Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

invents an incidental detail: the giant’s head is so heavy that two men are needed to carry it. Then Beowulf, covered in blood, wounded and triumphant, returns to Hrothgar’s palace, where Hrothgar thanks him for what he has done and showers him with gifts—accepting these gifts is not dishonorable—and Beowulf returns to his own kingdom, in the south of Sweden.
    Now, Beowulf was not actually Swedish. The Swedes belonged to a different tribe. The Geats were enemies of the Swedes. . . . Well, in this way, five years passed . . . excuse me, fifty years, “fifty winters,” the poet says. The Saxons counted time by winters because of the harshness of the climate. In the meantime, Beowulf performs many military feats, but the poet mentions them only in passing because he is interested only in Beowulf’s first and last feat. It has been said that one of the aims of the poem was to portray an exemplary prince, according to the concept of the time. That is, one who is strong—supernaturally strong, for he has the strength of thirty men—as well as a slayer of monsters who are a danger to everyone—again this coincides with Hercules—and also just. Because when he dies at the end of the poem, he invokes God and says that he never dealt out death to a single relative in the great banquet hall. And this is considered to be a rather extraordinary fact, and it probably was at the time.
    Fifty years pass, fifty years of victories, and, finally, a triumphant peace, and then another character appears, a dragon who has lived for time immemorial in a cave guarding treasures. The idea of the dragon as a guardian of treasures is common in ancient Germanic myth. We remember the case of Sigurd, or Siegfried, and the dragon; and there was also the griffin in Pliny’s
Natural History
, who guards mountains of gold and fights against the one-eyed Arimaspians. 6 The idea of the dragon as the guardian of treasures is so common that in Norse poetry one of the most common metaphors for gold—immediately understood by everybody—was “the dragon’s bed.” That is, people imagined the gold, and the dragon lying on top of it, sleeping on it in order to guard it better. The poet tells us about an escaped slave who enters the cave when the dragon is asleep and steals a golden pitcher. Then the slave disappears from the fable. The following day, the dragon awakes, notices that the golden pitcher is gone, and leaves his cave, thinking he must take revenge for the theft. Then we see a human trait: before destroying the Geats’ land, he goes back into the cave and carefully looks through everything, just to make sure the pitcher isn’t there somewhere. But he doesn’t find it, so he terrorizes the kingdom of the Geats, just as the ogre, half a century before, had done in Denmark. Then the news of what is happening reaches old Beowulf, and again he decides to fight a monster. And if we want to use our imaginations a little, we can see this as a story about a man pursued by a fate: to fight a monster and die. The dragon is, in some way—and whether or not it is understood this way by the poet, it really shouldn’t matter to us because an author’s intentions are less important than the success of his execution—the dragon is yet another encounter with his fate. That is, the dragon is again the ogre of Denmark. And the king goes there with his men, who want to help him, but he says no, he’ll manage on his own as he did fifty years before with the ogre and the ogre’s mother. He reaches the mouth of the cave of the dragon, who has been described with many metaphors—he has been called “spotted horror of dusk” and “guardian of gold”—and Beowulfchallenges him. The dragon emerges, and they engage in battle. There is a rather bloody description of the battle; Beowulf slays the dragon, but the dragon breathes fire, and Beowulf knows that this fire will poison him. And there is a servant named Wiglaf, the only one who has accompanied him there; and the king says that he is going to offer his soul to the Lord—this paragraph is Christian—and he knows he will be going to heaven because his life has been righteous, and he gives instructions for his funeral. The funeral is not like the one we saw earlier: there will be no funeral ship. He tells them to erect a pyre and pile it high with helmets, shields, and shining armor—“
Helmum behongen, hildebordum, beorhtum byrnum, swa he bena wæs
.”
Helmum behongen
means