Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

conflict will be resolved. This practice was so common that one of the metaphors for the princess used in the Saxon poem is “peace-weaver,” not because she was particularly peaceful but because she served to weave peace between neighboring, rival nations. Hildeburh marries the king of the Frisians and then her brother comes to visit her, arriving at court with sixty warriors. They are received hospitably and given lodgings in rooms that surround a central hall with two doors. Identical, let’s say, to Hrothgar’s palace. But at night, the Frisians attack. The Danes defend themselves and fight for several days, during which the princess of Denmark’s brother kills his nephew. Finally, the Frisians realize that they are no match for the Danes. Both Anglo-Saxon poems express true sympathy for the Danes and for the Geats, that is, for the Norsemen. After a few days, when [the Frisians] realize that they can no longer fight, that they are unable to defeat them [the Danes], they propose a truce, which the princess’s brother accepts. He waits for the winter to be over to set sail—because during the winter, the sea was obstructed by ice—then he returns to his country. There he assembles a force larger than the one with sixty warriors that previously accompanied him. He returns, attacks the Frisians, kills the king, and carries his sister, the princess, back with him to his country.
    Now, if this poem existed in its entirety—and we have to assume that it once did—we would have the possibility of a tragic conflict, because we would have the story of the princess whose son dies by the hand of his uncle. In other words, the poet would have more opportunity for pathos than in
Beowulf
, which simply recounts two brave feats, neither credible to us, against an ogre and a dragon. In the next class we are going to examine—and we can examine it in great detail—the Finnsburh Fragment. We’ll leave out the beginning of the fragment, because I’ve already told it. We will start from the moment the Danes realize that the Frisians have forcibly entered their rooms and are going to attack them, and we will continue until the Frisians realize they are no match for the Danes and that they have been defeated by them. We are going to analyze it almost line by line. There are about sixty lines. You will see how direct the language is, so different from the pompous language of
Beowulf
. Maybe its author was a man of action. In the case of
Beowulf
, on the other hand, we can imagine the author as a monk, from Northumbria, in the north of England, a reader of Virgil, who set himself the task, quite audacious at that time, to write a Germanic epic poem. And this brings us to a small problem, which is this: why is it that in the Germanic nations—and here I am thinking of Ulfilas, I am thinking of the Saxons, I am thinking later of Wycliff, and of England in the sixteenth century, of Luther—why were there translations of theBible in the Germanic nations before the Latin nations? 9
    There is a Germanist of Jewish origin,Palgrave, who had an answer, and the answer is this: the Bible that was read in the Middle Ages was the
Latin Vulgate Bible
, that is, it was a Latin text. 10 Now, if anyone would have thought of translating the Bible into Provençal or Italian or Spanish—these languages are too similar to Latin for the translation not to run the risk of seeming like a parody of the original. On the other hand, the Germanic languages are so totally different from Latin that the translation could be undertaken without running that risk. What I mean is, in the Middle Ages, those who spoke Provençal or Spanish or Italian knew that they were speaking a language that was a variant or a corruption of Latin. So it would have seemed irreverent to go from Latin to Provençal. On the other hand, the Germanic languages were totally different. [Translations of the Bible] that were undertaken for people who knew no Latin did not run any risks. Now, maybe we can apply this to
Beowulf
. Why was
Beowulf
the first epic poem written in avernacular language? Because that vernacular language was profoundly different from Latin, so that nobody reading
Beowulf
could think that they were reading a parody of the
Aeneid
. On the other hand, quite a lot of time had to pass for the Romance-language minstrels to have the courage to try epic poetry in their own language.
    In the next class, then, we will look at the Finnsburh Fragment, and at a much