Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

immensity of the whale seems to suggest or emphasize the immensity of the whale’s environment, the sea. And the poem says that the whale is sleeping or pretending to sleep, and the sailors mistake it for an island and disembark upon it. The whale dives down and devours them. Here the whale becomes a symbol of hell. Now, maybe we can find this idea of sailors mistaking a whale for an island in Irish legend. 5 I recall an engraving that depicts a whale, clearly not an island, which is also smiling, and then there is a small boat. AndSaint Brendan is in the small boat, bearing a cross and about to disembark very carefully onto the whale, who is laughing at him. 6 We can also find this in
Paradise Lost
byMilton, where he describes a whale sailors often encounter near the coast of Norway, and they disembark on it, and light a fire, and the fire rouses the whale, and the whale plunges down and devours the sailors. And here we see Milton’s poetic touch. He could have said that the whale was “haply slumbering on the Norway sea.” But he doesn’t say this. He says “on the Norway foam,” which is much more beautiful. 7
    So, we have these fragments, and then there is a long Anglo-Saxon poem about the Phoenix, which begins with a description of Earthly Paradise. Earthly Paradise is imagined as a high mountain plain in the Orient. Also inDante’s purgatory, Earthly Paradise is on the very peak of a kind of artificial mountain or system of terraces—purgatory. And in the Saxon poem, Earthly Paradise is described in words that echo others in the
Odyssey
. It says, for example, that there is no extreme cold or heat, or summer or winter; there is no hail or rain, and the heat of the sun is not oppressive. And then the Phoenix, one of the animals dealt with inPliny’s
Natural History
, is described. And here we can observe that although Pliny talks about griffins, or dragons, or the Phoenix, it doesn’t mean that he believes in them. 8 I think there is a different explanation. The explanation is that Pliny wanted to collect everything about animals in one volume, so he included the real and the imaginary, in order to make the text more complete. But he himself at times says, “which is doubtful,” or “it is said that,” whereby we see that we should not think of him as naïve but rather as someone with a different concept of what a natural history should be. Such a history had to include what was definitely known, not only about all animals but also about superstitions. I think, for example, that he believed that rubies make men invisible, emeralds make them eloquent, etcetera. I mean no, he did
not
believe these things. He knew that these superstitions existed. And he included them in his book, as well.
    I have mentioned these two pieces from the Anglo-Saxon bestiary because they are curious, not because they have any absolute poetic value. There is also a series of Anglo-Saxonriddles, riddles that are not meant to be ingenious the way Greek enigmas are. 9 You might remember, for example, the famous riddle of the Sphinx: “What animal goes on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening?” And it turns out that this is an extended metaphor for the life of man, who crawls when he is a child, who is a biped, who stands on two feet at noon, and then, in old age—which is compared to twilight—he leans on a cane. 10 Rather than ingenious, the Anglo-Saxon enigmas are poetic descriptions of things; there are some whose solution is unknown, and others whose solution is obvious. For example, there is one about the book moth, and it says it is a thief who enters the library at night and feeds on the words of wise men but learns nothing. So, we understand it is about the book moth. And then there is one about the nightingale, how men hear it. There is another about the swan, the sound its wings make, and another about the fish: it says that it is errant and that its home—the river, obviously—is also errant, but that if you remove it from its home, it dies. Obviously, a fish dies out of water. In other words, the Anglo-Saxon enigmas are more like leisurely poems, not ingenious, but with a very vivid sense of nature. (We have already seen that one of the characteristics of English literature from the time of its beginnings is a feeling for nature.) Then we have biblical poems, which are mere extensions of biblical texts, oratorical extensions, greatly inferior to the sacred texts that inspired