Jorge Luis Borges' Tombstone: The Battle of Maldon and the intimate discord of his two lineages

 

Among the many objects—both material and textual—that make up the legacy of Jorge Luis Borges, there is one that has continued to mesmerize both readers and scholars for decades: the Argentine writer's tombstone, somberly standing in the Plainpalais Cemetery in Geneva, Switzerland. Since it was raised, multiple attempts have been made to decipher it: most of them have been either fruitless or incomplete. The front side of the tombstone holds the most significant interest for scholars of early medieval England: it consists of an exact reproduction of the Lindisfarne stone with an Old English inscription below: and ne forhtedon nā, half-verse 21b from "The Battle of Maldon." 1 All this is rather clear and straightforward, but the ultimate meaning of these engravings and their relationship to the life and work of the writer, as well as the actual reason behind their having been selected for this final homage remain unexplained. It is perhaps fitting that the tombstone of the most renowned creator of paradoxes and enigmas would reflect on its marble surface the labyrinthine character of his literary work.

Borges passed away in Geneva, Switzerland on June 14th, 1986, but news about this monument only reached Argentina on the 10th anniversary of his passing, in 1996. Several newspapers and magazines published photos of the tombstone, but none were able to decipher the inscriptions. Argentina being a Spanish-speaking country, the very concept of Old English was wholly unfamiliar, so no one was even able to place the language, much less translate it. A few newspapers stated the inscriptions on the slab were in "Celtic," others went for "Ancient Norwegian," and yet others settled for "a mysterious language." At that time, I published my first article on the subject, correcting these mistakes, identifying the language of each inscription and explaining their respective origin. I also detailed the source for the each of the designs carved on either side of the stone.2.

The obvious question for any scholar of early medieval England stumbling for the first time upon Borges' tombstone will most likely be: Why Old English? It is no doubt uncommon for a Latin American, Spanish-speaking writer to be associated in any way with Anglo-Saxon England. But as I shall explain in extensive detail, Borges had a twofold ancestry: despite being solidly Argentine and porteño on his maternal side, he was at the same time thoroughly British on his father's side.3 Both the language and literature of England were imprinted upon him from his earliest days:

At home we spoke both English and Spanish. [As a child] I knew that I had to address my maternal grandmother in a specific way, and that I had to speak to my paternal grandmother in a different way, and I later learned that these two ways of addressing my grandmothers were the Spanish language and the English language.4

As we shall see, this double origin and the conflicts it engendered were of the utmost importance in Borges' life. It is from his paternal English side that Borges inherited his literary vocation, his erudition, and his love of books. Borges' paternal grandmother was an Englishwoman called Frances Anne Haslam, a fascinating character in her own right. Born in 1842 in Staffordshire, she arrived in Argentina circa 1870. In 1871, she met and married Colonel Francisco Borges Lafinur. Frances Haslam would refer to those years beside her beloved colonel as the happiest in her life, but their bliss was not to last. The couple had two children: Francisco Eduardo, born in 1872, and Jorge Guillermo, born in 1874, but neither of them would be able to keep any memories of their heroic father. Frances Haslam's husband, Colonel Borges, died during an insurrection in 1874. Perhaps due to the dire circumstances surrounding his death (see below), Frances Haslam's mind remained forever focused on 19th century England. She never gained full command of Spanish, and English remained the only language she was fluent in. As a consequence, and despite their mixed Anglo-Argentine ancestry, the couple's two children were brought up in an exclusively English-speaking household, surrounded by English books. Colonel Borges' tragic death thus had the unintended consequence of doubling the strength of Mrs. Haslam's British cultural influence on her descendants. The configuration of opposites that set culture and books against courage and military action that would haunt successive generations of this family was also already in place. The couple's oldest son, Francisco Eduardo, followed in the military footsteps of his late father and became an army officer. The younger one, Jorge Guillermo, was attracted to books and learning from an early age. He began a modest career as a writer, only stopped by the sudden onset of blindness, a genetic affliction that he had inherited and that he in his turn passed to his son. Jorge Guillermo Borges was the father of Jorge Luis Borges.

Frances Haslam passed away at age 93 in 1935 after having spent more than three decades in close contact with her grandson, the future weaver of labyrinths. A complete study of the impact of English literature and his British ancestors on Borges' writings is beyond the scope of this paper, but it can hardly be overstated: the author of Ficciones would frequently joke that he had first read the Quixote in English and that when he later came to the Spanish original, "it sounded like a bad translation." 5 Throughout the years, Borges repeatedly acknowledged that he had come to literature through his paternal side and the English language:

It was [my father] who revealed the power of poetry to me—the fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magic symbols and music. When I recite poetry in English now, my mother tells me I take on his very voice.6

The origin of his literary erudition was also British:

If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library. I can still picture it. It was in a room of its own, with glass-fronted shelves, and must have contained several thousand volumes.7

And in a separate interview he clarifies that

... most books in [that library] were in English, since my paternal grandmother was British.8

It is within this context that Borges' study of Old English is to be analyzed.

 

Old English: a Mythological Return to Origins

It was through the Norse sagas and mythology that Borges was first attracted to Germanic philology. His interest in Old English did not bloom until 1955, the year in which his increasingly poor eyesight led to almost complete loss of vision. His eye problems were due to a genetic condition, which had slowly progressed, "like a slow summer twilight" since the very first years of his life.9 Borges had this in mind when he stated:

The world of a blind person is not the night that many people imagine. I am, in any case, speaking in the name of my father and my grandmother who died blind; blind, merry and brave, as I myself hope to die.10

Staying courageous in the face of tragedy or death was, as we shall see, a mandate that Borges inherited from the military side of his family. It is thus remarkable that in the above statement he is already combining his two legacies (paternal and bookish, maternal and heroic) under the focus of courage. This is of course exactly what he did in his much celebrated "Poem of the Gifts," in which he asks that no one "reduce to tear or reproach" what he dispassionately calls "this attestation of the wisdom of God / who in a display of His magnificent irony / gave me at once darkness and books," 11 referring of course to the two opposing legacies—blindness and literature—that he inherited from his paternal English side and that had impelled him towards the study of Old English:

I said to myself: since I have lost the beloved world of appearances, I must create something else: I must create the future, that which is to come after 12 the visible world that I have, in fact, lost.13

Borges' autobigraphical narrative regarding his approach to Old English reads like a mythological story of origins. The writer feels the need to travel back, through language and literature, to the origin of this conflicting heritage in order to "create the future." As Mircea Eliade, the scholar of mythology and religions, points out:

[M]an has felt the need to reproduce the cosmogony in his constructions, whatever be their nature; that this reproduction made him contemporary with the mythical moment of the beginning of the world and that he felt the need of returning to that moment, as often as possible, in order to regenerate himself.14

And this is exactly what Borges seems to have intended: to go back in time and renew his life (and his world) after having gone completely blind:

I thought: I have lost the visible world but now I am going to recover another, the world of my distant elders, those tribes, those men who rowed across the stormy seas of the North and who from Denmark, from Germany and from the Netherlands conquered England; which is called England after them, since "Engla-land," land of the Angles, was formerly called "land of the Britons," who were Celts.15

It was in this way that Borges intended to literally create his own future: through a return to his beginnings. To quote Mircea Eliade once again:

We have shown elsewhere that construction rituals likewise presuppose the more or less explicit imitation of the cosmogonic act. For traditional man, the imitation of an archetypal model is a reactualization of the mythical moment when the archetype was revealed for the first time.16

Since he was blind and unable to read, Borges would not be able to undertake this new journey alone. He thus decided to enlist collaborators (perhaps we should call them "accomplices"!) among his university students. He was at the time a Professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and he talked some of his students into the project. In his lecture On Blindness, he states:

I told them: "I have an idea: now that you have passed and I have done my duty as a professor. Wouldn't it be interesting for us to undertake the study of a language and a literature that we hardly know?" They asked me what the language and what the literature I was talking about might be. "Well, naturally the English language and English literature. But now that we are free from the frivolity of exams, we shall go back to its origins." 17

He then comments:

Thus began the study of Anglo-Saxon, to which blindness led me. And now my memory is full of elegiac, epic, Anglo-Saxon verses. I had replaced the visible world with the auditory world of the Anglo-Saxon language.18

And, more revealingly:

I didn't allow blindness to cow me. Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune, it should not be regarded as something pathetic. It should be seen as yet another way of life: as just another possible lifestyle. Being blind has its advantages. I owe the shadow some gifts: I owe it the Anglo-Saxon, my scarce knowledge of Icelandic, the enjoyment of so many lines, of so many verses, of so many poems.19

It should also be noted that Borges was fortunate to find willing companions for his quest. Argentina being a Spanish-speaking country, the study of ancient languages has always focused (and continues to focus) on Latin and Greek. Even nowadays, to study Old English would be regarded as something beyond arcane. And in fact, Borges' journey into Old English did cause a small commotion in his household. The first and most vocal detractor of the Argentine writer's new project turned out to be his mother, Mrs. Leonor Acevedo, a firm and extremely lucid elderly lady with a strong personality and little patience for eccentric undertakings. She would complain to anyone willing to listen that the study of such an uncouth and useless language was an utter waste of time. She would also make similar and frequent observations to Borges himself (who was by then 55), demanding that he "drop this nonsense," and instead "go for something decent, like Ancient Greek." 20 She was not alone in showing her displeasure: one of Borges' nephews (probably Luis Guillermo) objected to the idea of this endeavor becoming a shared journey. He remarked that while it was forgivable for a solitary scholar to devote himself to the study of "those horrible Anglo-Saxon texts," the fact that several people would periodically congregate with that shared goal in mind seemed "downright monstrous" to him. Last but not least, Amalia, a beloved maid from Córdoba who worked in the Borges household, was unable to pronounce Anglosajón (the Spanish rendering of the English term "Anglo-Saxon") and instead referred to it as anglozanjón which in Spanish seems to allude to some kind of English ditch.21 Visitors were thus puzzled when they were told, upon arrival, that Borges would see them in a minute, after he was done leading a group involved with what sounded like a very strange kind of excavation. Fortunately, however (and as with most other matters), Borges' stubbornness prevailed and his study of the language continued. His informal study group continued to meet on and off for decades, and his interest in Old English (and later on, Old Norse) grew in both time and scope, leaving a lasting impact on his works. Borges took this learning very personally. In his "Autobiographical Essay," he wrote:

I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift ....My excursions into Old English have been wholly personal and, therefore, have made their way into a number of my poems. A fellow-academician once took me aside and said in alarm, "What do you mean by publishing a poem entitled ‘Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar'?" I tried to make him understand that Anglo-Saxon was as intimate an experience to me as looking at a sunset or falling in love.22

 

Warriors and Heroes

I have described Borges' English ancestry in some detail above. I have not yet delved much, however, into his other, military and criollo side: 23 from these ancestors, mostly maternal, the blind writer was descended from a very old Argentine lineage of warriors, founders and conquerors:

My mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, comes of old Argentine and Uruguayan stock ... her grandfather was Colonel Isidoro Suárez, who, in 1824, at the age of twenty-four, led a famous charge of Peruvian and Colombian cavalry which turned the tide of the battle of Junín, in Peru. This was the next to last battle of the South American War of Independence. My mother's father, Isidoro Acevedo, though a civilian, took part in the fighting of yet other civil wars in the 1860's and 1880's.24

Borges' family tree indeed comprises so many personalities of Argentina's past that its branches literally crisscross Buenos Aires: so many streets are named after the writer's forebears that it is literally impossible to walk around the city without stumbling upon these streets, one after the other. And in fact in a poem entitled "La noche cíclica" Borges alludes to "the vain grid of streets that repeat the ancestral names of my blood: Laprida, Cabrera, Soler, Suárez. Names that echo the (already secret) bugle-calls, the [founding of] republics, the horses in the sunrise, the dates, the victories, the military deaths."25 Note that although Borges' military ancestors mostly belonged to his maternal branch, the one exception to this rule was his paternal grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges, born in the city of Montevideo, in neighboring Uruguay, in 1835.

From the above constellation of fighters, Borges inherited a mandate to become a military man. This will likely strike the reader as preposterous. But we should remember that we are observing Borges' life in retrospective. None of us has ever known Borges as anything but the towering literary figure that he became. The mental portrait that we hold of him is that of the artist as an old man, wise and erudite beyond measure, able to conjure labyrinths and myths while gazing at infinity through his unseeing eyes. Nowadays, it would require a huge stretch of the imagination for any of us to picture Jorge Luis Borges riding into battle, holding a sword in his hand, urging his followers to stand and fight. But this is precisely what he felt compelled to do. It was a command, an ancestral order from that he was refusing to obey just by becoming a writer. Due to this he always feared he would be branded a coward. Unrealistic and downright absurd as all this may sound nowadays, this did cause Borges a lot of anguish:

I was always very nearsighted and wore glasses, and I was rather frail. As most of my people had been soldiers—even my father's brother had been a naval officer—and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.26

The conflict from these clashing mandates haunted him till the very last days of his life. He once stated:

I have always wanted to be a military man, but I now understand that this was never possible because I'm too much of a coward.27

This was of course opposed to the other, literary mandate that he inherited from his paternal British side. All this made Borges feel guilty to an extreme, and he would often resort to irony to brush away his anguish:

[O]n both sides of my family, I have military forebears; this may account for my yearning after that epic destiny which my gods denied me, no doubt wisely.28

 

The Battle of Maldon

But how did a half-verse, line 21b, from the Old English "Battle of Maldon" end up etched on Borges' tombstone? What made Borges so fond of the poem, and why was it so significant to him? Readers of this publication will of course be familiar with the contents of the poem itself, so there would be no point in recalling it in detail. For practical purposes, however, let us go very briefly over the events it chronicles. On August 10 or 11 of the year 991, several Viking ships were sighted in the estuary of the Pant River, in front of the town called Maldon, in the county of Essex, in the south of England. Aware of the imminent threat that these ships represented, Byrhtnoth, the Ealdorman of Essex, hurried to confront the attackers. The Vikings sent a messenger asking for ransom in gold to avoid combat. Byrhtnoth refused this offer outright: "We will pay you," he replied, "with poisoned spears and ancient swords."

Overconfident of his own victory, Byrhtnoth allows the Vikings to approach the coast; against all expectations, the tide of battle turns against the Saxons. The Viking troops slaughter Byrhtnoth first and then his troops, among them many of his friends and relatives. A cowardly Saxon called Godric then climbs on Byrhtnoth's riderless horse and flees towards the forest. Those who stay on the battlefield see their leader's steed galloping away and some of them conclude that it is Byrhtnoth himself who is leaving the battle. Many then flee, but some who know better remain loyal to their lord, proclaim that they will stay on the battlefield and fight to the death. The last section of the poem that has come down to us narrates the feats of these brave warriors. Specifically, the last few verses focus on a warrior called Godric, who rushes against the enemy: "He advanced first among those troops, killing and wounding, until he himself fell in the battle." In the very last verse of the surviving transcript, the anonymous Maldon poet clarifies: "This was not the Godric who fled."

From my conversations with María Kodama, 29 it became clear that "The Battle of Maldon" was among Borges' favorite Old English poems, and it was among the ones that he enjoyed reciting the most.30 In any case, to return to the central topic of this article, the main mystery is how and why a verse from the "Maldon" poem ended up carved on his tombstone. Given Borges' vast literary reach, it is obvious relevant sentences could have just as well been extracted from any of several thousand works, ranging from Gilgamesh to the Bible, the Odyssey and the Iliad, El cantar del mío Cid, the Divine Comedy or the Japanese Tale of Heike through to Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse or even classical Argentine tango lyrics from old Buenos Aires. So why was "Maldon" selected as a source? The battle of Maldon surely pales in importance to the Trojan Wars, or even the Battle of Dan-no-Ura in medieval Japan. So why was one of the half-verses from a poem about it chosen as an epitaph over the many memorable phrases that could have been quoted from such a vast number of sources? The answer, as we shall see below, was deeply personal—and thus also in a way, within Borges' private universe, at once mythic and eternally recurring.

"What I admire in a soldier," Borges once stated, "is the concept of a man who detaches himself, or at least attempts to detach himself from, his personal fate." 31 This would certainly apply to the Anglo-Saxon warriors in "Maldon." But it wasn't Essex that Borges was alluding to in the above sentence. To understand this reference we must go back to Argentina and the late 19th century. I ask the reader to bear with me: the following paragraphs are necessary to understand a context that will end up taking us back to England.

The classic narrative covering the circumstances I shall now chronicle is found in the volume by Eduardo Gutiérrez entitled Croquis y siluetas militares: escenas contemporáneas de nuestros campamentos, which Borges himself alludes to as a reliable source:

In Spanish, I also read many of the books by Eduardo Gutiérrez [among them] his Siluetas militares, which contains a forceful account of Colonel Borges' death.32

Bartolomé Mitre was a respectable statesman and politician who became president of Argentina in 1864. He improved the state's reach and efficiency, organized national finances, fought and suppressed the rural caudillos who had defied national authority, extended the postal service, and set up new courts, while at the same time encouraging immigration and attracting foreign investment.

Presidential periods at the time lasted six years. Mitre's successor was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a towering historical figure and nowadays regarded as one of Argentina's Founding Fathers. His tenure was full of achievements: he set up the country's modern educational system, fostered science and technology, developed the national infrastructure and created libraries, museums and even an astronomical observatory. When elections were held again in April 1874, Bartolomé Mitre ran again. Sarmiento anointed his education minister, Nicolás Avellaneda, as his personal candidate. And even though Mitre was the solid favorite to win the election, political bickering got in the middle, and—against all expectations—it was Avellaneda who was elected.

Mitre was bitter about the results but stayed calm. His followers, however, began to exert increasing pressure for him to revolt and seize power. Whether Mitre actually gave in to this pressure or whether he used it as an excuse for his own purposes is something that historians debate to this day. In any case, the fact remains that he started to plot a coup against Avellaneda, to be carried out after the latter's inauguration on October 12th of that same year. The intervening months, however, were anything but uneventful. Rumors of Mitre's scheming soon reached Sarmiento's ears, and this led him to conclude that a coup had been set in motion—not against Avellaneda, but against himself. He became more and more watchful and suspicious and sent for his closest officers to confront each of them individually and ask them point blank about their loyalty. Among those officers was Colonel Francisco Borges.

Colonel Borges was a reputable military man, a hero of several battles on the Paraguayan front. He was also in command of the 2nd Infantry Regiment of the Argentine Army. Borges had always been loyal to Sarmiento and the official government, but he was also friends with Mitre and (though he must have obviously kept this fact to himself) had pledged his participation in the upcoming October revolt. This, at first, posed no conflict, since the coup was only to be carried out after Sarmiento passed his mandate on to Avellaneda. So, when called for consultation, colonel Borges truthfully answered his Commander in Chief that the 2nd Regiment would remain loyal to the last day of his term: October 12th 1874. Sarmiento's concerns were not allayed by such pledges and he gave orders to nip the fledging insurrection in the bud. He started arresting conspirators and seizing boats and arsenals here and there. Confronted with this scenario, revolutionary leader Bartolomé Mitre was suddenly faced with two options: to continue to observe passively as the chances of his coup's success diminished by the day or to revolt immediately against the incumbent, the one person he had been unwilling to attack. Neither option was palatable, but something had to be done. He decided for the latter and marshalled his forces to rebel against Sarmiento.

One can only imagine what Colonel Borges must have felt upon hearing this news: through a twist of fate, he had been thrown into an impossible predicament. He had already promised to join the rebel forces. But at the same time he had given his word to Sarmiento that his regiment would never rebel against him. Now, no matter which party he chose to align himself with, he would be openly betraying the other. Thus cornered, he attempted to placate both sides: he took the regiment under his command to the nearest military outpost that remained faithful to Sarmiento—and handed all of his men to the local commander. When Sarmiento heard about this, he did not see any merit in these actions. Even though Colonel Borges had done this as a personal sacrifice to stay true to his word, Sarmiento—known for his very short temper—could not see beyond the fact that Colonel Borges had betrayed him. As if this were not bad enough, one can only imagine the expression on Mitre and his officers' faces upon realizing that Colonel Borges had handed his regiment away and was approaching their rebel encampment alone. No eyewitness testimonies survive, but upon hearing that he had handed his full force to the enemy, neither Mitre nor his men could have been too pleased:

[Colonel Borges'] companions did not understand, or pretended not to understand, that beautiful display of chivalry and character, and accused Borges, although neither directly nor openly, of what they dared to call his treason. This left a grievous impression on that essentially gentlemanly and self-sacrificing personality.33

Without any responsibility on his part, Colonel Borges had been thrust in the middle of a situation resembling a Greek tragedy. A number of circumstances clearly converged and aligned against him. But he was either unable to appreciate the threat that they represented, or—given the speed at which events were unfolding—was unable to do anything about it.

 

The Battle of La Verde

In November 1874 Bartolomé Mitre was maneuvering his rebel troops through the province of Buenos Aires, when they unexpectedly ran into an enemy (official) infantry regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel José Inocencio Arias. This was of course an unpleasant surprise but did not represent an immediate threat. Mitre's men numbered 6000 while the enemy contingent barely comprised 800 soldiers. The rebel army held such a huge advantage over the small regular contingent that Mitre, instead of attacking, condescendingly offered them a truce.

A messenger, upon meeting with Lt. Col. Arias, conveyed Mitre's magnanimous offer: lay down your arms and surrender, and we'll warrant your safety and grant all of you a general amnesty. Given the situation, everyone expected Arias to gladly take up the offer and give up the fight. But none of this happened. Arias rejected Mitre's offer. Mysteriously, even bizarrely (given the obvious numerical disadvantage), Lt. Col. Arias' reply was immediate and forceful. He ordered the messenger to "go back and tell [your men] that Commander Arias and his troops are determined to die fighting." Further negotiations yielded no results whatsoever: "There is no possible truce," Arias insisted, "We shall crush each other to death." Arias' smaller force took position in and around the farmstead of an estate called "La Verde." An eerie calm prevailed as the massive rebel army in turn surrounded them and encircled the buildings.

Mitre was completely confident of his victory, and he gave orders to take the farmstead and flush the rebels out. His soldiers complied and started their advance towards the farm's buildings. At that moment the reason for Arias' intransigence was abruptly revealed: Mitre's forces were met with an unrelenting barrage of gunfire. No one had even considered this possibility, but Arias' regiment had been furnished with the first shipment of Remington rifles to have ever arrived in Argentina. They were thus able to shoot at Mitre's forces nonstop, while the attacking rebels had to kneel and recharge. And this only applied to those fortunate enough to have guns on them. Most others were barely equipped with knives or spears. In an instant, Mitre's numerical advantage had been shattered and the outlook of the battle had become totally uncertain.

For a while Mitre remained undaunted. He rode and roused his troops to battle, asking them to fight and to push on. They loyally obliged and kept up their efforts. Mitre's men were falling one after the other, among them several hardened warriors from the Paraguay campaign and other well-known fighters of high rank. A couple of hours later, the battlefield was littered with several hundred dead. Mitre had no choice but to accept that the tables had turned, and he ordered his troops to withdraw. Colonel Borges, however, argued against this decision, and stated that retreat made no sense:

"Too many lives have already been lost," he said, "and the enemy, after but a single more minute of fire, will have run out ammunition." 34

They must press on, Colonel Borges argued. But Mitre paid no attention, and just repeated his orders to retreat.

Contemporaries and later historians have puzzled over what Colonel Borges did next. At that point, he could have easily complied and pulled back along with everyone else. But the Colonel had evidently made up his mind to a very different path. Not only did he not retreat: he climbed on a white horse and put on a white poncho to make himself the more visible and to present an easy target. He then slowly rode towards enemy lines, straight to where the enemy gunfire was the thickest. Gutiérrez expressively describes Borges' grandfather's last actions:

He advanced calmly with his arms crossed and his face etched with an expression of sadness and bravery.35 A few more steps, and Colonel Borges fell, never to rise again, with two grievous wounds, both fatal."

Borges tells a somewhat more simplified version:

Mitre's forces were defeated; [Colonel] Borges, upon realizing this, put on a white poncho, mounted a white horse, and with twelve or fifteen soldiers following close behind him, slowly advanced towards the [enemy] trenches with his arms crossed. He got himself killed .... 36

In another interview, Borges adds:

The bullets pierced him, but that was precisely what he was looking for.37

 

Maldon and La Verde

Local (Argentine) references and the very Spanish-sounding names of Argentine combatants may obscure the main plot, but as many readers will have noticed by now, the narratives of "Maldon" and "La Verde" are incredibly similar in structure, and they share an uncanny number of similarities.38 As Borges would say, Maldon seems like a dream of La Verde, and La Verde a dream or a reflection of Maldon.

Both narratives start with an unexpected, unforeseen threat. The Vikings appear suddenly off the coast of Maldon and catch the English off guard. Mitre's troops were in the middle of maneuvers when they unexpectedly stumbled into Isidoro Arias' contingent. A messenger is dispatched in both cases to prevent the battle from occurring. Both offer a truce to the opposing army but are harshly rebuked. The Viking messenger states that combat can avoided by exchanging gold for peace, beagas wið gebeorge, stating it's better to avoid this rush of spears than to fight such a hard battle: þonne we swa hearde hilde dælon. Byrhtnoth doesn't even consider the proposal and offers back "poisonous spearpoints and ancient swords" as payment. In similar fashion, Mitre's messenger offers Lt. Colonel Arias a truce and amnesty but Arias steadfastly refuses, and his reply is just as forceful as Byrhtnoth's: he commands the messenger "go back and tell your men" that his troops are determined to fight to the death.

In both battles, leaders become overconfident. Byrhtnoth accepts the Viking request to come to land to fight; Mitre could equally be criticized for his ofermode: he was so confident of his victory that he refused to even consider the possibility of Arias' smaller contingent being able to counterattack. In both "Maldon" and "La Verde," this leads to unexpected defeat and despair. Byrhtnoth is surrounded and killed by Vikings; Mitre comes out personally unscathed but loses so many men that he feels forced to capitulate. In both narratives, the act of climbing on a horse acquires central importance. Colonel Borges climbs a white horse and courageously seeks death in "La Verde" while Godric steals Byrthnoth's steed and flees to the forest. The actions are similar but their moral significance is directly opposed: Borges' goal is to ride to his death, while Godric uses Byrthnoth's horse to flee as a coward, disregarding his own mandate of courage as well as his personal loyalty to Byrhtnoth. This is in fact the thread that underlies the two battle narratives: the opposition between those who want to flee and those who are willing to stay and face death out of honor. Both battles end with a focus on a solitary, final warrior who rushes on alone towards the enemy, in the thickest part of combat, knowing full well that he will get himself killed: in a sense, Colonel Borges' actions seem to mimic the courageous Godric: Næs þæt na se Godric þe ða guðe forbeah. The accounts of their respective deaths are uncannily similar. The anonymous "Maldon" poet writes:

swa he on þam folce   fyrmest eode,
heow and hynde   oð þæt he on hilde gecranc.
[Thus he went forth, first among that crowd,
hewing and wounding, until he fell dead in battle.] 39

Gutiérrez states:

Colonel Borges ... advanced towards where enemy gunfire was the thickest and most unrelenting followed by two or three soldiers .... A few steps later, Borges fell never to rise again.40

As one can see, it is not surprising that the battle of Maldon fascinated Borges: after all, the Anglo-Saxon poem alluded for him not only to a medieval struggle of epic overtones, but also deeply resonated with his own personal history. While thinking about these two poems I couldn't help but recall the verses from "Sueña Alonso Quijano":

La Verde fue un sueño de Maldon
y Maldon un sueño de La Verde
El doble sueño las confunde y algo
está pasando que pasó mucho antes.
Byrhtnoth duerme y sueña. Una batalla:
Los campos de La Verde y la metralla.41

 

991 AD: the Healing of an Intimate Discord

We can get an idea of the importance Borges attached to "The Battle of Maldon" from the short prose piece that he simply—and enigmatically—entitled "991 A.D." 42 This is, of course, a rather curious title. The battle at Maldon and the Old English poem about it could be considered arcane for everyday English-speaking audiences; given that the "Maldon" poem is utterly unknown in Argentina, it is easy to see that the title is beyond opaque for its intended Spanish-speaking readers. This is most likely another case of Borges resorting to metaphor and arcane symbolism to allude to deeply personal matters, for "991 A.D." is much more than a mere rendering of "The Battle of Maldon" into prose. Borges' reworking goes way beyond that: it fills out several unknowns about the poem's origins and anchors the events within a much broader and deeper context, while simultaneously alluding to Borges' personal myth and providing an answer to and a justification for the Argentine writer's own fate.

The original transcript for "The Battle of Maldon" was once described as fragmentum capite et calce mutilatum, a fragment mutilated at head and heel: both the beginning and the end of the poem are lost. In its present form, the poem begins in medias res, describing the English defenses springing into full gear, with several warriors stepping into battle and earl Byrhtnoth exhorting his troops to face the invading Viking army. We do not get to know how the Vikings arrived, nor how they were first detected. The poem ends just as abruptly, describing the heroic deaths of loyal men as they are overrun by Norsemen. The Argentine writer's piece picks up where the original trails off. Borges describes a small group of survivors who have taken refuge in the forest to regroup, get some rest from the battle and plan what do next. The translations below are mine, and they attempt to reflect the curious fact that Borges' Spanish-language prose rendering repeats the alliteration of the original Old English text:

Most of them felt that the battle, that living and changing thing, had hurled them into the pine forest. They were ten or twelve men in the afternoon. Men of the plow and the oar, of the tough toiling of the land and its expected fatigue; they were now warriors.43

The oldest of them, Aidan, addresses the rest of the band:

Byrhtnoth, who was our lord, has given up the spirit. I am now the oldest and likely the strongest one. I do not know how many winters I can count, but his time seems to me less than that which separates me from this morning. Werferth was asleep when the tolling of the bell woke me. I have the light sleep of old men. From the door I caught sight of the striped sails of the seamen (the Vikings), who had already dropped anchor. We harnessed the farm's horses and followed Byrhtnoth. Within sight of the enemy, weapons were handed out and the hands of many learned the wielding of shields and of irons.44

He then reviews the action that we're already familiar with:

From the other side of the river, a Viking messenger asked for a tribute of gold rings and our lord replied that he would indeed pay it with ancient swords. The rising tide of the river stood between the two armies. We feared war and longed for it, for it was inevitable. On my right was Werferth, and he was almost hit by a Norwegian arrow.

Young Werferth, who turns out to be his son, joins the speech:

"It was you who cut it, father, with your shield."

Aidan continues, and in this part of his speech Borges provides his own hypothesis for the earl's ofermod:

The seamen asked that we let them stride to the shore. Byrhtnoth consented. He did so, I believe, both because he was eager for the fight and to frighten the heathen with the faith he had placed in our courage. The enemies waded through the river, shields held high, until they stepped on to the grassland. Then came the meeting of men.

After recounting various details of the battle, Aidan announces his decision to the group:

A few of them fled and will be forever disparaged by everyone. Of those of us left here there is not a single one who has not slain a Norseman. It shall be up to us to prove we are worthy of having witnessed [Byrhtnoth's] death and the other deaths and deeds of this mighty day. I know the best way to do this. We shall take the shortcut and arrive at the village before the Vikings. From both sides of the road, we shall ambush them with arrows ....Then they shall kill us. We cannot survive our lord. It was he who commanded us this morning; now the orders are mine. I shall not suffer anyone to be a coward. I have spoken.

Several of the Saxons complain of their small numbers and the impossibility of success in this final enterprise. Among them, Werferth, the son of the leader:

"We're only ten, Aidan."

But Aidan retorts:

"We shall be nine. Werferth, my son, it is you that I am talking to now. What I will command you to do is not easy. You must go alone and leave us. You have to give up the fight, so that the deeds of this day will live on in the memory of men. You are the only one capable of saving them. You are the singer, the poet."

The narrative continues with the surprise and rebellion of Werferth, who fears being branded a coward for obeying the order to leave:

Werferth knelt down. It was the first time that his father spoke to him about his verses. He said in a clipped voice: "Father, will you let your son be branded a coward like the wretched ones who fled?"

His father replies:

"You have already given proof of not being a coward. We shall honor Byrhtnoth by giving up our lives; you shall honor him by saving his memory."

The warriors, led by Aidan, then move on to the village. The son, the poet, is left alone:

Werferth saw them fade into the shadow of the day and of leaves,
but his lips had already found a verse.

"The shadow of the day and of leaves" is a rather peculiar expression, which can be easily understood however, as a metaphor for Borges' blindness, which, as described in detail above, was the motivation for Borges' undertaking the study of Old English. In any case, neither the above dialogue nor the two characters of Aidan and Werferth appear in the original poem. Borges uses the poem's framework to capture his conflict between a military and a poetic destiny, central to his family history and biography. Indeed, in Borges' own words:

I always use [biographical elements], especially if I can in settings that are distant in space or time. It's a form of modesty. I haven't invented characters, like, say, Shakespeare or Dickens or Tolstoy did. No, I think I always see myself in impossible or unlikely situations; I think everything I write is autobiographical.45

It is thus not difficult to discern who Werferth actually stands for in "991 A.D." He is, of course, an instantiation of Borges himself: the descendant, the son who follows a mandate to be a poet instead of following the martial fate of his elders. His ancestors may have fulfilled the mandate to be brave in combat, but Werferth-Borges did not follow that path, and this reworking of Maldon provides him with a literary justification: in order for the heroic feats of his people to be preserved for posterity, one of them must be released from their military mandate and follow another vocation: that of letters and books. Borges thus frames one of his internal conflicts within the context of one of his favorite poems, and simultaneously solves a philological enigma, providing a possible identity for the author of the "Maldon" poem and absolving him—and himself—in the process. The fact that the combat ends in failure for the Saxons adds to its appeal; for Borges, "defeat has a dignity that noisy victory does not deserve."

The choice of names for this fiction is also interesting. Werferth (d. 915), Bishop of Worcester, was one of a small group of scholars whom King Alfred gathered around him: both the fictional and historical Werferth have in common a literary inclination. The etymology is also relevant: Werferth (Wærferth) is a typical Old English composite name (wær "faithful" + ferth "mind or spirit"), and therefore means "faithful mind or spirit." This meaning cannot have eluded Borges when it occurred to him to give that name to the young poet of this story, who loyally fulfills his father's mandate to preserve the memory of the battle.

 

The Intimate Convergence of Two Lineages

The text above also has a more abstract significance. In "The Battle of Maldon" and Old English heroic poetry in general, Borges finally found something that he had yearned for all his life. In his first literary phase Borges devoted himself to creating "an apocryphal mythology of a Buenos Aires that perhaps never existed." 46 This mythology is made up of a series of stories, essays and poems; its unlikely heroes were the compadritos "streetcorner thugs" and cuchilleros "knifefighters" of the neighborhood where Borges grew up, Palermo: wretched men of very poor lives, who, from Borges' perspective, had unwillingly created a "brave religion" based on a naïve and boundless courage. This was one of his most original and idiosyncratic contributions to Argentine letters, but he nonetheless continued to yearn for more. For decades he sought similar stories of innocent bravery from diverse regions and eras, looking for something that would match the tone and atmosphere of the stories and family experiences he had inherited from his own legendary past:

... what I really wanted and did not find at the time was the idea of Germanism. The idea, I suppose, was evolved not by the Germanic people themselves but by a Roman gentleman, Tacitus. I was led by Carlyle to think that I could find it in German literature. I found many other things; I am very grateful to Carlyle for having sent me to Schopenhauer, to Hölderlin, to Lessing, and so on. But the idea I had—the idea of men not at all intellectual but given over to loyalty, to bravery, to a manly submission to fate—this I did not find, for example, in the Nibelungenlied. All of that seemed too romantic for me. I was to find it years and years afterwards in the Norse sagas and in the study of Old English poetry. There I found at last what I had been looking for when I was a young man.47

After a pilgrimage of more than half a century, in Anglo-Saxon and Norse literature Borges had finally found what he had been looking for. We cannot fail to emphasize how significant this finding must have been for him. He had finally found a heroism similar to that of his criollo ancestors, but what's even more important, this new repository of courage was a "secret chamber" embodied in the remote origins of his other, British lineage, and his other family language, English. This goes a long way towards explaining his fondness for Anglo-Saxon war poetry over similar works of any other origin. Neither Achilles nor Troy ever spoke to Borges the way Anglo-Saxon England did:

The Iliad abounds in this kind of battle, but for a reason: the Achaeans struggle to recover Helen as the Trojans try to keep her. Besides, the kings and warriors who fight do so under the tutelage of some god who protects them and infuses them with this or that virtue. Borges was never as fond of those combats in the Iliad as much as in the brawls and scuffles that involved Anglo-Saxon tribal chiefs.48

Heroic feats are of course abundant in world literature, but to Borges, Old English was precious and special: in it he had found a literary corpus that he could claim as his own by birthright. Old English war poetry—unknown, modest, almost secret—was a direct link to personal British ancestry, which he in fact explicitly mentioned as one of his motivations for undertaking the study of these languages:

Another factor that [led me to the study of Old English and Old Norse] was my ancestry. It may be no more than a romantic superstition of mine, but the fact that the Haslams lived in Northumbria and Mercia—or, as they are today called, Northumberland and the Midlands—links me with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past.49

It is hard to read the above paragraph without being reminded of the two characters whose cynn or ancestry are mentioned in "Maldon": Æscferð, who proclaims that he wæs on Norðhymbron heardes cynne (265) and Ælfwine, who states: þæt ic wæs on Myrcon miccles cynnes (217). It is also interesting to note that even in an autobiographical essay, targeted towards a present-day audience, Borges would choose to provide the medieval names of both regions first, and only later volunteer the modern names for today's counties as clarifications, as if their current denominations were secondary in his thought. This makes evident that Borges had replaced the Victorian England of his immediate ancestors, of which he knew next to nothing, 50 with his own personal and mythical rendition of Anglo-Saxon England. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that he often expressed a very real link to the anonymous authors of Old English poems, as well as to the characters and feats mentioned in them. In a 1961 interview, Borges states he is studying Old English precisely because he is aware of the immortal nature of the soul. He adds that he is returning to this language through "the benefits of reincarnation." He further adds: "Why couldn't my soul have spoken in a body prior to the tenth century, that language that would later become English?" The three participants in the conversation laugh, "but was Borges serious?" wonders M.E. Vázquez, "or was he joking?" 51 The former seems definitively more likely. While taking his first steps in Old English, he explained, he felt that he was experiencing a homecoming:

I thought: I am returning to the language that my elders spoke fifty generations ago; I am returning to that language, I am recovering it. It's not the first time I use it; when I had other names, I spoke this language.52

As Borges became progressively immersed in Old English poetry, he came in fact to dream of Anglo-Saxon battles:

The other night, it was Brunanburh. I was there, or I suppose I was. I was a warrior at Brunanburh in 937 A.D.53

All the above was of course of enormous significance for Borges: he had finally found a realm, that of courage and arms, in which his two lineages fused. In his Saxon and perhaps Norse forebears' lineage, Borges could feel relieved, there were also heroes; in the "secret chamber" of the oldest English literature there were also battles and sword-wielding warriors, every bit as courageous as his Argentine and Uruguayan military ancestors. At the same time, he had finally found a very real justification for his own fate as a writer: he could freely do what others had done. The very fact that he was able to study and recite "Maldon" in the 20th century, almost a thousand years after the combat had taken place, was sufficient proof that the individual who composed it had fulfilled an essential role: without his intervention, the names and feats of those warriors would have vanished from history. The release Borges must have felt at this realization must have been immense: his fear of being branded a coward had lifted, and the existential split that had haunted him most of life had come to an end. It will surprise no one that out of all the battles in history that he could have alluded to, he would resort to the Battle of Maldon to express this reconciliation:

I once thought that my destiny as a mere reader was poor; now, at the age of seventy, I have come to suspect that having read and reread The Ballad of Maldon is perhaps no less a vivid and valuable experience than having fought at Maldon.54

In fact, towards the end of his life, Borges expressed these exact feelings:

When I think of my Argentine and Uruguayan ancestors, I think of the military; and when I think of my English ancestors, I think of Methodist preachers, doctors of philosophy, and mainly of books .... But after living eighty years, this discord has softened. I no longer think of it as a discord, but as a form of diversity. It is very likely that I have been enriched by these very different streaks.55

In the mythical realm of courage, outside of time and space, his two lineages had finally met: there was no longer any need to choose between his criollo military mandate and the letters inherited from his English ancestors, between a learned life and a path of action: the discord of his two lineages had finally healed. The inscriptions on the tombstone, and especially the "Maldon" half-verse, also reflect, therefore, this intimate convergence that Borges finally achieved in the last decades of his life. We can finally appreciate the significance of the inscription on the tombstone: it represents Borges' utmost desire to not fear death in his last moments, expressed through the fusion of his two lineages. The exhortation is of course in Old English, but it also constitutes an implicit reference to his martial ancestors, and to the fierce mythology of courage and iron with which he populated the streets of Buenos Aires: la secta del cuchillo y del coraje. Within this context, Borges' tombstone remains, through its references to "Maldon," paradoxically and deeply Argentine.

But who was actually responsible for selecting the inscription to be carved on Borges' tombstone? As explained above, it was María Kodama who provided the sculptor with the design and the inscription. Knowing María, however, I always had the impression that there was something more to it. I had the feeling that María, in her typical modesty and self-effacement, would never have simply chosen a verse of her liking, but would have instead made sure that whatever was in Borges' mind in his final days would end up etched in stone for eternity. A number of sources offer us rather solid indications that this is exactly what transpired.

As to Old English poetry in general (and "Maldon" specifically) representing a fusion of Borges' two lineages, the following statements by Estela Canto provide revealing evidence.56

[In Old English literature] we have battles that follow one after the other: we witness clashes of small armies that do not fight for an ideal, as if the simple pleasure of fighting prevailed over any specific motivation: men fight for the sake of fighting ... Borges sometimes commented that there was a similarity between these blind clashes in Northumbría or Mercia and the fights of compadres, gauchos matreros or cuchilleros of [his] mythology.57

I only read these assertions by Estela Canto several years after reaching the conclusions given earlier, and I was pleasantly surprised by the precise nature of the confirmation they provided:

In every lineage there are some ancestors that are entirely forgotten (in fact, most of them are) and a few others that, for either clear or mysterious reason, end up influencing their descendants' fate. Borges' manifest ancestry was conspicuous: his paternal grandmother and his mother. To him, his grandmother represented cosmopolitanism; his mother, the will to be rooted, to be Argentine above all. These two tendencies were always opposed in him. And it is probable that the cumbersome, somber clashes of 10th century Anglo-Saxons as well as the feuds of Argentine knife-wielders would lead him to try to unify in a single symbol these two most marked aspects of his being.58

Within the context of his life and works, this unifying symbol is of course the Lindisfarne stone with its seven warriors, in which Borges saw a reference to both "The Battle of Maldon" and the knife-fighters of his youth. It is indeed profoundly fitting and appropriate that the very personal association that Borges had made decades earlier between the Lindisfarne stone and "The Battle of Maldon" would end up sculpted on his tombstone.59 Through the lens of his personal myth, this represented the final fusion of his two hitherto opposed lineages.

Another moving and relevant testimony can be found in the following assertion by the nurse who took care of Borges in his final days. It is clear that he spent those days dreaming of medieval combats:

He used to share some of his dreams with me. Scenes of cavalry warfare in Iceland were frequent. 60

It is highly likely, given the above, that Borges entered death like his forebears, losing himself in a dream of a battle. As he himself says in "El Sur":

He felt that if he could then have chosen or dreamed up his death, this is the death he would have chosen or dreamed.61

We have further solid confirmation that such battle scenes were in his mind during this last period of his life, and that Maldon was the battle that he chose to represent his own last fight. More specifically, we can state with certainty that Borges associated facing his own death with courage with the displays of bravery depicted in "The Battle of Maldon." Testimony provided by Hector Bianciotti, 62 a celebrated man of letters, and a friend and compatriot who was often at the writer's side during his final illness, sheds unexpected light on this event. From Bianciotti we have the following firsthand report:

In mid-January [1986], [Borges] was taken to a hospital [in Geneva] where, after suffering a hemorrhage, he had to submit to painful medical tests. I visited him there. We chatted, as if we were carrying on a dialogue from the night before, in bits and pieces. He talked of an old friend of Samuel Johnson who published a book under the title The Joys of Madness, and of Cocteau, whom he liked, at least partly, and he recited one of his poems to me. He told me that for some time the luminous fog that blurred his vision had turned violet, a color he detested. Then he described in detail the preface he had started to write—the night before, in the hospital—for the Pléiade [French] edition of his work.

It was clear to me that his condition was grave. I remembered that he liked to cite the example of Socrates on his last day, when he refused to talk of death and went on discussing ideas with his friends, not wanting to make pathetic statements of farewell; he sent away his wife and children and nearly dismissed a friend who cried, because he wanted to talk in peace—simply talk, continue to think.

Borges did not express any displeasure at being in hospital. He made jokes about the meals they served him—soups and purées whose tastes were indefinable. "It could," he said, "be made of silk, of marble, of an extract of clouds." He was animated by this conversation, and María Kodama and I asked him if he would get up and walk with us in the corridor. Not without some fears, he accepted. At first trembling, he managed to raise himself straight and firm. He smiled, and in a voice that was weak but that became heavy and jarring and strong when he recited Anglo-Saxon or Icelandic texts, he chanted —one might say "intoned"—[a] verse from the Ballad of Maldon, just as we were leaving the corridor:

he let him þa of handon   leofne fleogan
hafoc wið þæs holtes,   and to þære hilde stop.

[He then released his beloved falcon
into the forest and entered the battle.] 63

Buenos Aires