Toswell: Borges, The Unacknowledged Medievalist

M.J. Toswell. Borges, The Unacknowledged Medievalist: Old English and Old Norse in His Life and Work. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Reviewed by Daniel de Paula Valentim Hutchins (daniel.hutchins@ttu.edu)

In this concise study of the influence of medievalism on the life and writing of Jorge Luis Borges (1889-1996),  M. J. Toswell offers not only copious documentation of Borges’s lifelong fascination with Old English and Old Norse but also several compelling reasons for reconsidering Borges’s work in light of these connections. Though it may come as no surprise to even the casual reader of Borges that he was in dialogue with medievalism – his adaptation of a medieval bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957), is the best known but not the only explicit example of this dialogue in his work – Toswell digs deeper than others have before in exploring these connections and plumbing them for a better understanding of Borges as a writer.

For example, early in her introduction, Toswell claims that Borges “partakes of a profoundly medieval attitude to authority. [For Borges], texts derive each from the other, and aspiring to originality is always a mistake – despite the popularity of the idea in the modern era” (5). The non-medievalist reading these lines (and perhaps many medievalists as well) may be struck by how close Toswell’s characterization of a “medieval attitude” resembles Derridean poststructuralism: positing an origin or ascribing a total completeness to a text is ultimately a wishful fantasy; the logos can never be fully present. A bit later in her introduction, Toswell explains how the Anglo-Saxon word for poet, scop, meant a “shaper” or “maker,” one who mixes the words which result in a poem. She proceeds to compare this idea of poetry with Borges’s title for a collection of critical essays, El Hacedor, or literally translated from Spanish, The Maker (9).

For me, moments like this in Toswell’s work, moments in which she takes an insight about the influence of medievalism on Borges and uses that insight to transform my understanding of both Borges as a writer and of medievalism itself, are by far the most exciting and successful parts of the work. After reading passages from Toswell’s book like the one above I found myself going back to my favorite Borges short stories and rereading them with a new eye. And, indeed, though her close reading is acute and her research meticulous, I found myself a bit disappointed (unfairly, perhaps) that rather than anchor her book with these moments of keen lucidity, Toswell instead chose a more straightforward philological approach, unfolding her analysis first through biography and later through the overlapping facets of Borges’s career as a writer and public intellectual: poet, scholar, and “fabulist” (i.e. author of prose fiction).

Chapter one is a brief introduction in which Toswell outlines her chapters and presents her main thesis; namely, that Borges’s lifelong interest in Germanic medievalism, “including both Old English and Old Norse” was not a mere hobby (as Borges himself, on more than one occasion, fondly called it) but, rather, remains a crucial key for unlocking the meaning of Borges’s work (10). Chapter two undertakes to situate the historical Borges in the literary and cultural landscape that brought him into being as a major world writer of the twentieth century. To Toswell’s credit, however, rather than offering us a biography of Borges that takes us from childhood to adulthood, she begins with a close look at the author’s gravestone, located in Geneva in the Cimetiére Plainpalais. On one side of Borges’s gravestone is a quote from an Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon, “Our spirit must be sterner, our heart the braver, our soul the greater as our power diminishes” (14). For the other side, Borges (with the help of María Kodoma, the person who knew him best for the last twenty years of his life and who he married a few months before his death) chose a line from the Old Norse Völsungassaga, “He takes the sword Gram and lays it naked between them” (15). Toswell’s decision to begin with Borges’s gravestone is not only stylish, it also emphasizes the importance of medievalism in his life and work.

Two important facts about Borges: first, he was one-quarter English. His paternal grandmother was named Frances “Fanny” Haslam and hailed from Northumbria (16). Thus, Borges was raised in a bilingual household and spoke, wrote, and read English as naturally as he did Spanish, benefiting from this father’s expansive English-language library which included, “the early works of H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, and especially Robert Louis Stevenson” (16-17). Adding to this cosmopolitanism, in 1914 when he was fifteen the entire family moved from Buenos Aires to Geneva and he thus spent his high school years at a French language school, the Collège Calvin. Second fact: when Borges was fifty years old, he went blind. His father had gone blind when Borges was a teenager (16). Though Borges had a wide knowledge of medievalism by this point and, indeed, had already incorporated many ideas, themes, kennings, and plot-lines from medieval writings into his short fiction and poetry, it was not until his blindness that he began to publish, always collaboratively (at that point, how could he work otherwise?), serious scholarship on medieval subjects, beginning with the study, co-written with María Esther Vasquez, Literaturas Germánicas Medievales or Medieval Germanic Literatures (20). As Toswell writes elsewhere, rather poetically:

Borges connects his blindness to his speaking of Old English, a blunt tongue which should perhaps not delight him as much as it does. His memory he describes as failing, his life as repetitious and cyclical. Nonetheless, there is hope, and he can access the possibilities of the universe. Old English seems, paradoxically since it is largely a dead language, to offer him access to that universe. (35)

Chapter three deepens and expands the case for the influence of medievalism in Borges’s poetry, focusing on the theme of heroism and the “construction of a hero” – a typology firmly held in place for him in works like Beowulf as well as the many sagas and poems of the Old English and Old Norse traditions. But there are other influences as well: references to Draupnir, the great gold ring of the Norse gods, and to the idea that toenails and fingernails continue to grow after death, which Toswell, following Joseph Tyler, wants to tie to “the Norse mythological idea of a ship made from the fingernails of the dead appearing at Ragnarok” (32). When it came to his knowledge of medievalism, Borges was not a tourist or hobbyist. He showed the same enthusiasm for footnotes, curiosities, and other often overlooked ephemera as he did for a major canonical work like Beowulf.

Chapter four focuses on Borges’s scholarly work on medievalism (including a short, meaty section on Dante) but begins with a personal anecdote from 2010 in which Toswell recalls her work translating another one of Borges’s scholarly works, Antiguas Literaturas Germánicas (Ancient Germanic Literatures), from Spanish to English while on board a freighter ship going around the world. Here is a glimpse of a different book, one that lives along the margins of the one I am reviewing: a memoir by Toswell that shows the intersections of the personal and scholarly in her work and life. In the following passage, Toswell relates how she is hard at work on the translation of Antiguas Literaturas Germánicas when her freighter, some distance from Kuala Lampur, encounters very rough seas.

In a somewhat hallucinatory state, as I rolled back and forth across my single bed trying in vain to jam a toe somewhere to give myself some leverage, I realized that this situation called for Borges. And so, my first contribution to the scholarly study in English of Borges’ study of Old English and Old Norse medievalism was accomplished with a following surge (and a tornado wandering about) in the Persian Sea heading south to the Indian Ocean. By the time we were off the coast of Sri Lanka ten miserable days later, arriving in calm seas with a pleasant following wind, my first draft was complete. As we neared Kuala Lumpur, while passing through the notorious Straits of Malacca, I finished a second draft and some introductory material. (48)

What better state than a hallucinatory one to work on Borges, after all? Here we can see an easy and, indeed, perfectly organic homeostasis between the critical and the autobiographical. And why not? Doesn’t every work of criticism double as a kind of memoir for its author? Aren’t all our best, most creative ideas haunted, in a sense, by the manifold life experiences that brought them into being? Indeed, Toswell’s book succeeds because of the work she does to show us this same trend in Borges’s writing, the way his lifelong fascination with medievalism overflowed into his criticism, fiction, and poetry.

Chapter five, “Borges the Fabulist,” (which also begins with another anecdote from Toswell’s life) continues to make the point that a more holistic, more in-depth appreciation for Borges’s medievalism makes us better readers of his writing in general and, in this case, his short fiction in particular. Toswell’s treatments of stories like, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” “Brodie’s Report,” and especially “Funes, The Memorious” (Funes, El Memorioso, also translated to English as “Funes, His Memory”), open up new sightlines for close reading and interpretation. In this last story, Toswell focuses on the themes of memory and of organizing knowledge. Borges, she reminds us, was, among many other things, a professional librarian (73). For Toswell, the character of Ireneo Funes, a Uruguayan son of a washerwoman who is bucked off a horse, crippled, and emerges from this horrible ordeal with a total recall memory, stands in for Pliny, whose Historia Naturalis Funes borrows, early in the story, from our first-person narrator, Bernardo Juan Francisco. “Organizing knowledge, and getting it set in place so that all of humanity would be properly organized to worship God: these were typical medieval preoccupations, and Borges would have known it” (73). Furthermore, Toswell adds that, “The short story depends heavily on Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, a natural history rediscovered and copied in the medieval period, and its dependence on Pliny is remarkably medieval” (73). The themes of memory and knowledge so prevalent in this story can be found throughout Borges’s prose fiction writing. Toswell’s work here is to uncover and correctly identify an outsized vein of thematic content in those writings that was inspired by medievalism and its outsized presence in Borges’s imaginative life.

Chapter six of the book functions as a conclusion, encapsulating all that has come before it by, once again, splitting Borges three ways: poet, scholar, and writer of prose fiction. For those of us who have read and taught Borges, Toswell’s book may offer an uncanny sense of encountering an old friend under new circumstances, a mix of the strange and the familiar. For scholars of medieval studies who have yet to read Borges, Toswell’s analysis of how Borges used (and, in a sense, lived) medievalism will serve as a sustained and earnest argument for why you should do so immediately.

Daniel de Paula Valentim Hutchins

Texas Tech University

Oexle: Die Gegenwart des Mittelalters

Otto Gerhard Oexle, Die Gegenwart des Mittelalters. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2015.

Reviewed by Richard Utz (richard.utz@lmc.gatech.edu)

This delightful cahier of 45 pages, published under the auspices of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, offers a revised version of a paper Otto Gerhard Oexle originally presented at the Academy's Mittelalterzentrum in 2012. To speak about the "Presence" or "Contemporaneity" of the Middle Ages, Oexle addresses three general areas:

1) An immediate presence visible in remains and monuments: Oexle quickly summarizes what we know about the fascination we moderns have with historical objects and buildings, and he likens the immediacy ("Unmittelbarkeit") of the pleasure experienced by lay visitors with that experienced by professional historians. He also underlines how his own early paleographic and codicological contact with material medievalia served as prime incentive for seeking future pleasurable moments through historic discovery.

2) The concept of a "Middle Age" as invented by late medieval (he does not use "Renaissance") humanists: This second section, which demonstrates the wealth of knowledge Oexle has gathered during a lifetime of study, advances two main observations: That the humanists' conceptualization of the medium aevum or media aetas is an invention, and that, epistemologically speaking, this invention is itself an attribution of meaning ("Sinnzuweisung" or "Bedeutungszuweisung") anchored in its own historical and cultural contexts. As a way of structuring historical time, this attribution of meaning rendered history comprehensible, imaginable, and teachable, but its semantic longevity has made it impossible for historians to advance perhaps different, more appropriate periodizations and ways of imagining historical development. For example, the strict semantic separation between the Middle Ages and Modernity allows historians of modernity to disregard pre-modern/postmedieval completely. Thus, important early modern transitional changes are obliterated from consideration. The invention of the Middle Ages as a distinct historical period is only fully achieved when Enlightenment thinkers conceive of a "new time" ("Neuzeit"/modern age) that needs both a dark age against which an enlightened age can shine all the more brightly, and a pre-industrial world during which humans were safely rooted in allegedly natural orders (family, relatives, village, parish, etc.). "The Middle Ages," Oexle writes, "is the only era in western history that is perceived to exist within such a dichotomy. We are dealing with two conflicting forms of perception, which are mutually antagonistic and complementary, constituting both the interest in and the emphatically declaimed rejection of the Middle Ages" (17; my translation).         

3) The concept of the "Middle Ages" as invented by modernity: Oexle first rejects simplistic categorizations of entire periods as exclusively friendly (Romanticism) or inimical (Enlightenment) to medieval culture. He then declares that the term “reception” (Mittelalter-Rezeption) does not appropriately describe the process by which modernity simply (passively) receives, but (actively) visits its own desire for identity upon the predecessor period in an act of cultural memorialization. Even if Oexle claims otherwise, this distinction is a clear disciplinary slight towards colleagues in Germanistik, whom he denies the methodological preparation to dealing with modern medievalisms. It seems that only historians can appropriately deal with the various modernist attributions of meaning to the Middle Ages. Finally, Oexle dedicates not even two pages to the nineteenth-century’s active remembering of medieval culture (Victor Hugo; the Pre-Raphaelites) to move on to twentieth-century medievalism in music and architecture. This rhetorical move inverts David Matthews’ recent focus on a canonical nineteenth-century medievalism on the one hand and a “residual” medievalism in the twentieth century on the other (Medievalism. A Critical History, 2015, 140-65). Oexle, perhaps because he focuses almost exclusively on developments in Germany (and France), does not confirm Matthews’ claim of a medieval revival central to nineteenth-century (British) culture and a consequent abating of medievalism as a dominant cultural force. Instead, he follows the findings of Annette Kreutziger-Herr (Im Schatzhaus der Erinnerung: Die Musik des Mittelalters in der Neuzeit, 2008; Ein Traum vom Mittelalter: Die Wiederentdeckung mittelalterlicher Musik in der Neuzeit, 2003), mentions the “explosion” (27) of an imaginary Middle Ages in the works of Stefan George, Hermann Hesse, and Thomas Mann, and describes the medievalism of the Bauhaus (Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, Peter Behrens). It is only when he discusses examples of twentieth-century architecture (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial Church, Berlin; Wertheim department store, Berlin; Hoechst administration building, Frankfurt) that he acknowledges (and seems to agree with Matthews) that most of these buildings are only residually, and barely recognizably, ‘medieval’.

Oexle’s essay ends rather abruptly, just when I was hoping for some thoughts about examples of medievalism in the more recent “Gegenwart,” anything after the early twentieth century. However, all we are left with is the assertion that the quantity of medievalist “remnants” and “monuments” we can discern has increased, an observation David Matthews attributes to medievalism’s move away from cultural centrality to marginality since the nineteenth century. While this question remains unresolved in this essay, Oexle does present ample evidence that medievalist historians can make valuable contributions to understanding modernity (“Moderne”), a term he appears to equate with contemporaneity (“Gegenwart”). Postmodernity, computer and video games, and even movies never enter Oexle’s consideration, perhaps simply a generational issue.

Richard Utz
Georgia Institute of Technology

Wood: The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages

Ian Wood. The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Reviewed by Melanie Maddox (mcmaddox@me.com)

In The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages, Professor Ian Wood of Leeds University writes with noble erudition about the time period from the Fall of Rome to the early Middle Ages (AD 300-700) and considers how scholars have viewed the role of the time period in shaping Europe. Part of the book’s lofty goal is to respond to Charles Clarke, the United Kingdom’s former Education Secretary (2002-2004). The preface references a quote attributed to Clarke as saying “I don’t mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes but there is no reason for the state to pay for them” (vii). In response, Wood vehemently disagrees and states that indeed pre-modern history is important. Most particularly when one considers how it has been “exploited” through the centuries to describe disturbing events or to prove or disprove historical views (vii-viii). In fact one only has to turn on the evening news to see terms like barbaric, medieval and crusaders being used to describe troubles in the Middle East. This is just one way in which one can see the past being ill-used (vii). Wood points out that the period AD 300-700 has been important in arguments surrounding “aristocratic privilege” and “despotism in the eighteenth century,” as well as “class conflict, exploitation by foreign powers, and nationalism in the nineteenth” and “limits of Germany and the nature of Europe in the twentieth” (viii). The preface goes on to acknowledge that those who choose to write about history are not only influenced by their understanding of the past, but also by their current experiences and external influences. One example given of this was Michael Wallace-Hadrill’s work on “the early medieval past and its Germanic barbarians” and how Wallace-Hadrill’s “wartime experiences” might have influenced his understanding of history (x). For anyone who has studied or taught a course on modern Europe it is clear that the past does matter, because it is the basis of “European identity” (xi) and is used as part of the construct to explain how European states achieved and perceived the form they have today.

The book consists of sixteen chapters that lead the reader through historical perceptions of the Fall of Rome, the arrival of the barbarians and the use of this history beginning with the eighteenth century. By the end of book, Wood has shown that our perceptions of our shared European past do not only come from our knowledge of events in the past, but that “historical discourse [also] comes out of cultural, social and political circumstances” (327). Wood shows in these chapters of the book how Rome’s fall and the arrival of the barbarians have been used “through debates of the rights of the French nobility, the origins of democracy, the oppression of indigenous populations … calls for religious revival, the creation of the German nation, the establishment of German frontiers, and … the … search for European unity” (327). Each of Wood’s chapters are densely packed with discussion of scholars and their works.

Chapter one sets the stage for the book by considering the period AD 300-700 and its importance to how Europeans view their inheritance from the Roman past and the emergence of the “barbarian kingdoms.” Wood notes the differing interpretations of political, cultural and other changes during this time period focusing on three main viewpoints: 1. that of the “Romanists” (those that focus on “the internal history of the Roman Empire”), 2. the “Germanists” (those that focus on “the contributions of the barbarians”), and 3. the Ecclesiastical or the “triumph of Christianity” school (8). The chapter discusses how each of these three viewpoints have played a role in different countries in Europe and have been approached by different scholars. The chapter ends with an outline by Wood on what the book will and will not consider, while he notes his aim of explaining why differing discourses on the time period’s history have developed as they have, by considering the “whole tradition of historiography” as it relates to the three main viewpoints above (18). Keeping this aim in mind, the scholars focused on in chapters two through fifteen are briefly mentioned below.

Chapter two starts the process of reviewing the historiography by analyzing the role of eighteenth-century authors like Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers and abbé Jean-Baptiste Du Bos in the interpretation of the Franks and their role in the creation of the state of France. Wood makes the point that “the French found it less easy to decide whether to see themselves as heirs of Rome or Germania,” leading them to devote themselves to deliberations over the end of Rome and the arrival of the barbarians (19). The chapter carefully contrasts the work of Boulainvilliers and Du Bos, noting the support of the former for the “Germanists” and the latter for the “Romanists”.

Due to the depth and breadth of the information covered in chapters three through fifteen, I will only briefly outline some particularly interesting points of scholars discussed in chapters six and nine. One of the key points that emerges from this book is that not only are a country’s political views influenced by its understanding of the past, but also scholars’ views of history are affected by the political events they experience. Chapter six starts with the historical period following Napoleon’s defeat where the Restorationist François Guizot used his writings as public instructions on history and Augustin Thierry employed his knowledge of writing styles in the novels by contemporaries like Walter Scott and the use of language to complete histories of “the oppressed classes” for both the Frankish invasion of Gaul and the invasion of England by the Normans (102 and 112). Both men’s approaches are not surprising given that François Guizot was a politician and historian, while Augustin Thierry was a self-described plebeian and historian of the middle class (100). Guizot and Thierry are just two of the historians mentioned in the chapter that helped to move mid-nineteenth century discussions into “terms of nation, class and race” (94).

Chapter nine studies the German tradition of considering “language, literature and law” and their roles as another available source for historians (154). The chapter places German scholarship and its use, language, law and literature within the context of German efforts to understand the past through nationalistic discourse during the nineteenth century (154). The “patriotic” drive for the “promotion of German history,” provided academia with one of the most well-known series ever to be created, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The chapter goes on to discuss that even though the Monumenta was a project to promote the nation of Germany, many of the political elite were conservative in nature and mistrustful of academia in general. The Monumenta would not have endured to take its place in historiography without the efforts of Georg Heinrich Pertz, biographer of Karl Freiherr vom Stein. Pertz’s commitment to the early edition, as well as the work of Theodor Mommsen and Bruno Krusch, helped the Monumenta to reach its place in academia, but Wood notes that one should still be cautious in assigning too much significance to the early editions, along with Pertz’s place as the creator of something new in the way of collecting and editing texts, due to the existence of editorial practice from at least “seventeenth-century France” (159).

Chapter sixteen, the book’s conclusion, shifts away from discussing academic debates on “the notion of Europe” to portrayals focused on a wider general audience; this being done by exhibits, books, television and other forms of media (310). Wood addresses these strategies and their use to interact with a wider audience regarding the debates over the “end of Rome” (312). Each of the outlets has introduced Rome’s end in a less rigorous way, but also opened the door for non-academic institutions like businesses and governments to have more of a say in the history they finance (312). Wood points out that the “Movers and Shakers” found in a 1999 review article by Guy Halsall could indeed be related to the “Germanists” and “Romanists” discussed in earlier chapters. “‘Movers’ were those who placed a great deal of emphasis on the impact of incoming barbarians, while ‘Shakers’ were those who saw the ‘tensions and changes within the Roman Empire’” (311). This final chapter goes on to discuss some of the more multidisciplinary approaches to the discussion of barbarian ethnicity. Exhibitions discussed also show that in the twentieth century collaborative efforts across borders demonstrated cooperation between the countries of Europe (including those of the east) in communicating a shared past. One of the most interesting contributions in the chapter’s discussion of museum exhibits and their role in promoting historical imaginings of individual countries is the consideration of how exhibits promoted by governments use the display of a common past to promote a united history for their citizens, the European Union or even the “reintegration of Central Europe into the Western European tradition” (325). The book ends by raising the point of “policing the discourses;” recognizing that the history of both objects and the early Middle Ages “have been interpreted and reinterpreted through various discourses,” and abused by not only historians (whether amateur or professional) but also politicians and archaeologists (327). Wood notes that multiple discourses by both professionals and laymen are important to weighing the legitimacy of current and past interpretations of history (329).

The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages is a tour de force of a scholar who has continually provided academia with important works ranging from the end of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the early Middle Ages. My biggest reaction in answer to the book’s purpose of responding to the claim that “medieval history is purely ornamental,” is that Professor Wood has written a book that will provide scholars with a seminal work for generations to come, but will unfortunately swamp the non-academic reader (i.e. those individuals like Charles Clarke most in need of such an essential and insightful lesson). 

Melanie Maddox

The Citadel