Gutter, Gothic and goth, three words that look alike, but each stand for something completely different. Gothic for the architecture of bright, luminescent cathedrals and gothic for the darkness of horror and bloodthirstiness. And yet they hang together. Not through the word gutter, which comes from casting, and which ends in the sewer, but through the Goths, the extinct East Germanic people that form the basis of this word family.
King of the Goths
The Goths, fierce warriors who helped overthrow the Roman Empire in the Great Migration of the 4th to 6th centuries, were the civil terror of all of Medieval Europe. They not only occupied Spain until the Muslim Moors settled there, they also controlled the far North. The Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland and Gothenburg provide further evidence of this. Until fifty years ago, both the Swedish and Danish kings carried the title King of the Goths.
When a new architectural style emerged in northern France in the later Middle Ages, which preferred pointed arches and thin height to the darkness of the Romanesque round arches, this innovation was not seen as positive by everyone. The 16th century Italian painter, architect and early art historian, Giorgio Vasari, who as a Renaissanceist himself was a strong proponent of a style that harks back to Greco-Roman antiquity, referred to the novelty of the North with an epithet ‘estilo gotico‘, a barbaric style. Gothic has long retained this negative meaning. The French word gothic still initially means ‘savage, uncivilized’; ‘les siecles gothiques‘ refers to the Dark Ages with their cruel, crude mores and customs.
The modern tourist drives for miles to admire great Gothic cathedrals
Centuries later, when not only churchgoers but also art historians came to appreciate the beauty and quality of Gothic, Gothic took on such a positive connotation that the modern tourist takes a detour to admire the great Gothic cathedrals of Chartres, Beauvais, Strasbourg and Reims.
horror story
Still, the dark association didn’t completely disappear. The English gothlike the Dutch counterpart borrowed from the French, continued to refer mainly to ‘the dark ages‘, an unspecified medieval period, which was characterized by romantic unstructuredness and gloomy, in direct opposition to the rigid rationale of the classics. For example, the 18th century writer Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Oxford and son of the longest-serving prime minister under George II, was able to tell his horror story. The Castle of Otranto (1764)’a gothic novel‘ as a subtitle.
It is a bloody story set in a mysterious castle. With the introduction of the gothic novel, Walpole set the example for a genre made famous by Mary Shelleys in the 19th century. FrankensteinEdgar Allen Poes The Fall of the House of Usher and Bram Stokers Dracula.
The introduction of silent film in the 20th century opened up opportunities for goth cinema, and half a century later a goth subculture emerged from the punk and new wave scene, with black clothing, neckbands, piercings and an eerie descendant appearance. of the old Goths a new civil terror.
#light #darkness