West Germanic

West Germanic is the branch of Germanic behind English, Frisian, Dutch, Low German, High German and Yiddish, as distinct from North Germanic, which produced Old Norse and the Scandinavian languages, and from the extinct East Germanic branch whose only substantially attested member is Gothic. Wayne Harbert's survey sets out the shared innovations that define the branch and the disputes about its internal divisions.

Its religious importance is that the conversion of northern Europe was carried out in these languages. Old English produced the earliest large vernacular Christian literature in Europe outside Greek and Latin. Old Saxon produced the Heliand, a gospel harmony in alliterative verse. Old High German produced glosses, the Wessobrunn Prayer, the Muspilli on the end of the world, and the Merseburg charms.

That last item is worth stating carefully. The two Merseburg charms, written down in the ninth or tenth century in a Latin manuscript, name Germanic deities and describe a healing performed by them, and they survive as an isolated fragment with nothing beside them. Almost everything else in this branch that touches the older religion was written by people describing what they were in the act of replacing.

The pattern running through West Germanic religious history is translation. Gothic, which belongs to the East Germanic branch rather than to this one, set the precedent: Ulfilas devised an alphabet in the fourth century in order to translate the Bible, and Gothic survives almost entirely as that translation. Nearly every Germanic language afterwards received scripture the same way, through a deliberate act of rendering rather than through gradual absorption.

Aelfric in Old English, the Otfrid gospel book in Old High German, the Dutch and Low German bibles of the fifteenth century, and then Luther's German New Testament of 1522 and complete Bible of 1534, are stages of one process. Luther's translation is the case with the largest consequences, because it fixed a written standard for German while making an argument that scripture belonged in the hands of people who could read only their own tongue, and the printing press carried both effects together.

William Tyndale did the same for English and was executed for it in 1536, and much of his wording passed into the King James Version. Yiddish, a West Germanic language written in Hebrew script, developed its own religious literature, including a Yiddish retelling of the Torah made for women and read in households for four centuries.