Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges

corners; they are angular, because they were designed to be carved into stone or metal with a knife, as opposed to cursive writing that tends to have rounder shapes, and better suits the hand. In England, there are monuments carved with runic letters. One is etched with the first verses of “The Dream of theRood,” a poem we will look at later. There was a Swedish scholar who said that the Greeks had copied the runic letters from the Germanic peoples for their alphabet. This is totally improbable. Most likely Phoenician and Roman coins made their way north and the people in the north learned the runic alphabet from them.
    As for the origin of the name, it is strange. The word
run
in Saxon means “whisper,” or what is spoken in a low voice. And that means “mystery,” because what is spoken in a low voice is what one doesn’t want others to hear. So
runes
means “mysteries”; letters are mysteries. But this can also refer to the wonder primitive peoples felt at the fact that words could be communicated through those primitive written symbols. Clearly for them the fact that a piece of wood contained signs and that those signs could be transformed into sounds, words, was very strange. Another explanation is that only erudite people knew how to read, and so the letters were called “mysteries” because the common people didn’t know them. These are several different explanations for the word
rune
. And since I’ve now used the word
runic
, I would like to remind you that in the British Cemetery, you can see crosses that are mistakenly called “runic.” 15 These are crosses with a circular shape, usually of reddish or gray stone. The cross inside the circle is carved. They are of Celtic origin: in general, the Celts and the Germanic peoples did not like open spaces. In a painting, for example, they didn’t want there to be any empty space—maybe they thought this showed that the painter was lazy. I don’t know what I heard about a painting that was recently on exhibit that was just a white canvas, nothing else. Which is similar to a concert that was performed in Paris a while back; it lasted three-quarters of an hour and consisted of the instruments remaining absolutely silent. It is a way to avoid all mistakes, and also to do without any knowledge of music. There was a French composer from the last century who said: “
pour rendre le silence en musique
,” “to express silence in music, I would need three military bands.” Which seems more intelligent, surely, than expressing silence through silence. In any case, these runic crosses are round. Inside is the cross, but the cross has shafts that meet. There always remains a small space between the four arms of the cross, but this is decorated with intersecting lines, something like a chess board. And we might think that this style is akin to the poetic style in which everything is intertwined, everything is expressed through metaphors. In other words, they liked what was intricate and baroque, even though they were very simple people.
    The Christian poems are, to my mind, the least worthwhile of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Except the elegies. Now, these poems are not strictly Christian; though written in the ninth century, they already have romantic elements. Above all, they have one extraordinary feature: they are personal poems. In the Middle Ages, there was nothing like this in any region of Europe. Because a poet sang of the king or the battle, he sang what his listeners could feel. But the so-called Anglo-Saxon elegies—soon we shall see that the word “elegy” is not altogether appropriate—are
personal
poems, some of which start being personal as of the very first line. They have been called “elegies” but “elegy” really means a poem written to lament someone’s death. However, those poems are called “elegies” not because they lament a death but rather because of their melancholic tone. I don’t know who gave them that name, but that’s how