Ulfilas' Alphabet

Album: Ulfilas' Alphabet (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • Ulfilas (c.311–383) was a missionary bishop to the Goths. It was much because of his efforts that the Germanic language began to get written down.

    The Goths in Germany were first introduced to Christianity by Roman prisoners, whom they had taken captive during raids into the Empire. Ulfilas undertook to give the Goths the Bible in their own language. The translation of the Holy Scriptures into their everyday speech was a monumental task as in order to achieve this, Ulfilas had to first devise a Gothic alphabet to capture accurately the sounds of spoken Gothic. The bishop used a total of 27 letters adapted from examples in the Greek and Roman alphabets.
  • This is the title track of Sundaras Karma's second album. Vocalist Oscar Pollock explained the record's name to NME: "There's a whole backstory to Ufilas, which ties in to the album's themes of lack of faith, knowing what not to believe in. But also, we really liked the words 'Ufilas Alphabet' together. The aesthetic of those words is very appealing."

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