Borges, Kodama, and Snorri Sturluson: "Gylfi's Hallucination"

 

Translator's Introduction

Snorri Sturluson: La alucinación de Gylfi is one of Jorge Luis Borges's last published works. He did not write it alone, however, and it is telling that his partner María Kodama is credited as a co-translator on the title page. As M.J. Toswell has argued, Kodama was likely a decisive influence on Borges's late-life transition to a more serious academic study of medieval literature, particularly that of Old English and Old Norse literature, and she undoubtedly contributed a great deal to the work of translation.1 Borges and Kodama met in Buenos Aires in the 1950s, when the older writer invited the sixteen-year-old girl to join an Old English reading group that he had organized at the National Library. Kodama later enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires and began taking classes in English literature with Borges; by the end of the 1960s, when Borges had completely lost his eyesight, Kodama was acting increasingly as his amanuensis. After Borges' mother died in 1975, Kodama began accompanying him on his frequent travels to give invited talks, including a trip to Iceland in 1976. Kodama recently described how their relationship deepened in Iceland, protecting them from the outside world como la Völsunga Saga por un mágico círculo de fuego, "by a magic circle of fire, like in the Völsunga Saga."2 This must have been a shared mythology for the couple, or a not-so-private language, since Borges also made this connection in his 1975 short story "Ulrikke," in which two lovers named Ulrica and Javier Otálora meet in York, England, and take on the roles of Brynhild and Sigurd.

Over the next decade, the two would collaborate on a number of projects, including their Breve antología anglosajona of 1978. Although Borges had published on Old English and other medieval poetries before, this project with Kodama was the first sustained set of original translations from "the myths of the north." While Borges continued to write short stories and poetry until his death, this 1984 translation of the Gylfaginning with Kodama is a testament to the foundational role "ancient Germanic literature"3 continued to play in their relationship. Indeed, there are rumors that they asked a pagan priest to secretly marry them during that fateful tour of Iceland, though Kodama has publicly stated that she turned down many of Borges' proposals over their decade together, and they only officially married in 1986, a few months before Borges's death. Kodama has never remarried and maintains control over her husband's literary estate to this day. On Borges' tombstone, under the image of a Viking longship, is the phrase "from Ulrica to Javier Otálora."

Although Kodama is also given credit for the introduction translated here, it is written in Borges' inimitable style, and it manifests a new but natural development in the way Borges considered medieval Germanic literature in connection to his own. His interest in Old English had always been intensely personal, something he felt as part of his "blood," since his paternal grandmother was English. Borges's first essay on a medieval theme, "Las kenningar," was republished in 1936 with a dedication to an early amorous interest, the Argentine avant-gardist of English descent Norah Lange, cuya sangre los reconocerá por ventura "whose blood perchance might recognize it." Although he wrote about Old English and Old Norse throughout his career, Borges could not read these languages prior to the 1960s, and his opinions are often derivative of an earlier age of scholarship (W.P. Ker's 1912 book Medieval English Literature seems to loom large in these studies). In 1970, Borges published his English-language "Biographical Notes" in The New Yorker, where he mentions his "wholly personal" study of Old English, that learning the language was "as intimate an experience to me as looking at a sunset or falling in love."4

Yet by the end of his introduction to the Gylfaginning, Borges has widened this "wholly personal" interest in Old English to a more national, even linguistic, level. Our first indication is his citation of Ricardo Jaimes Freyre, one of the most significant modernist poets of South America, and one of Borges' personal favorites. Born in Peru, Freyre became the Bolivian ambassador to Argentina, and while in Buenos Aires founded a literary journal called La Revista de América. Freyre was influenced by French Parnassianism and the Symbolists, and he worked at the turn of the 20th century to reinvent older European forms for modern Spanish-language poets, particularly the meters of medieval poetry. Borges often mentioned Freyre in his international talks, and his citation of Castalia Bárbara here, Freyre's first volume of poetry from 1899, is probably a nod to poems like "El Walhalla," ("Valhalla") or "De la Thule lejana" ("From far Thule/Iceland"). Freyre would later publish Leyes de la versificación castellana ("Rules of Spanish Versification") in 1905, where he more explicitly investigated the verses of skalds and scops, among other medieval writers, to elaborate a theory of prosody based on accent, rather than on the traditional syllabic forms of Romance poetry.

In that sense, then, the final paragraph of the introduction translated here sketches out a rough pedigree by which Borges can claim the riches of Germanic poetry, not just for himself, but for Argentine literature. He brings up the period of Visigothic rule over Hispania at the end of late antiquity, and refers to the Getica to draw a connection between the Goths and the prehistory of los escandinavos. By then citing the Renaissance-era Spanish belletrist Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584-1648), who died while writing a history of the kings of Spain that connected the Castilian line back to the Visigoths (implying a fanciful unbroken tradition prior to the Umayyad conquest), Borges extends this cultural connection to Spain's New World colonies as well, which were a century old in Saavedra's time.

Borges and Kodama's focus on Snorri Sturluson, both in the title of their translation and in this introduction, is significant. Borges saw Snorri as a kindred spirit, not only in his erudition and tale-telling, but also in his treachery. Borges is sometimes denigrated by other South American writers as a "European"—not an Argentine—author. Borges began his career in the Ultraist vanguard, writing stories about gauchos, knives, and the mean streets of Buenos Aires; he is buried in Switzerland (where he spent much of his childhood), and he spent the last decades of his life writing about ancient swords and Vikings. Perhaps through this late project of translating the Gylfaginning into Spanish, he hoped to efface the apparent distance between these worlds. Borges had been fascinated by traitors from his earliest days (see, for example, his Universal History of Infamy); now, at the end of his life, he positioned himself like Snorri, or Freyre, as a redemptive traductor-traidor, one who opens new literary possibilities by collecting, interpreting, and translating the heritage of the ancient past.

 

Introduction and translation by Jorge Luis Borges and María Kodama

Germanic culture, which Tacitus was the first to investigate, reached its greatest height in Iceland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era. By that time, it had been virtually erased in the lands of Germany, England, and the Low Countries by Christianity, which was not only another faith but another culture, that of Rome. Iceland, Ultima Thule to the Romans, was responsible for saving Germanic culture for us. Beginning in the ninth century, groups of Scandinavians who left Norway and the islands north of Scotland would establish a shelter there. They were, by and large, pagans. They fled from the faith of "White Christ," as they called him, and they brought with them the mythological and epic songs that would in time form the Elder Edda. Thanks to their freedom, their exile, their nostalgia, and their love of those lost old things, they continued the cult of Thórr and the other pagan divinities. They founded the Republic of Iceland, which still endures. It was governed by an annual parliament, the Althingi, which could make decisions but could not impose them; the country was, consequently, subject to perpetual discord. An agent in—and ultimately victim of—this discord, born in the west of the island in 1179, was the author of this book.

Why refuse ourselves the lovely adventure of discovering—at seven centuries distance, and in a language undreamed of by him—an extraordinary man? Voltaire applied this title to Charles XII of Sweden; our Scandinavian, Snorri Sturluson, is no less worthy of such distinction. Among a few scholars, perhaps the first to discover Snorri was [Thomas] Carlyle. In his book The Early Kings of Norway (1875), which is an eloquent overview of the Heimskringla, Carlyle describes Snorri as Homeric. This designation involves an error. With or without historical justification, the name of Homer always evokes something like the dawn, something that rises. That is certainly not the case for Snorri, who brought together a long earlier process and surmounted it. It would have been more appropriate to compare him to Thucydides, who also brought to his history a literary tradition. In the speeches that Thucydides inserts in his Peloponnesian War, one observes the example of epic and the tragedies; similarly, the technique of Snorri's Heimskringla was influenced by the saga, a kind of Icelandic novel.

Richard Meyer, in his admirable Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (1910), emphasizes Snorri's work as a researcher and theologian. As Meyer writes: "The final activity of theologians is codification, that is to say the gathering and elaboration of materials. Snorri perfects the ancient theology of the north and is the founder of the study of these old beliefs."5 On another page, one reads: "Snorri was a distant colleague of Jakob Grimm; he was, above all, a great classic writer of prose."

Snorri, of the famed house of Sturlung, was adopted and educated by Jon Loptsson, child of a Norwegian princess and an erudite man named Oddi, who perhaps gave his name to the Eddas. Jon Loptsson may have inspired in Snorri a love of poetry and of history. It would be quite odd if a man as inquisitive as Snorri had neglected his Latin, which was the international language of his time; that neglect becomes impossible if we recall that he was educated at Oddi's school, the library which consisted above all of Latin codices. He knew something of the Aeneid since he could describe the god Thórr as the brother of Hector, Priam's son. In 1199 Snorri married Herdis, the daughter of Bersi the Rich, a priest in Borg. The faith of White Christ had by then reached Iceland, but ecclesiastical celibacy was observed with scant rigor. In 1206 Snorri established Herdis and himself in Reykjaholt. There he kept a circular basin of worked stone, fed by heated springs, formerly destroyed and which Snorri had ordered to be rebuilt. The land belonged to the Church; Snorri was charged with staying there and taking care of it.

Snorri, who had already distinguished himself as a poet in the manner of the skalds and as as a lawyer, proceeded to lead the parliament. Before each of the sessions, which were held in June, he recited the code of laws. In 1218 he accepted an invitation from the King of Norway and resided many years in that kingdom. The king, Haakon Hakonson, bestowed on Snorri a title, making him a vassal. Snorri promised that Iceland would become subject to Norway; by its own decision and of its own will it would become Haakon's fief. After a very hazardous journey, Snorri returned to his country. Once there, he gave over his political activities. Among his biographers are those who accuse him of double treason: first to the Republic of Iceland, for betraying it to the King of Norway; and also to his king, for indefinitely delaying the realization of this promise. It is plausible that he was trying to buy time to avoid an invasion. From Norway, Haakon stoked disagreements. After a long series of threats and disputes, Snorri's son-in-law Gizur Thorvaldson came with his men to his kinsman's house, where Snorri had hidden himself in the basement. Arni the Bitter dealt him death with a single stroke. This happened in September of 1241. Twelve years later, amid the other violence of that epoch, a man managed to escape from a house that was fenced in and burning. He jumped out and fell to the ground. Someone recognized him and asked: "Is there no one here who remembers Snorri Sturluson?" Then they killed him, because he was Arni. Afterward they killed Gizur, who was also in the house.

The death of Arni appears plotted by Snorri. That man—for whom a laconic question announces his death sentence—is one of Snorri's characters, a figure subdued by destiny and even by the rhetoric of the sagas.6

Gilchrist Brodeur defines Snorri's life as a complex chronicle of treasons.7 Snorri's greatness is in his written work. The key text in this work is the Heimskringla ("Sphere of the World") which is a long series of chronicles of the first Norwegian kings. It may surprise us that a work of history bears an astronomical name; this is owed to the fact that titles, at that time, were not the work of authors but of librarians, who, to designate a codex, turned to their first words. Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian and poet of the twelfth century, wrote in his Gesta Danorum that the men of Thule (Iceland) delighted in learning and recording the history of all peoples and that it did not seem to them less glorious to publish the excellence of another as to publish their own. The Heimskringla is, in effect, remarkably impartial. Snorri dramatizes what he recounts and attributes admirable statements to those of a rival faction. The seven feet of land that a Saxon king offers to a Norwegian king is probably Snorri's invention. Turning the pages of the Heimskringla, we think that if the characters depicted may not have really said those things, they should have said them, with these same cramped words.

As we transcribed above, Meyer defines Snorri Sturluson as a theologian. That does not mean that he professed the faith of his ancestors or would preach that faith; he means to say that Snorri sorted and put in order the disparate myths of the songs that came to be known as the Elder Edda or the Prose Edda.8 Nowadays, anyone can explain a mythology without running the risk of being branded an idolater. Not so in the Middle Ages. In the eighth century, when Alfred the Great translated Boethius' Universal History from Latin to Old English, he had to be quite cautious, warning his Saxons that the transformation of men into animals worked by Circe's witchcraft referred to their mere appearance, for only God is permitted to modify nature. Snorri understood that Germanic mythology was an essential part of Germanic culture and he set out to explain it. The task was delicate; he had to construct a pantheon in the Greek manner and he had to show it in a way that would not compromise him as a Christian. So, he came up with a sort of phantasmagoria or a fantasy that he called Gylfi's Hallucination.

Gylfi's Hallucination is the first part of the work that today we refer to as the Younger Edda, and to his contemporaries was simply the Edda. The other two books are the Skáldskaparmál or Language of the Poets,9 which studies the complex metaphors (sea-foal, boat; whale-road, sea; foal of the whale-road, boat) and the intricate meter of the skalds, who managed this iron-Gongorism.10 Snorri seems to have known that secular poetry by memory. The third book, the Háttatal or Tally of Verses, consists of a hundred and two panegyric stanzas that appear to exhaust the possibilities of ancient Scandinavian meter, and of a laborious critical commentary. It is not without happy passages. The comparative study of religions and their myths was a thing of the future. To explain a pagan myth to a priestly era, Snorri forged the fantasy of a legendary king of Sweden who is tricked and outwitted by the very deities of this nearly forgotten mythology. We have already said that Snorri did not believe in them, as perhaps he did not believe in Christianity, but he judged correctly that the mythology was necessary to understand the poetry of the skalds. He deeply felt its curious beauty, as it was felt centuries later by Thomas Gray, who, midway through the 1700s, admirably translated Baldrs draumar, which appeared in the Elder Edda, and which he titled The Descent of Odin. The subject matter of Baldr's dreams and of his sudden death inspired Matthew Arnold's verse drama Balder Dead. The myths of the North also stimulated the works of William Morris, Richard Wagner, and of Leconte de Lisle, who Jaimes Freyre imitated in his Castalia Bárbara.11

Paradoxically, the new faith enriched the old; upon the terrible vision of the Twilight of the Gods falls the terrible shadow of another vision, the Apocalypse that St. John the Theologian dreamed on the island of Patmos. The three gods questioned by Gylfi might be a mirror or a parody of the Trinity. Let us also remember Odin who hung for nine nights from a tree, sacrificed to Odin. The atmosphere of the Gylfaginning is fantastic, and, more than once, sarcastic. It affirms, for example, that the jaws of Fenris Wolf open wide enough to touch the heavens and the earth, and adds that they couldn't open wider because there wasn't enough space. Between the eyes of the serpent seated in the limbs of the ash tree Yggdrasil, there stands, quite implausibly, a falcon that calls itself Vethrflönir. Thórr, terrible Thórr, the 'war-god'12 that Longfellow sings of, is shown to us by Snorri as a sort of comic type, constantly duped by the giants, unable to conceive of anything besides delivering blows of his hammer. It is true that the relationship between the German and his deities seems not to have been reverential; one can speak of a friend of Odin but not of a devotee of Odin. Paganism had no missionaries; nor did it have martyrs. On the last page of this book the castle of the Aesir disappears and the king is left alone on the plains, as if to accentuate the phantasmagoric nature of everything that came before. Gylfaginning wants to tell the Hallucination of Gylfi; the title already suggests a ruse.

There are scenes of admirable delicacy, such as the moment in which Baldr dies and the divinities watch and know not what to do.

The Visigoths who occupied Spain at the beginning of the fifth century believed that their lineage was Scandinavian. This is affirmed by the historian Jordanes in his work De Rebus Geticis; Diego de Saavedra Fajardo reiterates the same in his Corona Gótica. Although they professed the Christian faith, the Visigoths remembered some of the magical fantasies that now return to Spain in this book.

 

1

Gylfi ruled over the land that is now called Sweden. It is said of him that, in payment for his amusement, he promised a wandering woman enough acres of arable land that four oxen could plow them in the time of a day and a night. This woman was descended of the Aesir and was called Gefjon. From the north, from Jötunheimr, she brought four oxen, who were the sons of a giant and herself, and she yoked them to the plow. The plow dug into the field so deeply and so broadly that it was pulled up by the roots and the oxen dragged it toward the west, unto the sea where they stopped at a certain gulf. There Gefjon fixed the land, and she gave it the name of Selund and from that time onwards the place from which she extracted the land filled with water and was called Lögr in Sweden, and there are bays in this lake that correspond to the promontories of Selund. Thus says Bragi the Old:

Gefjon blithely extracted from Gylfi his treasure, until the sweat of the running animals accreted in the territory of Denmark. The oxen had eight eyes, lights on their foreheads, upon the broad plunder of the field, and four heads at their task.