Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

morning. Now, this victory is a little sad for Harold, because his brother was there. But it was a great victory, for the Norwegians were usually the ones who defeated the Saxons—but not here.
    They are celebrating this victory when another horseman arrives, a very tired horseman, and he comes bearing news. He comes to tell Harold that the Normans have invaded in the south. So, the army, tired out from its victory, must now make a forced march toHastings. And there in Hastings, the Normans are waiting. Now, the Normans were also Norsemen, but they had been in France for more than a century, they had forgotten the Danish language, they were really French. And it was their custom to shave their heads.
    So Harold sends a spy—this was easy at that time—and sends him to the Norman camp. The spy returns and tells him he can rest assured, nothing is going to happen because the camp is a camp of friars. But those were the Normans. Then the next day, the battle is waged, and we have an episode that, if not historic—that is, historically significant—is historic in another way. Now another personage joins the action, another horseman. This isTaillefer, a minstrel; there are many horsemen in this story. He is a Norman minstrel, and he asks permission of William the Bastard, who will later become William theConqueror, to be the first to engage in battle. He asks him for this honor—a terrible honor, because naturally the first to engage in battle are the first to die. So he enters into combat playing with his sword, throwing it and picking it up in front of the astonished Saxons. The Saxons were a serious people, needless to say, I don’t think there were many such fellows yet among them. And he enters the battle singing
cantilena Rollandi
, that is, singing an ancient version of
Chanson de Roland.
(So we are told in the ancient English chronicle by William of Malmesbury.) 24 And it is as if with him the entire French culture, all the light of France, entered England.
    Now, the battle lasts the entire day. The Saxons and the Normans used different weapons. The Saxons had battle-axes—terrible weapons. The Normans cannot mange to break through the Saxon siege, so they resort to an ancient ruse of war: pretending to run away. The Saxons pursue them, and the Normans turn and destroy the Saxons. And there ends Saxon rule in England.
    There is another episode that is also poetic—though poetic in a different manner—and it is the subject of a poem by Heine titled “
Schlachtfeld bei Hastings
,” “The Battlefield of Hastings.”
Schlacht
, naturally, is related to the English word “slay,” to kill, and the word “slaughter.” “Slaughterhouse” in England is a place where animals are killed. [The episode] is as follows: the Saxons are defeated by the Normans. Their defeat is natural because they had already been decimated during their victory over the Norwegians, because they were already very tired when they arrived, etcetera. And there is a problem, and this is to find the king’s corpse. There are “merchants” who have followed the army, and naturally they steal the armor off the dead, the trappings off the horses, and the battlefield at Hastings is full of dead men and horses. So, there is a monastery nearby, and the monks naturally want to give Harold, the last Saxon king of England, a Christian burial. One of the monks, the abbot, remembers that the king had a mistress, who is not described but whom we can very easily imagine, because her name is Edith Swaneshals, Edith Swanneck. Thus, she would be a very tall, blonde woman with a slender neck. She is one of many women the king had. He grew tired of her, abandoned her, and she lives in a hut in the middle of the forest. She has grown old, prematurely. (People aged very quickly then, just as they matured very quickly.) And so the abbot thinks that if anybody can recognize the king’s corpse—or rather, the king’s naked body, he must have thought—it would be this woman, who knew him so well, whom he abandoned. So they go to the hut, and out comes the woman, by then an old woman. The monks tell her that England has been conquered by the French, the Normans, that this has happened nearby, in Hastings, and they ask her to come look for the king’s corpse. This is what the chronicle says. Now, Heine, naturally, uses this, describes the battlefield, describes the poor woman making her way through the stench of the dead and the birds of prey devouring