Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist

Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work

M. Toswell

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137444479
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Theorie der Literaturkritik

The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will consider the medieval elements in Borges creative work and shed new light on his poetry.

1

Introduction

Abstract: The introduction uses a set of lectures Borges delivered in 1967–1968 at Harvard University, published in 2000 as This Craft of Verse in order to engage in a preliminary analysis of Borges’ medievalism, notably his references to Old English and Old Norse. The chapter uses other evidence from the 1960s, including the Spanish title of one collection El Hacedor and its English version Dreamtigers, in order to lay out the direction of the book.

Keywords: Alberto Manguel; Borges; Dreamtigers; El Hacedor; Harvard lectures; kenning; medievalism; Old English; Old Norse; This Craft of Verse

Toswell, M.J. Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137444479.0003.

About 15 years ago, my colleague Călin Mihăilescu stopped by my office to ask if I would listen to some words on tapes that had recently been found in a library vault at Harvard University. The tapes recorded the voice of Jorge Luis Borges delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968. In total Borges delivered six talks, published after their rediscovery as This Craft of Verse. His range of reference, as my colleague notes in his afterword to the lectures, is immense.¹ From the Greek classics to twentieth-century English novels, including the great texts of many languages, Borges knew the original texts, their later developments, their translations, and their reception in the modern day. Prominent among those texts, but less well-known and often unrecognized, were Old Norse sagas and Old English poems. My colleague was at my door because among those references were quotations in Old English of single words and of a few lines, translated by Borges but not otherwise identified. Călin’s hope was that I might be able to recognize the passage in particular. As it turned out, any undergraduate student of Old English could have identified that passage: it was lines 31b–33a of The Seafarer, one of the most famous elegies from the Exeter Book, and it took me hardly five minutes to find Ida Gordon’s edition and demonstrate the passage to my colleague’s satisfaction.² There were some individual words as well, also pretty easy to decode. He went off, happy. And the transcribed lectures, with their afterword and explanation for the rediscovery of the tapes, went off to press and emerged as an elegant small paperback some time later. I, however, found myself remembering the years I spent studying literature in Spanish, both in Canada and in Spain. I found myself thinking about how thoroughly medieval Borges was as a writer, medieval in ways that I recognized as a scholar of Old English and Anglo-Saxon England. I started checking, and quite rapidly found that there was much to be discovered, rediscovered, and considered.

The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was very many things during his life: a collaborator on detective stories and fantasies, a poet with ten separate collections published, an essayist and discussant on matters literary and political, joint author and editor of many works and anthologies, author of seven major collections of short stories, and a figure central not just to Spanish and Spanish-American literature but to world literature for his ability to express twentieth-century alienation and uncertainty. What has gone largely unnoticed about Borges, however, is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his life, and in his work. He wrote a study of Old English, Old Norse, and Old High German literature, offering detailed analyses of the major works in each language. The first edition of this book was with one collaborator, and a second edition 14 years later was with a second. Later yet he executed at least a dozen translations of Old English texts, seven of them with a third collaborator (all hispanic women and most former students of Borges himself). When he went blind around the age of fifty, according to his own repeated account in nearly every published interview thereafter, he returned to his study of Old English. Sometimes, according to these accounts, he also approached Old Norse, which he saw as much more difficult. This lens casts new light on Borges’ repeated references in his texts to medieval ideas about authority, tradition, dreams, and particularly on his lifelong concern with ideas of heroism. This study considers Borges’ life in terms of his knowledge of medieval studies, his writings and studies in the field of medieval studies, and the medieval elements in his creative work.

A specific example makes a good beginning to this analysis. Handily, This Craft of Verse, the Norton lectures at Harvard in 1967–1968 mentioned earlier, offers such a starting point, and one typical of the references to Germanic medievalism that Borges made relatively constantly from the mid-1960s to the end of his life. It seems best to start with Borges’ explicit references to Old English, Old Norse, and Old High German texts, and only later to consider the less certain world of the influence this material might have had on his thinking, the more oblique references. This Craft of Verse is also appropriate for this introductory chapter as its six lectures were delivered from October 24, 1967 to April 10, 1968; they therefore fit neatly into the 1960s vibe of this opening chapter, a period during which Borges was also in his sixties. The first specific reference occurs early in the first lecture, itself entitled “The Riddle of Poetry”:

Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.”³

This opening lecture sweeps across many generations and literatures, in this passage commenting on the temptation to buy new books, and more generally commenting on the book as an artifact, and as a document filled with fascinating words. Moreover, Borges clearly states that he already has a very full collection of scholarly works in Germanic medieval literature in his possession. A page later, Borges discusses the unusual Old English verb tesan and the noun þreat, which today are, respectively, “to tease, to joke” and “threat, warning” but in Old English meant “to wound with a sword” and “company, cohort, group of warriors.”⁴ In both cases, as Borges points out, the meanings have shifted. His concern is the beauty of words, and perhaps their longevity and mutability. The last example of the talk is an extended quotation from The Seafarer, read by Borges in what he calls the “stark and voweled Old English of the ninth century.”⁵ Warning the audience that if they return for future lectures they will hear much more Old English, he speaks of the poet writing this material in Northumberland, producing a poem which has in Borges’ view only been enriched by the passage of time. His conclusion is that once there is true knowledge of a subject, in this case poetry, it becomes difficult to define simply and easily, since the subject gains so many levels of complexity. The Seafarer, which for Borges is “so straightforward, so plain, and so pathetic through the centuries,” offers us a chance to enter into the thinking of its anonymous poet, and engage with a poem which speaks of “commonplace things.”⁶ Even in this opening chapter, Borges demonstrates detailed knowledge of Old English, quoting individual words and two-line passages, offering etymologies, and drawing conclusions about how we can come to know a subject, in this case poetry.

The second talk concerns the metaphor, and here Borges delights in quoting from Old English and Old Norse, beginning the talk with þreat from the opening lines of Beowulf, and ending his conspectus of kinds of metaphoric usage with a sequence of kennings from Old English and Old Norse. Thus the Norse kenning for blood, “the water of the serpent,” for Borges ties to the sword as “an essentially evil being, a being that lapped up the blood of men as if it were water.”⁷ He even discusses a Norse and Irish metaphor about battle as a “web of men” as an example of a metaphor which does not have the definite patterns that we find recognizable as metaphorical. He proposes that metaphors have major trends, but that it is also possible to invent new ones that do not reflect the patterns. In the third talk Borges moves on from his discussion of words, and then metaphors, to address the poet who writes narratives and tells tales. Here he makes brief references to the plots written by one of his favorite poets, Snorri Sturluson, to the Middle English poet Langland and his Piers Plowman, to the Völsungassaga, and to Beowulf.⁸ He even engages in medievalism, discussing a poem written by G.K. Chesterton about ninth-century Danish attacks on England and King Alfred’s victories. Borges is a fan of the epic, and very definitely not of the novel. His conclusion: “I believe that the poet shall once again be a maker,”⁹ thereby reflecting the title El Hacedor discussed later in this chapter. This lecture, like its predecessors, ranges broadly across several literatures, but this conclusion demonstrates that the most fundamental thoughts of Borges about poetry and the role of the poet reflected early medieval approaches.

The next lecture considers translation, and its first and longest example is the Old English poem now called The Battle of Brunanburh, which Borges calls the “Ode of Brunanburh,” and its translation at the end of the nineteenth century by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.¹⁰ His reading of the text and its translation is close and careful, sensitive and precise. He also enters into the mentalité of the poet: “The whole poem is filled with a fierce, ruthless joy. He mocks those who have been defeated. He is very happy that they have been defeated.”¹¹ Borges is onside with the poet, against the Danish invaders. He notes that he knew the Tennyson translation before the Old English original, which means that his access to the Middle Ages was mediated, as for most others in the twentieth century, through the romanticized and somewhat sentimentalized lens of the nineteenth century. Charmingly, he suggests near the end of the talk that on occasion he has invented a bold metaphor and ascribed it to a Persian or Norse poet in order to deflect criticism. Borges channels medieval poets, noting that they might well have invented his metaphor. In other words, he partakes of a profoundly medieval attitude to authority. Texts derive each from the other, and aspiring to originality is always a mistake—despite the popularity of the idea in the modern era.

The pattern by now is clear. Near the beginning and often near the end of each talk Borges invokes Old English or Old Norse. In “Thought and Poetry” he quotes Robert Louis Stevenson for the way the poet takes everyday words and makes magic of them, arguing that he will prove otherwise. His first exemplum for his argument is the Norse poets who could not, he argues, have expressed themselves as well in prose. King Alfred similarly wrote serviceable prose but “it rings no deep note,” whereas the poetry that still lives begins with concrete references and remains a set of “words packed with magic.”¹² For Borges, poetry returns a language to its sources, taking the magic of the words as they were originally developed, and restoring that magic to them. The last talk, “A Poet’s Creed,” draws conclusions about the role of words and poems that are well-nigh Jungian: “Words are symbols for shared memories . . . The reader, if he is quick enough, can be satisfied with our merely hinting at something.”¹³ In this talk Borges makes his clearest and most cogent comments about his interest in Old Norse and Old English. As a young man he read Thomas Carlyle, who sent him to German literature, but he did not find what he was looking for. That, he states, is:

the idea I had—the idea of men not at all intellectual but given over to loyalty, to bravery, to a manly submission to fate—this I did not find, for example, in the Nibelungenlied. All of that seemed too romantic for me. I was to find it years and years afterwards in the Norse sagas and in the study of Old English poetry.¹⁴

He further describes the language as harsh but possessing a kind of beauty, and the poetry as possessing deep fee...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  The Germanic Medievalism of Borges Life
• 3  Borges the Poet
• 4  Borges the Scholar and Write
• 5  Borges the Fabulist
• 6  Borges Medievalism
• Bibliography
• Index