Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

erroneous sense of Anglo-Saxon.” At the time Sweet wrote those words, English philology enjoyed an antiquarian prestige. The term “Old English” was meant to evoke—for patriotic as well as philological reasons—a cultural and linguistic continuum from the early Middle Ages to the current modern form of the English language.
10.
Chanson de Roland
, the most well-known of all the French
chansons de geste
, was written around the year 1100. It recounts the Battle of Roncesvalles in the year 778 and the feats of Roland, a knight of Charlamagne’s court.
Nibelungenlied
or
The Song of the Nibelungs
is an epic poem written in approximately 1200 in High German. Many of the facts and stories recounted in the poem, however, took place much earlier and appear in the
Völsungasaga
and the songs of the
Poetic Edda
or
Elder Edda
of Old Norse literature. Richard Wagner composed his
Ring Cycle
based on those three sources. Borges analyzed and translated parts of
The Song of the Nibelungs
in
Medieval Germanic Literature
, OCC, 910–15.
    CLASS 2

1. This is the first of three undated classes. Borges held classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The first class was held on Friday, October 14, and the third on Monday, October 17. Classes were not held on Sundays. It is likely this class was held on Saturday, October 15, perhaps to make up for the class not held on Wednesday, October 12, which perhaps was a holiday, or on Wednesday, October 19, which had been cancelled.
2. Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), Spanish Baroque lyric poet.
3. See the section on the Norns in the
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 674.
4. William Paton Ker (1855–1923), British scholar and writer, born in Glasgow. He taught at Cardiff, at University College London, and in 1920 was named professor at Oxford University. His works include
Epic and Romance
(1897),
The Dark Ages
(1904), and
The Art of Poetry
(1923).
5. In his
Medieval Germanic Literature
, Borges asserts that the
geatas
or Geats were “a nation in the south of Sweden, which some have identified with the Jutes and others with the Goths.” Friedrich Klaeber, in his edition of
Beowulf
, explains that the identity of the Geats “has been the subject of a prolonged controversy, which has manifold aspects: linguistic, geographic, historic, and literary. Grundtvig assigns the Geats to the island Gotland (or, for a second choice, Bornholm); Kemble assigned them to Angeln, Schleswig; Haigh (as a matter of course) to North England. But the only peoples who have been actually admitted as rival claimants to the title are the Jutes in the northern part of the Jutish peninsula, and those called in Old Norse
guatar
, in Old Swedish
gøtar
, i.e. the inhabitants of Västergötland and Östergötland, south of the great Swedish lakes. Phonetically, OE geatas answers precisely to ON
gautar
.” Friedrich Klaeber,
Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg
, (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co., 1922) p. XLVI.
6. The fragment about Scyld Scefing can be found translated into Spanish by Borges in his
Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology
, under the title
“Fragmento de la gesta de Beowulf.”
7. By Percival Christopher Wren (1875–1941), published in 1924.
    CLASS 3

1. In fact,
fus
, which means “frozen.”
Ond
means “and” in modern English.
2. See Class 2, note 4.
3. When the monks in Anglo-Saxon England began to write in Old English, they did so using the Latin alphabet. They had to deal, however, with two consonant sounds that had no corollary in Latin. These are the interdental consonants that in modern English are written with th (for both the unvoiced consonant in “thin” and the voiced consonant of “this”). To represent those two sounds, scribes added two letters: they borrowed “thorn,” þ, from the Runic alphabet, and invented a new letter “eth,” ð, transformed from the Latin “d.” In Old English each of these two letters was used to represent both the unvoiced and the voiced consonants; they were interchangeable. In Late Old English, scribes tended to separate their use, writing þ at the beginning and s in all other positions. The letter ð was no longer used in Middle English; þ continued until the sixteenth century. Borges’s explanation shows that he remembers the name of the king in its original spelling (using the letter þ: Hroþgar), but he wanted to explain to his students how to write it using the letters they knew.
4. It is clear that here Borges gave several examples of the phonetic