Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature Read Free Page A

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 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