Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

those who made it were even aware of it. We don’t know if the pieces that have been preserved were even the first. But something very important takes place, perhaps the most important thing that can take place in poetry: the discovery of a new inflection. Often, when journalists talk about a new poet, they say “a new voice.” Here the phrase would have that meaning exactly: there is a new voice, a new inflection, a new use oflanguage. And this must have been rather difficult, for the Anglo-Saxon language—Old English—was by its very harshness destined for epic poetry, in other words, to celebrate courage and loyalty. This is why, in the pieces of epic poetry we have looked at, what these poets do best is describe battles. As if we can hear the sound of swords clashing, the blow of spears against shields, the tumult and shouts of the battlefield. In the ninth century, there appear what have come to be called the“Anglo-Saxon elegies.” This poetry is not the poetry of the battlefield. These are personal poems. Moreover, solitary poems, poems by men expressing their solitude and their melancholy. And this is something totally new in the ninth century, when poetry was generic, when the poet sang of the triumphs and defeats of his clan, of his king. Here, on the contrary, the poet speaks personally, anticipating the romantic movement, which we will study when we look at English poetry of the eighteenth century. I have speculated—this is my personal speculation, not to be found in any book I know—that this melancholic and personal poetry might have come from the Celtic tradition, that it could be of Celtic origin. It seems improbable, if we think carefully about it, to assume, as is common, that the Saxons, the Anglos, and the Jutes, when they invaded England, slaughtered the entire population. It is more natural to assume that they kept the men as slaves and the women as their concubines. There would be no point in killing the entire population. Moreover, this can be verified in England today: the purely Germanic type, that is, the lineage of people who are tall, blond, or red-haired, belongs to the Northern counties and Scotland. In the south and to the west, where the primitive inhabitants took refuge, there are many people of average height and with brown hair. In Wales, there are a lot of people with black hair. In the north, in the Scottish Highlands, also. In addition, surely, there are many blond people in England who are not of Saxon but rather of Norse origin. This can be seen in Northumberland, Yorkshire, and the Scottish Lowlands. And this mixture of Saxons and Norsemen with Celts could have produced—here we are obviously in the realm of speculation—the so-called Anglo-Saxon elegies. In the last class, I said they are called elegies because of their melancholic tone, for they are not elegies in the sense that they mourn the death of an individual. In the last class, we looked at the beginning of one of the most famous of these elegies, “TheSeafarer,” which starts out with a personal declaration. The poet says that he will sing a true song about himself and will tell of his travels. Then comes an enumeration of all the rigors of the life of a seafaring man. He talks about the storms, the night-watch on the boat. He talks about the cold and the boat crashing against the cliffs. Here is the theme of the sea, which is one of the eternal, constant themes in English poetry. And there are strange images. But not strange in the way that the kennings, which have something fabricated about them, are strange. Calling, for example, the tongue the “oar of the mouth” is not a natural metaphor, in the sense that there is no deep affinity between the two things: here we see the Saxon—the Norseman—man of letters looking for new metaphors. In “The Seafarer,” we have lines such as “
norþan sniwde
,” “it snowed from the north”; and then “
hægl feol on eorþan
,” “hail fell on the earth”; and “
corna caldast
,” “coldest of grains,” or “of seeds.” And it seems strange to compare the ice, the snow, the hail—in short: the cold, death—to seeds, which symbolize life. When we read this we feel that the poet has not, like a scholar, sought a contrast, but rather that he saw the hail, and when he saw it falling, he thought of seeds falling.
    In the first part of the poem, the poet, who is a seafaring man, talks about the hardships of the sea. He talks about the cold, the