Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

pronounced in Anglo-Saxon. Undoubtedly, Old English had a much more open sound and was more voiced than English is now. Now, in English, consonants serve as the high points of the syllables. On the contrary, Anglo-Saxon or Old English—these words are synonymous—was highly vocalic. 9
    Besides this, the Anglo-Saxon lexicon was completely Germanic. Before the Norman Conquest, the only other significant influence was the introduction of about five hundred words from Latin. These words were, for the most part, religious, or, if not religious, they named concepts that had not previously existed among those peoples.
    As far as the religious conversion of the Germanic peoples, it is worth noting that being polytheistic, they had no problem accepting yet another god: one more is nothing. For us, for example, it would be rather difficult to accept polytheistic paganism. But for the Germanic peoples, it was not; at first Christ was merely a new god. The issue of conversion, moreover, presented few problems. Conversion was not, as it is now, an individual act; rather, if the king converted, the entire people converted.
    The words that found a place in Anglo-Saxon, because they represented new concepts were, for example, ones like “emperor,” a notion they did not have. Even now, the German word
kaiser
, which means the same thing, comes from the Latin
caesar
. The Germanic peoples, in fact, knew Rome well. They acknowledged it as a superior culture and admired it. That is why conversion to Christianity meant conversion to a superior civilization; it had, without a doubt, incontrovertible appeal.
    In the next class, we will look at
Beowulf
, a poem from the seventh century, the oldest epic poem, prior to “Song of the Cid” from the ninth or tenth century, and
Chanson de Roland
, written a century before
Cid
and the
Nibelungenlied
. 10 It is the oldest epic poem in all of European literature. We will then continue with theFinnsburh Fragment.

CLASS 2

    BEOWULF.
DESCRIPTION OF THE GERMANS. ANCIENT FUNERAL RITES

    UNDATED, PROBABLY OCTOBER 15, 1966 1
    In our last class, I said that today we would discuss the epic poem,
Beowulf.
As we shall see, the protagonist is a knight who embodies all the virtues held in high regard during the Middle Ages: loyalty, bravery—this is all in the book by the Venerable Bede. But let’s dig into
Beowulf.
The name in itself is a metaphor that means “bee-wolf,” in other words “bear.” It is truly a long poem: it contains a little fewer than 3,200 lines, all of which follow the law of Germanic versification: alliteration. Its language is intricate; it makes constant use of what is called “hyper-baton,” that is, the alteration of the logical sequence of words in a sentence. We know this was not the usual form of the Germanic language, and much less so of its poetry, because another fragment that has been preserved, the Finnsburh Fragment, employs very direct language.
    It was previously believed that the style of
Beowulf
belonged to a primitive, barbaric stage of poetic creation. Subsequently, however, a Germanist discovered that lines from the
Aeneid
were woven into the poem, and that elsewhere, passages from that epic poem were brought in, then interspersed in the text. Hence, we have realized that we are not dealing with a barbaric poem, but rather with the erudite, baroque experiment of a priest, that is, someone who had access to Latin texts, and who studied them.
    The author took an ancient Germanic legend and turned it into an epic poem that follows the syntactic rules of Latin. Thanks to those few interpolated lines, we can see that the author set out to compose a German
Aeneid.
One clear indicator of this is the aforementioned contrast with the direct language used in the heroic Finnsburh Fragment and the other texts we have from that era (such as incantations, etcetera). But the author faced a problem in attempting to carry out his intention: according to the decorum of the time, he could not praise the pagan gods. In the eighth century, the pagan era was quite recent, and still very much alive among the populace. It was not until the seventeenth century, almost ten centuries later, that we see Góngora speak calmly, without qualms, about the pagan gods. 2 However, [the author of
Beowulf
] could not speak about Christ and the Virgin, either. The fact is, he never names them anywhere. But two concepts make their appearance, and we do not know if the author understood that