Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

and he will be forgotten and will die like all kings and all men, he must give them something. It is a way of showing his superiority. He is a king. He gives one of them, the Breton, a horn, and he says, “So that you will remember this morning. And you, Norwegian, I give you this ring, so you will remember me, for I am of Odin’s blood.” 5 Because, as you will remember, the kings of England believed they were descended from Odin.
    Then they take leave of the king and start on their journey. The journey lasts many years. The seafarers land on marvelous islands, but they age. Then they come to an unknown city on an island, where they remain till the end of their days. That island is inhabited by Greeks who have preserved the cult of the old gods. The father of the Norwegian knows Greek because he was a member of the Scandinavian guard of the Byzantine emperor—that famous guard of the Byzantine emperors, made up of Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes that many Saxons joined after the Norman invasion of England in the year 1066. 6 It is strange to think that familiar languages were spoken in the streets of Constantinople. In the streets of Constantinople, ancient Danish was spoken and, around the middle of the eleventh century, Anglo-Saxon.
    The city on the island is governed by Greeks. They warmly welcome the travelers, and here we have the framework Morris needed: the elders of the city suggest to the seafarers that they should all meet twice a month and tell each other stories. The stories the islanders tell are all Greek myths. There are the stories of Eros, of Perseus, all taken from Greek mythology. And the others tell stories of different origins, among them anIcelandic story that Morris translated into English. It is called “The Lovers of Gudrun.” There is an Arabic story, a story the father of the Norwegian told him, taken from
A Thousand and One Nights
. There are other Scandinavian and Persian stories. In this way, in a year, twenty-four stories are told. Morris took his meter fromChaucer. There are also, as in Chaucer, intervals between the twelve stories of the seafarers and the twelve stories of the Greeks. In these intervals, the changes of the seasons are described, and by the use of a convention—Morris was not looking for realism, of course—the landscapes described are the landscapes of England in the spring, summer, fall, and winter.
    At the end, the poet speaks, and the poet says that although he has told these stories, they are not his, but that he has re-created them for his time and that, probably, others will tell them after him as they were told before him. Then he says that he cannot sing about heaven or hell—he was probably thinking about Dante when he said that—that he cannot make death seem like a trivial thing, that he cannot stop the passage of time, that it will sweep him away as it will sweep away the readers. 7 We can see he has no faith in the next world. He says that he is simply “
el ocioso cantor de un día vacio
.” [“The idle singer on an empty day.”] Then he speaks to his book, and he tells the book that if it should ever findChaucer, that it should greet him and in his name say:
“¡Oh, tú, grande de lengua y de corazón!
” [“O thou great of heart and tongue . . . ”]. 8 And so the book ends on a melancholy note.
    This book is full of fantastical inventions. There is a witches’ Sabbath, for example, and there is the king of the demons, who rides on a horse of sculpted and ever-changing fire, so that at every moment the features of the king and his horse have a precise shape, but this shape lasts only an instant. 9
    Before publishing this book, Morris published another long poem titled
The Life and Death of Jason
. 10 I’m convinced it must have originally been one of the Greek stories of
The Earthly Paradise
, but the story was so long Morris published it separately. One of the most notable features of this poem that came before
The Earthly Paradise
is that the centaurs of Thessaly appear on the first pages. It seems impossible to us that a poet of the nineteenth century would talk about centaurs, because we and he don’t believe in centaurs.
    It is extraordinary to see how Morris prepares the way for the centaur. First he talks about the forest of Thessaly, then he talks about the lions and wolves of this forest, and then he tells us that the quick-eyed centaurs shoot their arrows there. 11 He begins with the part of the body where life is most