Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

1332–1440), English poet and putative author of
Piers Plowman.
5. Stefan George (1868–1933), German poet.
6. Borges includes a translation of this poem in his book
Medieval Germanic Literature
, OCC, 877–78. Bath, called Aquae Sulis by the Romans, is next to the Avon River. The ruins of the thermal baths are a modern archeological and tourist at- traction.
7. The poet’s rhetorical questions, the wind that blows through the rooms, and the shapes of serpents carved into the walls do not in fact belong to the poem “The Ruin,” but rather to a passage of similar themes and tones in “The Wanderer.” Both poems include descriptions of ruins and walls eroded by time.
8. This poem was translated by Borges into Spanish and appears in
Brief Anglo-Saxon Anthology
under the simple title “Deor.”
9. Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy
, Canto III,
Hell
, lines 1–3 and 10.
10. “Beam” in modern English is related to the German word
baum
, which has the same meaning.
11. The
Chronicle of the Kings of Norway
(or
Heimskringla
) was written by Snorri Sturluson at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It consists of sixteen sagas, each corresponding to a sovereign who occupied the throne of Norway between 850 and 1177. As Borges explains, the first page is missing from the first codex of this work. The second page begins with the words
“Kringla Heimsins,”
which means “the round ball of the world.” For this reason the codex was called
Kringla Heimsins
or
Kringla
or
Heimskringla
. Two random words became the title of the work, two words that nonetheless imply the vastness of its scope.” Jorge Luis Borges,
Medieval Germanic Literature
, OCC, 960.
    CLASS 7

1. Bestiaries, also called
Physiologus
, enjoyed enormous popularity during the Middle Ages. They consisted of forty-eight sections, each of which described attributes or habits of beings that were real or imaginary, and served to exemplify Christian virtues, creating biblical allegories about sins or deviations from faith. Bestiaries were translated into many languages and circulated for more than fifteen centuries; all the translations descended from the Greek original, which was supposed to have been written in Alexandria in the second century. The word,
physiologus
, means “naturalist,” and is used as the title of the bestiary, but it actually corresponds to the author or the original source of the book.
2. Borges refers to the Anglo-Saxon poem about the panther in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 679.
3. This is actually the twentieth line in the poem “Gerontion,” which is not in
Four Quartets
, as Borges thought, but rather in the book
Poems
(1920). The stanza reads as follows: “Signs are taken for wonders. ‘We would see a sign!’ / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year / Came Christ the tiger.”
4. “Fastitocalon” is a corruption of the Greek
aspidochelone
, from
aspís
, “shield,” and
chelone
, “turtle.” The word was further corrupted with each successive translation and copy of the bestiary. Borges offers a summary of the poem of the whale on the pages dedicated to Fastitocalon in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 628.
5. Borges analyzes the origin of this legend on the page about “Zaratán” in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 711. There, he also mentions the Anglo-Saxon poem about the whale and translates a fragment of the
Voyage of St. Brendan
.
6. Saint Brendan the Voyager (ca. 486–578) founded several monasteries and churches, the most famous of which is in Clonfert, where he is buried. The work that tells of his legendary voyage to the Promised Land and his encounter with the whale described by Borges is called
Navigatio Sancti Brandani
or
Voyage of St. Brendan.
7. “...or that sea-beast / Leviathan, which God of all his works / Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream / Him, haply, slumbering on the Norway foam...” (John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, Book I.)
8. An imaginary beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. Borges devotes a page to the griffin in his
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 639.
9. Borges included six of his translations of these Anglo-Saxon riddles—about fish, the garlic seller, the swan, the bookmoth, the chalice, the sun, and the moon—in
Medieval Germanic Literature
, OCC, 890–91.
10. See the page about the Sphinx in
Book of Imaginary Beings
, OCC, 627.
11. Robert K. Gordon,
Anglo-Saxon