Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

differences.
5. A character in the comedic plays of Plautus and Terence who bragged about his great feats in battle.
6. The Arimaspians are “men famous for having only one eye in the middle of their forehead. They live in perpetual war against the griffins, a species of winged monster, in order to steal from them the gold they extract from the bowels of the earth and that they defend with no less covetousness than the Arimaspians use to steal it from them.” Pliny,
Natural History
, VII, 2. This is quoted by Borges on the page he dedicates to one-eyed creatures in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 666.
7. Borges is referring to Jordanes’s
De origine actibusque Getarum
. Also known as
Getica
, it was written in the middle of the sixth century and based on a much more extensive work by Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, which has been lost. The
Getica
preserves the legends the Goths told of their own Scandinavian origins; it is also a particularly valuable source of information on the Hun peoples. The work includes a detailed description of Attila’s funeral, which Borges compares to Beowulf’s.
8. The Finnsburh Fragment was translated into Spanish by Borges and published in his
Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology.
9. Ulfilas or Wulfilas, “the wolf cub” (ca. 311–83), Gothic bishop. Preached Arianism, a theological doctrine that denied the divinity of Christ and the consubstantiality of the Trinity. He is credited with the invention of the Gothic alphabet, which he used to produce the first translation of the Bible into a Germanic language. Philostorgus, the historian, as well as Socrates Scholasticus, the Byzantine, confirm that he translated the entire Bible; Philostorgus says that Ulfilas skipped the
Book of Kings
in order to avoid instigating the warrior nature of the Gothic tribes. Much of the material translated by Ulfilas, however, has been lost, and what has survived has reached us in fragments. The most important is the so-called
Codex Argenteus
, written in gold and silver lettering on purple parchment, preserved today in the library of the University of Uppsala in Sweden. Ulfilas worked as a missionary from the time of his consecration, around the year 341, until his death.
John Wycliff (ca. 1330–84), English theologian and philosopher, a forerunner of ecclesiastic reform. He believed the Church should give up its material possessions. Wycliff rebelled against papal authority and was opposed to the ecclesiastical magisterium. He maintained that the Bible was the only legitimate authority and initiated the first complete translation of the Bible into English.
10. Francis Palgrave (1788–1861), historian and founder of the Public Records Office. His works include
A History of England, The History of Normandy and England, and Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages: the Merchant and the Friar.
    CLASS 4

1. Hrothgar’s minstrel recites this story in
Beowulf
, lines 1063–59.
2.
Les Burgraves
was written by Victor Hugo around 1843.
3. The
Völsungasaga
is one of the
fornaldarsögur
or “sagas of ancient times.” Borges gives a summary of this saga in class 24, when he analyzes
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung
, by William Morris.
4. He is referring to Olaf Tryggvason (ca. 964–1000), who was king of Norway from around 995 until his death. The saga carrying his name belongs to the
Heimskringla
.
5. In Old English, as in Modern English, there were three third-person singular pronouns:
he
(written the same as in Modern English),
hit
(neuter), and
heo
(feminine). The plural pronoun was
hi
or
hie
for all three genders. These were replaced by “they,” “theirs,” and “them,” all of Norse origin.
6. Borges tells other anecdotes from this trip in his
Autobiografia.
7. Cnut the Great (ca. 985–1035), king of Denmark, England, Sweden, and Norway.
8. The Vikings’ voyages to lands that seem to be the east coast of North America are described in the
Saga of the Greenlanders
and the
Saga of Erik the Red
. At the beginning of the 1960s, the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad discovered a Viking settlement in L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, Canada. Antón and Pedro Casariego Córdoba [the Spanish editors and translators] write that there were “eight houses, one of them large ... several rusty needles, a piece of a Nordic-type bone needle, a lamp made of stone of the same type as those in medieval Iceland, and a small ironmonger shop with a stone anvil, an oven for extracting iron