Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

standpoint of literature, with references made to the economic, political, and social context only when necessary for the understanding of the texts.
    Let us begin this first class, then, in which we will discuss epic poetry and the Anglo-Saxons, who arrived in the British Isles after the departure of the Roman legions. We are talking about the fifth century, the year 449, approximately. The British Isles were Rome’s remotest colony, the one farthest to the north, and it had been conquered all the way to Caledonia, part of present-day Scotland, which was inhabited by the Picts, a people of Celtic origin separated from the rest of Britain by Hadrian’s Wall. To the south lived the Celts, who had converted to Christianity, and the Romans. In the cities, educated people spoke Latin; the lower classes spoke various Gaelic dialects. The Celts were a people who lived in the regions of Iberia, Switzerland, Tirol, Belgium, France—and Britain. Their mythology was wiped out by the Romans and the barbarian invasions, except in Wales and Ireland, where some remnants of it were preserved.
    In the year 449, Rome collapses and its legions withdraw from Britain. This was an extremely important event because the country was left without the defenses it had counted on and was vulnerable to attacks by the Picts from the north and the Saxons from the east. The Saxons were thought of as a confederation of marauding tribes, forTacitus does not refer to them as a “people” in his
Germania
. They were “of North-Sea Germanic stock,” and were related to the Vikings, who came later. They inhabited the Lower Rhine region and the Low Countries. The Anglos inhabited southern Denmark, and the Jutes, as their name indicates, lived in Jutland. And so it happened that a Celtic chieftain, a Britain, upon seeing that the south and the west were being threatened by marauders, realized he could pit them against each other. To this end, he summoned the Jutes to help him in his struggle against the Picts. And that’s when two Germanic chieftains arrive: Hengest, whose name means “stallion,” and Horsa, whose name means “mare.” 2
    “Germanic,” then, is the generic designation of a group of tribes, each with a different ruler, who spoke similar dialects, out of which came modern Danish, German, English, etcetera. They shared some of the same mythologies, though only the Norse one has survived, and then only in the remotest part of Europe: Iceland. We know of certain connections between them from the mythology preserved in the
Eddas
: for example, that the Norse god Odin was the German Wotan and the English Woden. 3 The names of the gods have persisted in the names of the days of the week, which were translated from Latin to Old English: Monday is the day of the moon. The day of Mars, Tuesday, is the day of the Germanic god of war and glory. The day of Mercury became the day of Woden in Wednesday. The day of Jove became Thursday, day of Thor, with his Norse name. Friday is the day of Venus, the goddess of beauty; in German it’s
Frija
, and
Frig
in England. Saturday is the day of Saturn. The Lord’s day—
domingo
[in Spanish], and in Italian
domenica
—remained the day of the sun, Sunday.
    Very little of Anglo-Saxon mythology has been preserved. We know that the Norsemen worshipped the valkyries—warrior goddesses who could fly and who carried the souls of dead warriors to paradise; we also know that these were worshipped in England, thanks to a trial held in the ninth century of an old woman accused of being a valkyrie. In other words, Christianity changed these warrior women who carried the dead to paradise on their flying horses into witches. The old gods were commonly interpreted as devils.
    Although the Germanic peoples were not politically unified, they did acknowledge unity of a different kind: national unity. Thus foreigners were called
wealh
, which becomes “Welsh” in English, and means “the people from Wales,”
galeses
[in Spanish]. This word also remains in the word “Galicia,” or
galo
[in Spanish]. That is, the name was used for anyone who was not German. . . . So, the Celtic chieftain Vortigern summoned the Picts to help him, but when they launched their oar-driven boats—they didn’t have sails—and they landed in Kent County, the Celts immediately waged war and defeated them quite easily. So easily, in fact, that they decided to invade their entire country. This cannot really be called an armed invasion,