Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

because the conquest was carried out almost peacefully. Immediately thereafter the first Germanic kingdom of England is formed, with Hengest as its ruler. Thereafter, many other small kingdoms were formed. At the same time, the Germans were abandoning, en masse, the southern regions of Denmark and Jutland, and founding Northumbria, Wessex, Bernicia. This entire assortment of small kingdoms converted to Christianity one century later as a result of the efforts of monks who hailed from Rome and Ireland. These efforts, at first complementary, soon grew into rivalries between the monks from those two places. There are several interesting aspects of this spiritual conquest, the first being the way the pagans accepted Christ. The VenerableBede tells of a king who had two altars: one devoted to Christ and the other to the devils. 4 These devils were, without a doubt, the Germanic gods.
    Here we come to another problem. The Germanic kings were direct descendents of their gods. And a chieftain could not be prohibited from paying homage to his ancestors. Thus, the Christian priests, whose responsibility it was to record the genealogies of the kings—some of which have been passed on to us—found themselves in the dilemma of not wanting to contradict the kings and, at the same time, not refute the Bible. The solution they came up with was really very curious. We must realize that for the ancients the past did not extend beyond fifteen or twenty generations: they could not conceive of a past as long as we do. So, after several generations, we come to a kinship with the gods, who in turn are related to the Hebrew patriarchs. Hence, for example, we have Odin’s great-grandfather, the nephew of one of the patriarchs. And from there, it is a direct line to Adam. At the most, their concept of the past extended to fifteen generations, or a bit more.
    The literature of these peoples spans many centuries, and most of it has been lost. Because of the VenerableBede, we date its beginnings to around the middle of the fifth century. And from the year 449 until 1066, the Battle of Hastings, out of this entire period, there remain only four main codices and a few other bits. 5 The first codex, the
Vercelli Book
, was discovered in the monastery of the same name in the north of Italy in the last century. It is a notebook written in Anglo-Saxon, assumed to have been brought there by English pilgrims on their way back from Rome, and who, fortunately for us, forgot the manuscript in the convent. There are other codices:
TheAnglo-Saxon Chronicle
, a translation of Boethius, one of Orosius, laws, and
Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn
. 6 And that is all. Then come the epic poems. The famous
Beowulf
, a composition of a little fewer than 3,200 lines, suggests, perhaps, that there were other epic poems that vanished. But they are all completely hypothetical. Moreover, considering that the epic poem appears after the proliferation of short cantos and arises from them, it is also reasonable to believe that that one is unique.
    In every instance, poetry comes before prose. It seems that man sings before he speaks. But there are other very important reasons for this. A verse, once composed, serves as a model. It is repeated over and over again, and then we have a poem. Prose, on the other hand, is much more complex, and requires a greater effort. Moreover, we must not forget the mnemonic value of verse. Thus, in India, the codices are written in verse. 7 I assume they must have some poetic value; this is not why they were written in verse, but rather because in that form it was easier to remember them.
    We must look closely at what we mean by “verse.” This word has a very elastic meaning. It is not the same concept for all peoples in all eras. For example, we think of rhymed and isosyllabic verse; the Greeks thought of sung verse, noted for its parallel structures, for its phrases that balanced one another. Germanic verse is nothing like this. It was difficult to discover the rules that determine how these verses were constructed, because in the codices the lines aren’t written—as are ours—one under the other, but rather continuously. Moreover, they have no punctuation. But finally, it was discovered that each line has three words whose first syllables are stressed and that they are alliterated. Rhymes have also been found, but these are accidental: those who listened to this poetry probably didn’t hear them. And I say those who listened