Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges Read Free Book Online

by sixty warriors. They are given lodgings in a chamber off the central hall, which has doors on both sides. Then the poem begins with the guards seeing something shining, a glow in the night’s darkness. And then we assume, based on what follows, that there are several speculations about the reason for the glow. “‘The eaves are not burning,’ said the king [Hrothgar], a novice in battle, ‘nor is day dawning, nor is a dragon flying toward us,’”—such an explanation was possible at that time—“‘nor are the eaves of this hall burning: an attack is underway.’” And we can see from the previous lines that the glow they have seen is the glow of the moon “shining through the clouds” and onto the shields and spears of the Frisians who have come to attack them, treacherously.
    The language is extremely direct, and I’d like you to hear the first [lines], so you can hear again the hard sounds of Old English, which is so much better suited to epic poetry than modern English; modern English no longer has open vowels, and the consonant sounds aren’t as hard.
    “
Hornas byrnað naefre?
”
Hornas
here means “eaves”; “
byrnað naefre
” is “never burn” or “are not burning.” “
Hleorrode ða, heaðogeong cyning
” is: “the king, a novice in battle.” “
Ne ðis ne dagað eastan, ne her draca
. . .”––
draca
is “dragon”—“. . .
ne fleogeð, ne her ðisse healle hornas ne byrnað, ac her forð berað
,” and then the king has some kind of vision of what is going to happen next. He is not talking about the present. He says: “The birds are singing.” These are the birds of prey that will swoop down to the battlefield. Then he says, “the wood of battle resounds”—“
guðwudu
,” in other words, “the spear.” “Shield will answer sword,” and then he speaks of the moon that reflects off the armor of the attackers. Then he tells his warriors to awaken, to rise, to think about courage. Many knights adorned with gold—with gold embroidery on their cloaks—rise, strap on their swords, draw them, and advance upon the two doors to defend the hall of Finn.
    The poem is titled Finnsburh, “the castle of Finn.” The word
burh
or
burg
is a word you know, and it means “castle” and has remained in the names of many cities: Edinburgh, “castle of Edin”; Strasbourg, Gothenburg—in the south of Sweden—and the Castilian city of Burgos, which is a Visigoth name. Then we have words like “bourgeois,” someone who lives in a city, and “bourgeoisie.” In French, it gave rise to the word
burgraves
, the counts of the city (the name of a play by Hugo), as well as other words. 2
    The poem, then, names the warriors who come to the defense of the stronghold. And one name in particular stands out: this is Hengest, and the poem says “Hengest himself.” It has been suggested that this Hengest is the same who will later establish the first Germanic kingdom in England. This is plausible because Hengest was a Jute. We surely remember that Jutland is the name for the northern part of Denmark. Before becoming the captain who establishes the first Germanic kingdom in England, Hengest could have fought among fellow Danes. Moreover, if this Hengest were not the same Hengest who began the conquest of England, I don’t see why the author would have mentioned him with such emphasis in these verses. The poet was Anglo-Saxon, and the conquest of England took place in the middle of the fifth century. The poem is, supposedly, from the end of the seventh century. (It could be earlier, for the style is much more direct and has none of those Latinate inversions and complicated kennings—the kinds of metaphors in
Beowulf
.) So, an English audience would be interested in knowing that this protagonist was one of the founders of the Saxon kingdoms of England.
    Then the poet turns his attention to those who are treacherously attacking the Danes. And among them is Garulf, son of Queen Hildeburh and