Borges and the North

Summary

Old English? Why don’t you study something more useful, like ancient Greek?

Jorge Luis Borges’s affair with the Boreal Muse is no secret. The precise beginning of this affair, however, the chronology of its subsequent development, the number and nature of its plentiful and diversiform progeny, its place in the work of one of the twentieth century’s major writers, its significance in understanding that century’s interpretations and uses of the medieval past – these are all matters that have thus far received relatively little attention from Borgesians and medievalists alike. In the absence of scholarship, fables thrive. Indeed, it might seem that one can actually point to a precise year, a key one in the Borges mythology: that same 1955 in which God, as he later wrote, “with such splendid irony/ granted me books and blindness at one touch” (SP 95). In 1955 Borges was appointed director of the Argentine National Library in Buenos Aires, even as his sight was deteriorating to the point of leaving him unable to read the books on its shelves. And, according to the account he gave in the lecture “Blindness” (1964), it was then that:

I thought: I have lost the visible world, but now I am going to recover another, the world of my distant ancestors, those tribes of men who rowed across the stormy northern seas […]. I thought: “I am returning to the language my ancestors spoke fifty generations ago; I am returning to that language; I am reclaiming it. It is not the first time I speak it; when I had other names this was the language I spoke.” […] So I began my study of Anglo-Saxon, which blindness brought me. And now I have a memory full of poetry that is elegiac, epic, Anglo-Saxon.

I had replaced the visible world with the aural world of the Anglo-Saxon language: I went on to the Eddas and the sagas. I wrote Ancient Germanic Literature and many poems based on those themes, but most of all I enjoyed it. (SNF 477–8)

By this date, these were old memories: it is perhaps not to be expected that they will conform to the truth.