A friend (and historian) mentioned to me that Ulfilas had some "troubles" translating the bible into Gothic, but he couldn't remember the source. I found some information on a German homepage, but I couldn't find a proper source that would I consider "valid" enough.
I know that certain Old-German tales like the Nibelungen are grey in a sense that there are no clear good / bad guys, at least not in a way which is common today. But I also think that "guilt" is a feeling, thus I am very skeptical at least about that claim.
Does anyone can provide me with further information on this topic and/or proper sources?
As a follow up, do historians out there still use the concept of "guilt cultures" and "shame cultures"? I believe it comes originally out of anthropology, but I learned it from a historian, who was explaining exactly this moment that /u/wzkawumme was talking about--how we go from Beowulf, who fears losing face in the eyes of his peers (i.e. shame), and Dream of the Rood, where Jesus is envisioned as a warrior, through the new popular mendicant orders in Germany who essentially reconvert urban Germans to a more nuanced and orthodox Christianity, by adding in lots of new concepts including guilt, which ultimately set up Luther and the Reformation. Guilt being an internal emotion, you feel guilty because you know what you did rather than shame you feel ashamed because you lost standing in the eyes of others. The word conscience is opaque to us, but it's from the Latinate con science, "with knowledge". I was told by this same historian that during the late Medieval period mendicant monks would teach this new Christianity through neologisms. The one he mentioned was "Gewissen", which is the German word for conscience, which like con science is clearly rooted in the word knowing, wissen. This preaching is how, he explained, internally oriented feelings of feelings guilt (necessary for the Reformation and its anxiety over individual salvation) replaced externally oriented feelings of shame. Is this still the common thinking? Are there good sources for more on this specifically? My favorite history professor (a well respected historian who works on religion in Late Medieval/Early Modern German) taught it to us in a "Western Civ" course, but it was just part of a short lecture that an effective bridge from the Anglo-Saxon literature we read and a prologue to our longer discussion of the Reformation.
Aside from any other answers you receive here, this is a good question to crosspost over in /r/AcademicBiblical, which focuses on scholarly studies of the Christian holy texts and has quality standards similar to this sub.