Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

of the Latin comedy, who is a coward. 5 But, generally speaking, this idea did not exist in antiquity. Heroes boasted of their deeds, and were permitted to do so. In fact, doing this gave them courage. I’d like to recite here some couplets of the
compadritos
[toughs, braggarts] from the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires. I don’t think anybody would think a man was a coward because he said:
Soy del barrio ’e Monserrá
donde relumbra el acero,
lo que digo con el pico,
lo sostengo con el cuero.
    [I am from the Monserrat neighborhood, / where blades abound, / what I say with my lips, / I back up with my hide.]
    or:
Yo soy del barrio del norte,
soy del barrio del Retiro,
yo soy aquel que no miro
con quién tengo que pelear,
y aquí en el milonguear
ninguno se puso a tiro.
    [I’m from the northern neighborhood, / I’m from Retiro, / I never stop to look / at who I have to fight, / and here in the fray / nobody was up to the dare.]
    or:
Hágase a un lao, se lo ruego,
que soy de la Tierre ‘el Fuego.
    [Step aside, if you please, / for I am from Tierra del Fuego.]
    That is, from the neighborhood around the penitentiary.
    In any case, Beowulf had a lot in common with our
compadritos
from Monserrat or Retiro. Beowulf wanted to boast about how brave he was. And no one thought he was a coward. To find a more famous example, we can turn to the
Iliad
, in which the warriors state who they are, and their reputations do not suffer. On the contrary, they are enhanced. It is a necessary prelude to combat, their way to warm up. They could even insult each other, too, and could accuse each other of cowardice.
    In
Beowulf
, after the swimming race and the battle against the sea monsters, everyone goes to bed and falls asleep. This is another poorly wrought episode: they are expecting the ogre’s attack, yet they sleep peacefully. The only one who stays awake is Beowulf, and Beowulf is unarmed, because he knows that no weapon can harm the monster. Moreover, he has confidence in his physical strength, which is extraordinary. The poet tells us that he has in his fist the strength of thirty men.
    Then the monster arrives, circles the castle, and although the door is locked with strong iron bars, he breaks it down, surprises the first sleeping warrior he comes upon, and devours him whole, raw. Also, he devours the warrior’s hands and feet, then rashly approaches Beowulf. And then Beowulf, who has not yet risen, grabs the ogre’s hand and breaks it. And the two begin to fight—a fight others do not participate in—which allows the hero to show off even more. And Beowulf, with only the strength of his hands—imagine we have before us a northern Hercules—pulls off the ogre’s arm and shoulder. As they fight, they shout. This is realistic. For example, when infantrymen charge, they shout. There is a poem byKipling that describes this. So, they are both shouting. The entire palace of Heorot trembles, it is about to collapse, but finally the ogre receives a mortal wound and runs off to die in his swamp. The next day, they celebrate the death of the ogre and hang his arm in the hall as a trophy. There is another banquet, but that night the ogre’s mother, who is a witch and also very strong, comes to recover her dead son’s arm, and she takes it and kills a warrior. Then Beowulf decides to look for the swamp where the ogre lives, and that’s where we get the description of the swamp, one of the classic passages in the poem. Some men want to accompany Beowulf, but he is the hero: it is better for him to perform his feats alone, as Hercules did centuries before. And he sees pieces of flesh, human flesh, possibly the ogre’s, in the swamp. And there is also foam, which seems to be bloody. The hero dives in and swims for a whole day before he reaches the cavern. The cavern is dry; it is illuminated by a supernatural, magical light. And there is the ogre’s mother, horrible, as strong as the ogre himself. Beowulf fights her and is on the verge of being defeated: she is actually stronger than her son. But [Beowulf] manages to grab a sword hanging on the wall. The ogre’s mother is not invulnerable to iron; he kills her with the sword, but the sword melts because the witch’s blood contains some kind of poison. Then, Beowulf takes the ogre’s head and also the hilt of the sword, though not the blade, which has melted. On shore, they are waiting for him anxiously. He rises to the surface with this trophy, and here the poet