[In the following essay, Tyler demonstrates Borges's interest in medieval Germanic literature, and points to elements of it in his poetry.]

Libros como el de Job, LA DIVINA COMEDIA, Macbeth (y, para mí, algunas de las sagas del Norte) prometen una larga inmortalidad …

Borges, “Sobre los clásicos.”¹

… In the preface to Literaturas germánicas medievales (1978), Borges states that the aim of his book is “to trace the origins of three literatures which emerged from a common root, and whose complex historical vicissitudes transformed and separated, as occurred also with the diverse languages in which they were written” (“Medieval Germanic Literatures” 7, hereafter referred to as MGL; my trans. Translations hereafter are my own). My aim here is to trace elements from those literatures in several poems included in his Obra poética and elsewhere.

Borges's initial interest for these literatures begins at home with the English origins of his father: “My father's English came from the fact that his mother, Frances Haslam, was born in Staffordshire of Northumbrian stock” (“An Autobiographical Essay” 136; Bantam, 1971). In his autobiographical essay, the Argentine poet talks about his attraction to the medieval Germanic literatures and to their poetic forms:

I had always been attracted to the metaphor, and this leaning led me to the study of the simple Saxon kennings and overelaborate Norse ones. As far back as 1932, I had even written an essay about them. The quaint notion of using, as far as it could be done, metaphors instead of straightforward nouns, and of these metaphors being at once traditional and arbitrary, puzzled and appealed to me. I was later to surmise that the purpose of these figures lay not only in the pleasure given by the pomp and circumstance of compounding words but also in the demands of alliteration. Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “a sea-stallion” and the open sea “the Whale's-road” is no great feat. The Norse skalds went a step further, calling the sea “the sea-stallion's-road,” so what originally was an image became a laborious equation. In turn, my investigation of kennings led me to the study of Old English and Old Norse.

(The Aleph and Other Stories 178)

Borges's experience with these medieval Germanic literatures led to his lecturing and teaching the subject in and out of the university. His research efforts in this field culminated in the publication of Antiguas literaturas germánicas (Old Germanic Literatures), an earlier version of Literaturas germánicas medievales.³ The earlier text appeared in México in 1951, and it is in “Mateo, XXV, 30,” a poem published as part of his El Otro, el mismo in 1953, that we find the first traces or elements of these medieval Germanic literatures. This single reference to “La saga de Grettir” is the bridge that connects a simple title with a full composition, a poem entitled “A Saxon” (A.D. 449). This poem, with its indefinite and anonymous title, is symbolic for its generic value, for it transmits diachronically the metamorphosis or rudimentary individuals into men of letters, as the last two stanzas of the poem clearly testify. The poem ends with a long, chaotic enumeration of words which together compose one single sentence.

He brought with him the elemental words
Of a language that in time would flower
In Shakespeare's harmonies: night, day,
Water, fire, words for metals and colors,
Hunger, thirst, bitterness, sleep, fighting
Death, and other grave concerns of men;
On broad meadows, and in tangled woodland
The sons he bore brought England into being.

(Selected Poems, 1923–1967 107, hereafter referred to as SP)

Later in other poems, Borges joins the many bards who sing of the moon with these meaningful lines:

There's an iron forest where a huge wolf
Lives whose strange fate is
To knock the moon down and murder it
When the last dawn reddens the sea.
(This is well known in the prophetic North;
Also, that on that day the ship made out
Of all the fingernails of the dead will spread
A poison on the world's wide-open seas.)

(A Personal Anthology, 197)

These parenthetical lines derive from Scandinavian literature (The Poetic Edda) where one reads of Ragnarökr (“The Twilight of the Gods”), a poetic title for a short piece found in Dreamtigers (26). The original source for these referential lines appears within the text of the “Medieval Germanic Literatures” where Borges writes:

This is the Twilight of the Gods (Ragnarökr). Fenrir, a wolf muzzled by a sword, breaks its millenial prison and devours Odin. The ship Naglfar sets sail, constructed with the fingernails of the dead. (In the Snorra Edda we read: “one must not allow someone to die with uncut fingernails, because he who forgets it hastens the construction of the ship Naglfar, feared by the gods and men.”)

(102)

Engrossed by this phenomenon of nails growing after death, Borges writes yet another piece simply entitled “Toenails.” But what is treated mythically in the earlier example becomes simply another curiosity in the later work.

Gradually we move away from these peripheral elements and we approach a concentration of poems directly related to the central subjects of the medieval Germanic literatures. A poem functioning as an inaugural part of these cardinal themes is appropriately entitled “Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar.” Here again we find autobiographical data supporting a now commonly-held hypothesis about the poet's kinship to early skalds. In selecting the term embarking for the poem's title, the translator chose his words wisely, for it is a sort of voyage in time that the poet (anchored in his native Buenos Aires) chose to undertake. “I come back to the far shore of a vast river / Never reached by the Norsemen's long ships [los dragones del viking reads the original] / To the harsh and workwrought words / Which, with a tongue now dust, / I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia / Before becoming Haslam or Borges” (SP, 139). Serious studies of these words, symbols of other symbols, will keep the poet researching, learning, and writing about his findings.

Proceeding along the same path, we come to Borges's sonnet “Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf.” Here Borges trades the internal rhyme of the former composition for the external rhyming scheme of the sonnet in its original version (abba abba cdd cdd). What may seem at first, if one pardons the oxymoron, a silent clamor for weaving and unweaving words—(“At various times I have asked myself what reason / Moved me to study … / The Language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons”)—ends up being a philosophical commentary comparing the bard's lexical toil with his weary existence: “I tell myself: It must be that the soul / Has some secret sufficient way of knowing / That it is immortal … / Beyond my anxiety and beyond this writing / The universe waits.” He concludes, “inexhaustible, inviting” (SP, 155).

The third in this series of poems dealing with the medieval Germanic literatures, “Hengest Cyning,” has a Nordic flavor. Both poem and title contain a binary value; the composition starts with The King's epitaph:

Beneath this stone lies the body of Hengist [sic]
Who founded in these islands the first kingdom
Of the royal house of Odin
And glutted the screaming eagle's greed.

(SP, 157)

Then he continues with the neo-fantastic element of the King's speech, supposedly after death, in defense of his own deeds:

I know not what runes will be scraped on the stone
But my words are these:
Beneath the Heavens I was Hengist the mercenary.
My might and my courage I marketed to Kings
Whose lands lay west over the water
Here at the edge of the sea
“Called the Spear-Warrior”;
But a man's might and his courage can
Not long bear being sold,
And so after cutting down all through the North
The foes of the Briton king,
From him too I took light and life together.
I like this kingdom that I seized with my sword;
It has rivers for the net and the oar
And long seasons of sun
And soil for the plough and for husbandry
And Britons for working the farms
And cities of stone which we shall allow
to crumble to ruin,
Because there dwell the ghosts of the dead.
But behind my back I know
These Britons brand me traitor,
Yet I have been true to my deeds and my daring
And to other men's care never yielded my destiny
And no one dared ever betray me.

(SP, 157)

Composed of alternating long and short verses, the protracted text contrasts with the briefer portion of the composition in both size and content. Its tempo, nevertheless, is kept with internal rhyme and an occasional alliteration—“no sé que runas habrá marcado el hierro en la piedra / Hay ríos para el remo y para la red”—Obra poética 234–235; italics added). The poem is not only interesting because of its contrasting elements, but also because of its narrative components. Especially appealing are those parts mentioning the geography, the toil of the Briton farmers, and the fateful decay of their cities. As a matter of fact in “The Elegies,” Borges mentions something to this effect at the same time that he quotes another scholar; thus in “The Ruin” he comments, “Stopford Brooke, in a dignified tone, says that the Saxons disdained city life, allowing the existing towns in England to fall into ruin and later composing elegies to deplore those ruins” (MGL, 24).

In his next poem titled simply “Fragment,” Borges's attention is focused upon a sword. Here things are deconstructed, so to speak, for the rhymer sings of one of the basic elements for settling discords: “A sword carved with runes … / A sword from the Baltic that will be celebrated in Northumbria, / A sword that poets will equate to ice and fire … / A sword to fit the hand of Beowulf” (SP, 159). There are fifteen rhythmic mentions of the word “sword,” and the placement of the word creates for the reader a pattern of pulsating sounds that resemble a collective image of the blade. Needless to say, the poem abounds in “kenningar”: a sword “That will stain with blood the wolf's fangs / And the raven's ruthless beak. / That will bring down the forest of spears” (SP, 159). Another title connecting with the same pattern is that of “A una espada en York” (“To a Sword in York”). And in La Rosa profunda there appears a sonnet titled “Espadas” (“Swords”), a sort of arma virumque cano that starts with a brief enumeration of famous blades. Borges himself, in a concluding note, explains that the weapons listed belonged to Sigurd, Roland, Charlemagne, and King Arthur.

Moving from the naming of the basic symbols of conflict to the praising of those who lexically celebrated victory and the spoils of war, the author dedicates his next poem “To a Saxon Poet,” a simple title designating two different compositions included in the collection I have been quoting from. Because of its vertical concatenation of apostrophes addressed to an anonymous bard who normally extolls heroes and heroic deeds, this poem resembles the previously discussed “Fragment.” From the eulogy to the nameless Saxon poet, Borges shifts to “Snorri Sturluson,” a tragic figure depicted here in a sonnet and the subject of the writer's twice-told-tales. Let us briefly consider the first of these variants:

“Snorri Sturluson, (1179–1241)”

You, who bequeathed a mythology
Of ice and fire to filial recall,
Who chronicled the violent glory
Of your defiant Germanic stock
Discovered in amazement one night
Of swords that your untrustworthy flesh
Trembled. On that night without sequel
You realized you were a coward. …
In the darkness of Iceland the salt
Wind moves the mounting sea. Your home is
surrounded. You have drunk to the dregs
Unforgettable dishonor. On
Your head, your sickly face, falls the sword
As it fell so often in your book.

(SP, 163)

Yet in another, but shorter, version of this biographical piece, Borges mentions the name of Sturluson—famous as historian, archaeologist, builder of hot baths, genealogist, president of an Assembly, poet, double traitor, victim of beheading, and ghost—as the main source for his “Kenningar,” an essay on poetic language published together with an article titled “Metaphor” in his History of Eternity. It should be added that we find a more unabridged biographical note about Sturluson within the frequently quoted “Medieval Germanic Literatures.”

A final poem with an oxymoronic title “The Generous Enemy” is composed of nine elliptical verses, seven of which are subjunctive phrases expressing an eloquent greeting, emitted by Muirchertach, King of Dublin, cheering the exploits of the rival King Magnus Barford;⁴ the final couplet, however, foretells King Magnus's final defeat and demise. The contradictory content of “The Generous Enemy” concurs with its title, and it seems to be a direct rendition of a piece taken from the Anhang zur Heimskringla by Hugo Gering, according to the final note provided by Borges at the poem's conclusion. The peculiarity of this text lies not only in its given form and content, but also in its almost total exclusion from other Borgesian writings such as the “Medieval Germanic Literatures.” It is there that we find a brief mention of it, for it appears insignificantly important on a list of other minor compositions that preceded Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla. There we read:

Another historical work, valuable for the verses and compositions it cites, is called Fagrskinna (Beautiful Skin) because of the elegant binding of one of the two copies which were preserved in the seventeenth century, and then destroyed in a fire. Another similar compilation is called Morkinskinna (Rusty Skin), and includes biographies of Magnus Olafson, who was king of Norway and Denmark; of Harold Hardrada, Harold the Cruel, who fought in Italy, in Sicily and in the Orient; of Magnus Berfoett, Magnus Bare Foot, who fell in ambush in Dublin; and of Sigurd Jorsalafari (Sigurd the Pilgrim, Sigurd the Traveler to Jerusalem), who fought against the Spanish Arabs, and died insane.

(MGL, 150–51)

Ultimately, I suggest that Borges's interest in medieval Germanic literature has numerous causes, but one in particular seems to lie slightly hidden within his autobiographical strata. Living in a world of created doubles (ein doppelgänger), Borges has conceived the character Juan Dahlmann and sets him in a conflict very much like Borges's own self in “Borges and I.” In the poem, too, Borgas-poet-persona undergoes a kind of personality split while yearning to become one with his predecessors. It is important to recall here one of my preliminary citations when Borges recites, “I come back … / To the harsh and work-wrought words / I used in the days of Northumbria and Mercia / Before becoming Haslam or Borges” (SP 139). It is in his Historia de la Eternidad that Borges expresses, in a footnote, a similar affinity. Speaking about Snorri Sturluson's epithet as traitor, he defensively states, “Traitor is a harsh word. Sturluson, perhaps, was merely an available fanatic, a man shockingly torn apart by consecutive and opposite loyalties. On the intellectual order, I know of two examples: that of Francisco Luis Bernárdez, and mine” (Historia de la Eternidad 49). Borges's earlier books of poetry, Fervor of Buenos Aires, Moon Across the Way, and San Martin Copybook, speak of his native Buenos Aires. His The Self and The Other talks about his other Fatherland, that of Northumbria and Mercia. Thus, poetically Borges comes to his very own forking paths choosing for the moment to relive the past of his other. Indeed, the ubiquity of medieval Germanic elements in Borges's poetry mirrors cogently the English side of his ancestry, which has often been interpreted as his other self.

Notes

1. Italics and emphasis added. Also, whenever I quote poetry, I provide the page number(s) rather than the line(s) to facilitate reference to translations.

2. Cf. my article “Borges y las literaturas germánicas medievales en El libro de arena,” Hispanic Journal, II 1 (1980): 79–85.

3. Jorge Luis Borges with María Esther Vázquez, “Medieval Germanic Literatures,” trans. Joseph Tyler (unpublished MS 1985).

4. Magnus III, King of Norway (1093–1103), was also called Magnus the Bare foot Norwegian, Magnus Barford, 24 August: 1103. He conquered the Orkney and the Hebrides, and was killed before Dublin during an invasion of Ireland, The New Cyclopedia of Names, Vol. III, eds. Clarence L. Barnhard, et al. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954) 2575.

Works cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “An Autobiographical Essay.” The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969., Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, with Borges. New York: Bantam, 1971.

———. Dreamtigers. Trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland. Austin: U of Texas P, 1964.

———. Historia de la Eternidad. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1966.

———, and María Esther Vázquez. Literaturas germánicas medievales. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1978.

———. “Medieval Germanic Literatures.” Trans. Joseph Tyler. (Unpublished.)

———. Obra poética. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1967.

———. A Personal Anthology. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove, 1967.

———. Selected Poems, 1923–1967. Trans. Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1972.