Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

because these poems were meant to be read or sung, accompanied by a harp. There is a Germanist who says that alliterated verse has the advantage of forming a unit. But we must mention here its disadvantage, which is that it does not allow for stanzas. Indeed, if we hear a rhyme in Spanish, we are led to expect a conclusion; that is, if a four-line stanza’s first line ends in -
ía
, followed by two verses ending in -
aba
, we expect the fourth line to also end in -
ía
. But this does not happen with alliteration. After several verses, the sound of the first one, for example, has vanished from our minds, and hence the sensation of the stanza disappears. Rhyming allows for lines to be grouped together.
    Later, the Germanic poets discovered the refrain and used it infrequently. But poetry had developed another hierarchical poetic instrument: that is,kennings—descriptive, crystallized metaphors. 8 Because poets were always talking about the same things, always dealing with the same themes—that is: spears, kings, swords, the earth, the sun—and as these were words that did not begin with the same letter, they had to find a solution. The only poetry that existed, as I have said, was epic poetry. (There was no erotic poetry. Love poetry would appear much later, in the ninth century, with the Anglo-Saxon elegiac poems.) For this poetry, which was only epic, they formed compound words to denote things whose names did not begin with the requisite letter. These kinds of formations are quite possible, and normal, in the Germanic languages. They realized that these compound words could very well be used as metaphors. In this way, they began to call the sea “whale-road,” “sail-road,” or “fish-bath”; they called the ship “sea-stallion” or “sea-stag” or “sea-boar,” always using the names of animals; as a general rule, they thought of the ship as a living being. The king was called “the people’s shepherd” and also—this surely for the minstrels’ sake, for their own benefit—“ring-giver.” These metaphors, some of which are beautiful, were employed like clichés. Everybody used them, and everybody understood them.
    In England, however, poets finally realized that these metaphors—some of which, I repeat, were very beautiful, like the one that called the bird the “summer guardian”—ended up hobbling poetry, so they were slowly abandoned. In Scandinavia, on the other hand, they carried them to their final stage: they created metaphors out of metaphors by using successive combinations. Thus, if a ship was “sea-horse” and the sea was “gull’s field,” then a ship would be “horse of the gull’s field.” And this could be called a metaphor of the first degree. As a shield was the “pirate’s moon”—shields were round and made of wood—and a spear was the “shield’s serpent,” for the spear could destroy the shield, that
spear
would be the “serpent of the pirate’s moon.”
    This is how an extremely complicated and obscure poetry evolved. It is, of course, what happened in learned poetry, within the highest spheres of society. And, as these poems were recited or sung, it must be assumed that the primary metaphors, those that served as the foundation, were already familiar to the audience. Familiar, even very familiar, almost synonymous with the word itself. Be that as it may, the poetry became very obscure, so much so that finding the real meaning is like solving a puzzle. So much so that scribes from subsequent centuries show, in the transcriptions of these same poems we have now, that they did not understand them. Here’s a fairly simple kenning: “the swan of the beer of the dead,” which, when we first see it, we don’t now how to interpret. So, if we break it down, we see that “beer of the dead” means blood, and “swan of the blood” means the bird of death, the raven, so we see that “swan of the beer of the dead” simply means “raven.” And in Scandinavia, whole poems were written like this and with increasing complexity. But this did not happen in England. The metaphors remained in the first degree, without going any further.
    As for the use of alliteration, it is interesting to note that a verse is considered alliterative even if it contains stressed words beginning with different vowels. If a verse contains a word with the vowel
a
, another with , and another with
i
, they are alliterated. In fact, we cannot know exactly how the vowels were