Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

lot of disagreement about this.
    One peculiar feature of
Beowulf
is that the story we are looking at is a primitive one—even puerile, according to some. Yet the atmosphere in which this barbarous and primitive fable takes place is not the fantastical atmosphere of a fairy tale even if the events that take place are. The story abounds in realistic details, especially regarding the genealogy of the characters. It has, as the English Germanist Ker has said, the solid atmosphere of a realist novel. 2 The events are fantastical, but we feel the characters as real, as garrulous as if they were right there, and given to oratory; they are characters who like good manners, conviviality, ceremony. It is true that all of this was highly valued during that dangerous era, a violent era when people perhaps did not much like violence; it was a barbarous era that nonetheless was drawn to culture, that enjoyed culture.
    The poet lists the names of the kings of the royal house of Denmark, until he gets to a king named Hrothgar. These consonant clusters are common in Anglo-Saxon, but have since been lost:
hr
, and the runic letter following it, can be transcribed as
th
. 3 We have another example in the Anglo-Saxon word for “ring.” In German and, I think, in Scandinavian languages, it is
ring
, whereas the Anglo-Saxons said
hring
, and there are other analogous sounds. For example, “neigh” in English is the verb
hnægan
in Anglo-Saxon. 4 There are other consonant clusters we cannot pronounce, because we don’t know how they were pronounced. For example, for “haughty” they said
wlanc
. I don’t know how the
wl
should be pronounced. It’s possible the W was pronounced as a U. But let’s return to the poem.
    The poet names several kings until he finally gets to Hrothgar, the king of Denmark, who builds a palace called Heorot. And this palace, the poet tells us, is the most splendid of palaces, though we should imagine it built of wood. I have seen beautiful houses in the United States, luxurious houses—the house of Longfellow, the house of Emerson—houses that are three hundred years old, and these houses are built of wood. Currently, in Buenos Aires, to say “a wood house” is to mean a shack. This is not the case in New England: a wood house can be very beautiful, with many floors, a salon, a library, and they are well built so there are no drafts.
    The king builds the palace, and the poet tells us that this is the palace that shines over all the neighboring kingdoms; in other words, it is famous. We can imagine a large central hall where the king meets with his vassals and where he dines. I assume they ate pork and deer and drank beer from drinking horns; wine was quite rare, as it had to be brought from the south. In the poem, there is a minstrel who livens up the banquets singing and accompanying himself on the harp. The harp was the national instrument of all the Germanic peoples. The music would be, undoubtedly, very simple.
    The king has his court. And there he hands out gold rings and bracelets to his vassals. This is why one of the king’s titles is “ring-giver” or
beahgifa
. We find this word,
beag
, in French as
bague
, meaning “ring.” The king is very powerful, but the din of the court, or the music, frightens or disturbs a monster who lives nearby in an area full of swamps, marshes, and moors. Some believe that certain regions of England are recognizable in the description of where the monster, named Grendel, lived. Lincolnshire, for example. But this is pure conjecture. The monster is described as looking like a human being, but gigantic. He is an ogre and apparently belongs to ancient German mythology, but as the poet is Christian, he wanted to tie him to the Christian tradition, rather than the pagan tradition, so he tells us that he is a descendent of Cain. And this monster wanders around the moors and lives with his mother under a lake, so deep down that the hero swims for an entire day to reach the underground cavern where he lives with his mother, who is a witch. The poet calls her “the she-wolf of the sea,” “the sorceress of the sea.” There are also storms, which make this lake seem like the sea, and there is a description of the forests surrounding the lake. It says that crows are afraid to fly near the lake, for it is a zone of tempests, fog, solitude, and because of what could be called sacred horror. The description of the lake and its surroundings lasts about twenty lines.