Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

are necessarily more complex than the men of the Middle Ages, who were men well versed in theology and theological subtleties. We have surely gained a lot, but it is also possible that we have lost something.
    This, then, is one of the elegies. There is another one, “TheWanderer.” Here the theme is one that surely had social importance in the Middle Ages, of the man who has lost his protector—his lord—in battle, and is looking for another. The man has been left outside society. This is very important in a stratified society like that of the Middle Ages. A man who lost his protector was left alone, and it is natural that he would lament his misfortune. The poem begins by speaking about the lonely man—the man who seeks the protection of a lord and who has “sorrow and longing as companions”—and about exile as “cold as winter.” “Destiny has been fulfilled,” it then says. Here, we can think about the general context of life, but also the particular case of a man who finds no support. He says his friends have died in battle, his lord has died, and he is alone. This is another famous elegy.
    Then we have one that is titled“The Ruin,” which takes place in the city of Bath, where there are still ruins of the great Roman baths, which I have seen. 6 And those constructions themselves must have seemed prodigious to the poor Saxons, who at first knew only how to build houses out of wood. I already said that the Roman cities and roads were much too complex for those invaders who arrived from Denmark, the Low Countries, the mouth of the Rhine, and for whom a city, a street—a street where there were houses next to each other—was something mysterious and incomprehensible. The poem begins by saying, “Marvelous, prodigious is the carved stone of this wall, laid waste by fate,” “
wyrde gebræcon
.” Then it talks about how the city was destroyed, then about the water that flows out of the thermal fountains, and the poet imagines the parties that must have taken place in these streets, and wonders: “Where is the horse? Where is the rider? Where the givers of gold?”—the kings. And he imagines them with shining armor, he imagines them drunk on wine, haughty, shining with gold, and he wonders what happened to those generations. Then he sees the crumbling walls, the wind blowing through the rooms. Little is left of the adornments. He sees walls carved with snakes, and all of this fills him with melancholy. 7 And since I’ve used the word “melancholy,” I want to mention that this word has had a very curious fate. “Melancholy” means “black humors,” and currently the word “melancholy” is a sad word for us. A long time ago, melancholy meant “humor,” or physical bile, that when predominant, caused a melancholic temperament.
    Now, we will never know if these English poets, possibly of Celtic origin, realized what an extraordinary, revolutionary thing they were doing. It’s very possible they didn’t. I don’t think there were literary schools at that time. I think they wrote these verses because they felt them, and that they didn’t know they were doing something so extraordinary: how they were forcing an iron language, an epic language, to say something for which that language had not been forged—to express sadness and personal loneliness. But they managed to do it.
    We also have a poem, possibly somewhat prior, called“Deor’s Lament.” 8 All we know about Deor is that he was a poet in a German court, in Prussia, who lost the king’s favor and was replaced by another bard. The king took away the lands he had given him. Deor found himself alone and was then imagined as a dramatic character by a poet in England whose name has been lost. In the poem, Deor consoles himself by thinking about past misfortunes. He thinks about Welund—called
Völund
in Norse poetry and
Wieland
in Germany—who was a warrior. And this warrior was taken prisoner—he was a kind of northern Daedalus—and he constructed wings out of swan feathers and escaped by flying out of his prison cell, like Daedelus; but not before he raped the king’s daughter. The poem begins by saying, “As for Welund, he knew exile among snakes.” It is possible that these snakes were not real; it’s possible the snakes were a metaphor for the swords he forged . . . “
Welund him be wurman wræces cunnade
,” and then this “determined man, he knew exile,” and it also says, “exile as cold as winter.” Now