Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

many Norse words, and there is a certain Jarl who is spoken of, an earl of Orkney . . . “traveler to Jerusalem,” they called him. 11 And there were also reports about another Viking who sacked a city in Italy, erroneously thinking it was Rome, then he set it on fire to have the honor of being the first Norseman to set fire to Rome. 12 It turned out to be a tiny port town of no importance, but he had his moment of glory, his military joy. They also sacked cities in North Africa. In the Norse language, there’s a word,
Serkland
, which means “land of Saracens,” and that word refers indistinctly to Portugal, Morocco, and Algeria—for the Moors lived there. All of that was the land of the Saracens. And farther south is what the Norse historians called
Blaland
, “blue land,” “land of blue men,” or rather Negroes, because they mixed the colors up a little. Besides one word,
sölr
, which means “yellowed” and is used to describe fallow fields and the sea, they have no colors. The snow is often spoken of, but they never say the snow is white. Blood is spoken of, but they never say it is red. They talk about the fields, but they never say they are green. We don’t know if this is the result of some kind of colorblindness or if it was simply a poetic convention. The Homeric Greeks said “the color of wine.” But we don’t know what color wine was for the Greeks; they don’t talk about colors, either. On the other hand, Celtic poetry that is contemporaneous or prior to Germanic poetry, contains an abundance of colors—it’s full of colors. There, every time a woman is mentioned, they speak about her white body, her hair the color of gold or fire, her red lips. They also talk about the green fields, and specify the colors of fruits, etcetera. In other words, the Celts lived in a visual world; the Norse did not.
    And now, as we are discussing epic poetry, let’s take a look at some much later epic compositions that are still considered to be from the ninth century. First of all, we will look at the ode, the “Battle of Brunanburh,” written at the beginning of the tenth century. It appears in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. 13 There are several versions, and those of you who know English can look at a really splendid translation of it among the works ofTennyson. That is, it is readily available. Tennyson did not know Anglo-Saxon, but one of his sons studied a primitive form of English and published a prose translation of the work in a specialized magazine. This translation interested the father, to whom the son surely explained the rules of Anglo-Saxon meter. He was told that it was based on alliteration, not rhyme, and that the number of syllables in each line was irregular, so Tennyson, a poet who was quite hooked on Virgil, tried for once in his life, and with unquestionable success, this experiment that had never been tried in any language, which was to write in modern English an almost literal translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, and using Anglo-Saxon meter. 14 The truth is, Tennyson stretches the rules of this meter slightly. For example, there are more alliterations and one better alliteration in Tennyson’s version than in the original poem. In any case, his version deserves to be read. In any edition of Tennyson’s poems you will find the“Battle of Brunanburh.” 15 And before we talk about this ode, we should talk about the battle. According to the poem, it was one of the longest and bloodiest waged in England during the Middle Ages, for it began at dawn and lasted the entire day until dusk, which is very long for a battle in the Middle Ages. 16 Think of our famous battle of Junín, which lasted three-quarters of an hour; not a single shot was fired, and the entire battle was waged with sabers and spears. 17 We can see that a whole day for a battle in the Middle Ages meant it was very long, analogous to the long battles of the Civil War in the United States, the bloodiest of the nineteenth century, and the long battles of the First and Second World Wars.
    The circumstances of the battle are quite curious. There is an alliance, which would at first have seemed invincible, between Constantine, the king of Scotland—Scotland was an independent kingdom at the time—and his son-in-law Olaf—in this poem he is called Anlaf—the Danish king of Dublin. They fought against the Saxons of Wessex. (Wessex means “land of the western Saxons.”) Also fighting were five British—in other words,