Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

be a very idiosyncratic journey, guided by the professor’s personal preferences. The thread that unites these lectures is outright literary enjoyment, the affection with which Borges treats each of these works, and his clear intention to share his enthusiasm for every author and period studied.
    Among these preferences, there is one that occupies a prominent place and to which the professor dedicates nothing less than seven classes, more than a quarter of the syllabus: the language and literature of Anglo-Saxon England. The extent of this emphasis and focus, highly infrequent for any course on English literature, is even odder considering that the course was taught in a Spanish-speaking country. Borges dedicates one class to kennings, two to the study of
Beowulf
, and another few to the Anglo-Saxon bestiary, the war poems of Maldon and Brunanburh, the “Dream of the Rood,” and “The Grave.” One inevitably wonders why this emphasis on the language and literature of early medieval England. What did Borges see in this literature? What did the study of Old English represent to him? The answers to these questions weave in and out of fiction and reality, Borges’s personal history, and his philosophical and literary worldview. In order to arrive at those answers, we should begin by briefly analyzing the history of the English language, traditionally divided into three stages:
    Old English or Anglo-Saxon: fifth century to ca. 1066
    Middle English: ca. 1066–1500
    Modern English: 1500 to the present
    The earliest form, Old English, retained many of the archaic characteristics of Common Germanic. Its considerably complex grammar featured three genders (masculine nouns such as
se eorl
, “the man” or
se hring
, “the ring”; neuters such as
þæt hus
, “the house,” or
þæt boc
“the book”; and feminines such as
seo sunne
, “the sun,” or
seo guð
“the battle”); three numbers in the pronouns (singular first person
ic
, first person plural “we,” first personal double
wit
, “we two”); an elaborate system of verb conjugations; and numerous declensional paradigms, with five cases of inflection for articles, nouns, and adjectives. The vocabulary was, at first, almost wholly Germanic, just barely influenced by a handful of Latin and a smattering of Celtic loanwords. Old English is thus mostly incomprehensible to speakers of Modern English, who must study it as if it were a foreign language. Herewith an example, from the entry for the year 793 from the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
:
Her wæron reðe forebecna cumene ofer Norðhymbra land, and þæt folc earmlic bregdon, þæt wæron ormete ligræscas, and fyrenne dracan wæron gesewene on þam lifte fleogende. Þam tacnum sona fyligde mycel hunger, and litel æfter þam, þæs ilcan geares on vi Idus Ianuarii, earmlice heþenra manna hergung adilegode Godes cyrican in Lindisfarnaee þurh hreaflac ond mansliht.
    That Old English was the remote ancestor of the English language, so beloved of our writer, is sufficient explanation to justify his interest in studying it: the compositions Professor Borges analyzes in his lectures are among the first writings in a language we could call English. 3 But the Anglo-Saxon tongue has two features that Borges found irresistibly attractive. In the first place, Old English held, for him, a personal significance: it was none other than the language spoken by his remote paternal ancestors, the side of the family from which he had inherited his literary vocation and his vast erudition. His British grandmother, Frances Haslam, was born in Staffordshire. “It may be no more than a romantic superstition of mine,” Borges wrote in his
Autobiografía
, “but the fact that the Haslams lived in Northumbria and Mercia—or, as they are today called, Northumberland and the Midlands—links me with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past.”
    In his lecture “Blindness,” in
Seven Nights
, Borges states: “I was a professor of English Literature at our university. What could I do to teach this almost infinite literature, this literature that exceeds the length of the life of a man or even a generation? . . . Some students came to see me after they had taken and passed their exam. . . . I told these young women (there were nine or ten of them): ‘I have an idea, now that you have passed and I have fulfilled my duty as your professor. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we took up the study of a language and a literature that we barely