a word from our sponsor.
[[ad-begin]]
This episode is brought to you by Tabula Wax Tablets.
Let's be honest about papyrus. Every letter you write uses reeds pulled from the Nile, and every note to your cousin in Antioch is a little less marsh for the ducks. Parchment? Don't get me started on what happens to the sheep.
Tabula is different. A smooth layer of beeswax in a sturdy wooden frame, and a single bronze stylus: pointed at one end for writing, flat at the other for erasing. Write it, read it, smooth it over, and write again. One tablet lasts for years. Some families pass theirs down for generations, and the wax comes from local bees, who ask only for flowers in return.
It's the original reusable notebook. Nothing gets thrown away, because nothing has to be.
And for our younger listeners, a little secret. Tabula is the preferred choice for students across the empire, and not only for arithmetic. Pass a note to your friend three benches over. Teacher heading your way? A quick swipe of the flat end, and what note? You were practicing your letters. Tabula: the evidence melts away.
Tabula tablets come in single panels, hinged pairs, and deluxe multi-leaf editions for the serious scholar. Perhaps you're inventing a whole new alphabet. We don't judge.
Tabula Wax Tablets. Write boldly. Erase freely. Save a reed.
Available at finer marketplaces from Rome to the Danube, roughly seventeen hundred years ago. No returns, but you'll never need a refill.
[[ad-end]]
Let me tell you who he was, and where he came from. I'll warn you now: this was a long time ago, and even my memory has worn thin in places. Some threads are faded. But the pattern is still there, if you look closely.
In those days, if you'd asked a Roman about the Goths, you would have gotten an earful. Barbarians, they'd say. Raiders from beyond the Danube, with long hair and loud voices, always testing the border. Roman writers described the Goths in their histories and letters, usually with a shudder. Every word written about the Goths was written by someone else. The Goths themselves wrote nothing, because they had no way to write their language at all.
And the Goths did raid. Around the 250s and 260s, their warbands swept south across the sea into the Roman lands we now call Turkey, into a region called Cappadocia. They burned villages and carried away captives. From one village, a place called Sadagolthina, they took a group of Christians. They marched them north, across the water and across the Danube, into a strange land with a strange language.
I watched those captives. They were frightened and far from home, and they had lost almost everything. But they kept one thing. In the evenings, they prayed together, in Greek, quietly, so their children would learn the words.
Among those captives were the grandparents of our friend.
He was born around the year 311, north of the Danube, among the Goths. His family called him Wulfila, which means "Little Wolf." The Romans had trouble with it, so they called him Ulfilas.
Picture a boy growing up between two worlds. At home, and out with the herds, he spoke Gothic. In prayer, he spoke Greek, the language his grandparents had refused to let go. Later he learned Latin too. He was a Goth among Goths and a Christian among the descendants of captives, and he was never entirely one thing or the other.
As a young man, he became a lector, a reader, the one who stood up in the small Christian gatherings and read scripture aloud. But his listeners spoke Gothic, and the scriptures were in Greek. So every time he read, he was translating in his head, word by word, out loud, for people who had no other way to hear it. He'd been practicing his life's work for years without knowing it.
When he was about thirty, a Gothic delegation traveled south to Constantinople, the gleaming new capital of the Roman world, and Wulfila went with them. Imagine that shepherd's grandson walking among marble columns and golden domes. There, around the year 341, the Roman church made him a bishop for the Christians living among the Goths.
In those years Christians were quarreling fiercely about how to speak of God, and Wulfila stood with one side of that argument. His side would eventually lose. But that was far in the future.
For now, the Little Wolf was going home.
For seven years, Wulfila lived and worked north of the Danube.
He walked from village to village, along muddy tracks, through birch woods and past wooden longhouses. He preached in Gothic to anyone who would listen: farmers, herders, soldiers, the grandchildren of captives. Some listened. Some shrugged. And some watched him with narrowed eyes.
Because here's the trouble. To the Gothic chieftains, this man looked suspicious. He had been to Constantinople. He had been made a bishop by the Romans. When he talked about his new faith, some Goths heard something else: Rome, creeping in through the back door.
In the year 348, a Gothic ruler decided he'd had enough. The Christians were to be driven out.
I remember the hurry of it. People grabbed what they could carry: blankets, cooking pots, a child on each hip. The shepherds rounded up their flocks, sheep bleating and dogs darting back and forth. And Wulfila, not yet forty years old, gathered his people and led them south toward the river.
The Danube is not a stream you hop across. It is wide and cold and gray-green, and it moves with real power. I watched them cross, in boats and on rafts. The animals swam or were hauled over, bawling, while the children stayed very quiet. Behind them lay the only home most of them had ever known. Ahead of them was Roman land, and no one knew if the Romans would want them.
They did. Emperor Constantius welcomed them, and he was so struck by this bishop leading his people through water to safety that he called him "the Moses of our time."
It was a grand title. But the cost was real, and it was permanent. Wulfila never went home again. He never went back across that river for the rest of his life.
His people settled in the hills near a Roman town called Nicopolis. They were shepherds, and they stayed shepherds, grazing their flocks on the high slopes, poor but safe. Wulfila became everything to them: bishop, judge, leader, teacher. He would serve them for thirty-three years.
And somewhere in those long, quiet years in the hills, he began the work that would outlast everything else he did.
He had a problem. He wanted his people to have the scriptures in their own language. Not heard secondhand from a reader translating on the fly, but written down, where anyone could read them and they would stay the same. For that, Gothic needed letters.
So he built them. He started with the Greek alphabet he'd grown up praying in. Where Greek fell short, he borrowed a few Latin letters. He took a few from the old Gothic runes, the angular marks his people scratched on spear points and rings. Where nothing fit at all, he invented something new, like that letter for the breathy hw sound. Letter by letter, sound by sound, he built a way for Gothic to live on a page.
Then came the translation, and I don't think he did it alone. I picture a table crowded with helpers: scrolls unrolled, arguments about just the right word, someone reading a Greek line aloud, and someone else saying, "No, no, a Goth would never say it like that." It took years. Maybe decades.
There's a story, told by an old writer not long after, that I have always loved. Wulfila translated nearly all of the scriptures, it's said, but he left out the Books of Kings, the ones full of battles and conquests. His people, he felt, already knew quite enough about war.
It makes me smile. And it makes me a little sad, too. Imagine knowing your people so well that you choose which stories to give them, and which ones to hold back for their own good.
So here we are, back where we began. The lamp is burning low. The sheep bells have gone quiet outside. And the words that started on a wax tablet, Atta unsar þu in himinam, have become a book. It's a whole Bible, in a language that until then had lived only in the air.
Wulfila's book did not stay in the hills.
North of the Danube, around the year 369, the persecution of Christians began again, and this time it was harsher. I won't linger there. But I remember a young Goth named Saba, a cheerful man who sang in church. He refused to give up his faith, and he paid for it with his life, in a river. His people remembered him. They wrote his story down, and so he is remembered still.
But something else was happening among the Goths. A chieftain named Fritigern was fighting a rival for power, and he turned to Rome for help. As part of that friendship, he and his followers took up Christianity, and they learned it Wulfila's way, from his missionaries, through his letters and his Bible. The faith that had crossed the river as a refugee was now crossing back into the heart of the Gothic world.
Then, in 376, the ground shifted under everyone.
Out of the far east came the Huns, riders so fast and fierce that whole peoples fled before them. The Gothic world north of the Danube broke apart. Tens of thousands of Goths, entire families with everything they owned, gathered on the riverbank and begged the Roman Empire to let them in.
Do you see it? It was the same river, and a crossing just like Wulfila's twenty-eight years earlier. But this time it wasn't a few hundred shepherds. It was a nation.
Rome said yes, and then Rome handled it very badly. The Roman officials in charge starved the newcomers, cheated them, and treated them with cruelty. The Goths rose up. In 378, at a place called Adrianople, the Gothic army met the Roman army, and the Romans were crushed. The emperor himself died on that battlefield.
People who study history still point to that day as a turning point, the moment the Roman world began to come undone.
And Wulfila was still alive to see it, an old man in his hills.
In 383, a new emperor summoned him to Constantinople. The argument about God had turned, and Wulfila's side was losing. He made the long journey anyway. But soon after he arrived, he fell ill. Before he died, he wrote out what he believed, in his own words, clear to the end. One of his students, a young man named Auxentius, whom he had raised almost like a son, wrote down the story of his teacher's life. That letter is the main reason we know Wulfila at all.
But his letters didn't die with him. They traveled with his people.
When the Goths moved across Europe in the years that followed, they carried his Bible with them. In 410, a Gothic king named Alaric captured Rome itself, the first time in eight hundred years that an enemy had taken the city. Yet his soldiers spared the people who ran into the churches for shelter. Later, Gothic kingdoms rose in Spain and in Italy.
And through all of it, the Goths had something no army could give them: their faith, in their own tongue, in their own letters. It set them apart. It kept them a people instead of dissolving into Rome's great crowd.
You know how I think of history, as a great tapestry. Every person, every event, every idea is a thread, all woven together into a pattern.
For a long time, the Goths' threads in that tapestry were woven by other hands. Roman hands. When Roman writers wove the Goths into their pattern, they chose dark colors: raiders, barbarians, trouble at the border. The Goths had songs and stories of their own, but those were threads made of air. They were carried by voices, and each one lasted only as long as someone remembered to sing it.
Wulfila changed that. For the first time, a people who had only been written about could write for themselves. They could hold their own words in their own letters and put their own voice into the pattern.
Now, here is the part that catches in my throat every time.
The Goths did write their own history, eventually. At the court of their great king in Italy, a scholar assembled a whole chronicle of the Gothic people, with their kings and their wanderings and their glories. It's lost. Only a short summary survives. The old songs are gone. The runes have left us a handful of words scratched on metal. So when we reach back to hear the Goths speak in their own language, what we find, almost alone, is Wulfila's Bible.
He wrote to carry a faith. And in the end, he carried a people.
Even that survived only because others chose to keep it. About a hundred and forty years after he died, someone in Italy made a copy so precious it was written in silver and gold ink on purple parchment. We call it the Silver Book. It disappeared for a thousand years. Then it surfaced in a German monastery, was carried off as a prize of war to Sweden in 1648, and was locked away safe in a library there. One missing page turned up hidden in a German cathedral in 1970. Every one of those keepers made a choice: this matters, so I will keep it.
Wulfila didn't start from nothing. He had the Greek alphabet, the scriptures, and grandparents who refused to let their prayers unravel in captivity. But what he made from them opened a door. The Goths could finally speak for themselves on the page. Their language became the first of its whole family to be written down, and that family is the one English belongs to.
Preserving wasn't a side note to Wulfila's life. It was his life's great act. One choice, carried forward by many hands, made a direction you can still see.
Can I ask you something, my friend?
When you hear the word memory, you might think of something small and private, like an old photograph tucked away in a drawer. But memory is bigger than that. Memory is the architecture of continuity. It's how a song outlives its singer. It's how a people knows where it came from, and which way is forward. Every people chooses what it remembers, and slowly becomes what it chooses.
So let me leave you with a few questions to carry around this week.
Whose stories do you know only from the outside, told by someone else?
What language did your grandparents speak, or their grandparents? Is any of it written down? Is there a song, a recipe, a saying, or a family story that lives only in someone's voice right now?
And what about your own story? If someone wrote it down one day, would you want it in their words, or yours?
You don't have to answer. Just notice.
Maybe somewhere there's a wax tablet waiting for you, smooth and blank, with a stylus beside it. What would you write first?
Next time, we're traveling to Russia in the 1860s, to meet a man named Dmitry Milyutin.
He was a general, and later the Tsar's minister of war. But he didn't win his place in history on a battlefield. When he took charge, Russia's peasant soldiers could be kept in the army for twenty-five years, which was most of a lifetime. Milyutin cut that down to six. Then he did something even stranger for a man running an army. He built schools inside it and taught hundreds of thousands of soldiers to read. And he kept a diary, faithfully, for decades, so we can still hear his voice today.
Letters, arriving for people who never had them. Sound familiar?
Until then, my friend, remember the Little Wolf in his stone house in the hills. He had a lamp, a wax tablet, and a language that had never been written, and he refused to let it stay that way. Some threads in the tapestry hold because someone, somewhere, cared enough to write them down.
This podcast is sponsored by Tabula Wax Tablets. Write boldly, erase freely, and keep what matters.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia