Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Christ. And this poem, full of deep and true mystic sentiment, hearkens back to ancient Germanic sentiment. Then, when Christ speaks, he is called “that young hero who was All-Powerful God,” “
þa geong hæleð, þæt wæs god ælmihtig
.” Then they nail Christ to the cross with dark nails, “
mid deorcan næglum
.” And the cross trembles when it feels Christ’s embrace. It is as if the cross were Christ’s woman, his wife; the cross shares the pain of the crucified God. Then they raise it up with Christ, who is dying. And then for the first time in the poem—for until now it uses the word
beam
, like the modern English word, which meant tree; in other words, the tree was a tree until the moment the young man embraced it, and the two trembled as in a nuptial embrace—then the tree says: “
Rod wæs ic aræred
.” 10 “[As a] cross was I raised.” The tree was not a cross until that moment. Then the cross describes how the Earth goes dark, how the sea trembles, how the veil of the temple is torn. The cross is identified with Christ. Then it describes the sadness of the universe when Christ dies; and then the apostles arrive to bury Christ. And the cross calls them “the sad apostles of evening.” We don’t know if the poet was at all conscious of how well the words “sadness” and “evening” go together. It’s possible this sentiment was new at that time. The fact is, they buried Christ, and from then on the poem becomes diluted—as happens with almost all the Anglo-Saxonelegies, and as happened later with many passages in the Spanish picaresque novels—it becomes diluted with moral considerations. The cross says that on the day of the Final Judgment, those who believe in it, those who know how to repent, will be saved. In other words, the poet forgets his splendid personal invention of creating a story told by the cross of the Passion of Christ, and the fact that the cross considers Christ’s pain as well.
    There are several Anglo-Saxon elegies. I think the most important are “TheSeafarer”—in which the horror of and fascination for the sea coexist—and this extraordinary “Vision of the Cross,” in which the cross speaks as if it were a living being. There are other Christian poems that are derived from episodes of the Bible. For example,“Judith,” who kills Holofernes. We have a poem derived from Exodus, and this poem has a feature that is not essentially poetic, but is interesting because it shows us how far away the Saxons were from the Bible. The poet has to describe the Israelites being pursued by the Egyptians as they cross the Red Sea. He has to describe the sea that parts to allow them to pass, then drowns the Egyptians. The poet doesn’t really know how to describe the Israelites. So, since they are crossing the sea, and he has to use words to describe them as seafarers, he uses a word that is most unexpected for us today. When speaking about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea, he calls them“Vikings.” Naturally, for him the ideas of “seafarer” and “Viking” were closely linked.
    We are now very close to the end of the Saxons. England has already been invaded by the Norsemen, and would soon be invaded by the Normans. (In the next class, we will look at the tragic end of the Saxon reign in England.) The Saxons will remain in England, and they will remain there as vassals, just as the Britons were vassals of the Saxons. The Norsemen were for the Saxons what the Saxons were for the Britons, that is, pirates and then overlords. The history of this conquest has been preserved for us in the
History of theKings of Norway
, by Snorri Sturluson, and in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. 11 And before talking about what happened to the English language, I want to spend some time in the next class talking about what took place in the year 1066, the year of the Battle of Hastings. Then we will see how the language changes, what happens to the English language and to its literature.

CLASS 7

    THE TWO BOOKS WRITTEN BY GOD. THE ANGLO-SAXON BESTIARY. RIDDLES. "THE GRAVE." THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS.

    FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 1966
    Throughout the Middle Ages, the idea held sway that God had written two books. One of these books, needless to say, was sacred scripture—the Bible—dictated to various people at various times by the Holy Spirit. The other book was the Universe, and all its creatures. It was said repeatedly that the duty of every Christian was to study both books, the