Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Sigurd accompanies his friend Gunnar, and they come to the wall, and Gunnar does not dare penetrate it. So Sigurd, using magic, disguises himself as Gunnar. He is going to help his friend; he bandages his horse’s eyes, and forces him to go through the wall of fire. He reaches the palace, and there is Brynhild, sleeping. He kisses her, wakes her up, and tells her that he is the hero destined to perform this feat. She falls in love with him and gives him her ring. He spends three nights with her, but not wanting to be disloyal to his friend, he places his sword between them. She asks why he is doing this, and he answers that if he didn’t, they would both suffer misfortune. This episode of the sword placed between a man and a woman can be found in one of the stories of
A Thousand and One Nights
.
    After spending three nights together, he bids her farewell. It is understood that he will come back to get her. He tells her his name is Gunnar, because he does not want to betray his friend. And she gives him her ring, and then she marries Gunnar, who takes her to his kingdom. Sigurd has used magic, and he forgets what has happened for a long time and marries Gunnar’s sister, who is named Gudrun; but there is a rivalry between Brynhild and Gudrun. Then Gudrun learns the truth about the story: Brynhild tells her that her husband is the most noble king, for he passed through the wall of fire to win her, and she shows her the ring she gave to Sigurd. Brynhild then understands the deceit. At that moment, Brynhild realizes that she is not in love with Gunnar, that she is in love with the man who passed through the wall of fire, and that man is Sigurd. And she also knows that there is a spot on Sigurd’s back where he is vulnerable, so she employs a third person to kill Sigurd. When she hears him shout as he is being killed, she laughs with a cruel laugh. Once Sigurd is dead, she understands that she has killed the man she loves, and she calls her husband and tells him to raise a high funeral pyre. Then she mortally wounds herself and asks to be laid next to Sigurd, with the sword between them, like before. It is as if she wanted to return to the past.
    She says that when Sigurd dies, his soul will rise to Odin’s paradise. This paradise is lit by swords. She says that she will follow him to this paradise where “we will lie together and there will be no sword between us.” The story continues, we see the death of Atli, and the poem concludes with Gudrun’s revenge. 5 Then the treasure of the Nibelungs is lost again, which is what provoked this whole tragic story.
    It was somewhat ambitious to think about all this in the nineteenth century. Some contemporary critics say that
Sigurd
is one of the principle works of the nineteenth century. But the truth is that for some reason that we don’t know, the epic poem in verse is, at times, quite distant from our literary demands. Morris’s work garnered what the French call a
succès d’estime
. The defect Morris suffered from is slowness: the descriptions of battles, the death of the dragon, they are a bit languid. After the death of Brynhild, the poem falls off. With this, let us leave Morris’s work.
    We are now going to talk about Robert Louis Stevenson. He was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and died in 1894. His life was tragic, because he lived trying to escape from tuberculosis, which was an incurable illness. This took him from Edinburgh to London, from London to France, from France to the United States, and he died on an island in the Pacific. Stevenson carried out a vast literary labor. His works fill twelve or fourteen volumes. He wrote, among many other things, a famous book for children,
Treasure Island
. 6 He also wrote fables, a detective novel,
TheWrecker.
7 People think of Stevenson as the author of
Treasure Island
, a work for children, and they hold him in less regard. They forget that he was an admirable poet, and that he is one of the masters of English prose.
    Stevenson’s parents and grandparents were lighthouse engineers, and we find among Stevenson’s work a quite technical treatise on the construction of lighthouses. 8 He has a poem in which he seems to consider that his work as a writer—work that made the Stevenson family name famous—was in some way inferior to that work of his parents and grandparents. In that poem he speaks of “the towers and lamps we lit.” 9 It’s a little like our ownLugones, when in that poem dedicated to his elders he