Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

stand out against the evening sky. And I say evening because there are regions in the north of Scotland where the sun shines—the word “shine” isn’t quite right here—from dawn to dusk with a light that is like an evening light, and that cannot but make the visitor somewhat sad.
    Macpherson had heard the bards. The great clans of Scotland had bards whose task it was to recount the history and great deeds of the family. They were poets, and of course they sang in Gaelic. In all the Celtic countries, literature was organized similarly. I don’t know if I told you that long ago in Ireland, one had to study for ten years to have a literary career. One had to pass ten examinations. At first one could use only simple meters—let’s say, the hendecasyllable—and could write only about ten different subjects. Then, once these exams were finished—which were given orally in a dark room—they gave the subject and the meter the poet was supposed to use, and they brought him food. Two or three days later, they would question the poet, then allow him to use other subjects and other meters. After ten years, the poet reached the highest grade, but to get there, he had to have a complete knowledge of history, mythology, law, medicine—which was understood as magic in those days—and he received a pension from the government. He ended up using a language that was so laden with metaphor, only his colleagues could understand it. He had the right to more provisions, more horses, and more cows than the kings of the small kingdoms of Ireland or Wales. Now, this same prosperity of the order of the poets also sealed its fate. Because according to the legend, there came a time when one king would hear his praises, sung by two of the principal poets of Ireland, and the king was not well versed in the poets’ gongoristic style; he didn’t understand a single word that was sung. And he decided to dissolve the order, and the poets were left out in the streets. But among the great families of Scotland, a position a little inferior to the previous one was restored: that of a bard. And James Macpherson learned this when he was a boy. He was about twenty when he published a book titled
Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language
. 6
    The songs in this volume were of an epic nature. Something had taken place that we cannot now fully understand and that I will have to explain, but it is something easily comprehensible. In the eighteenth century, and for many centuries, it was thought thatHomer was indisputably the greatest of all poets. In spite of whatAristotle said, the literary genre of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
became the superior genre. That is, an epic poet was inevitably considered superior to a lyric or elegiac poet. So, when the men of letters of Edinburgh—Edinburgh was a city that was no less, and perhaps even more, intellectual than London—when they knew that Macpherson had collected epic fragments from the Highlands of Scotland, they were very impressed, for it allowed them to entertain the possibility that an ancient epic poem existed, which would give Scotland literary supremacy over England, and above all over the other modern regions of Europe. And here there appears a curious character, Dr.Blair, author of a book on rhetoric that has been translated into Spanish, and that you can still find. 7
    Blair read the fragments translated by Macpherson. He did not know Gaelic, so he and a group of Scottish gentlemen provided Macpherson with a kind of stipend that would allow him to travel through the mountains of Scotland and collect ancient manuscripts—Macpherson had said he had seen them—and also write down songs by the bards of the great houses. James Macpherson accepted the mission. He was accompanied by a friend better versed in Gaelic, who was able to read the manuscripts. And a little more than a year later, Macpherson returned to Edinburgh and published a poem called
Fingal
, which he attributed to Ossian; Ossian is the Scottish form of the Irish name Oisin, and Fingal is the Scottish form of the Irish name Finn. 8
    Naturally, the Scots wanted to nationalize those legends that were of Irish origin. I don’t know if I have told you that in the Middle Ages, the word “Scotus” meant Irishman, not Scot. (So, we have the great pantheistic philosopher, ScotoEriugena, whose name meant “Scotus,” or “Irish,” and “Eriugena,” meant