SOURCE: “Medieval Germanic Elements in the Poetry of Jorge Luis Borges,” in Readerly/Writerly Texts, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1993, pp. 97–105.

In the following essay, Tyler demonstrates Borges's interest in medieval Germanic literature, and points to elements of it in his poetry.

Libros como el de Job, LA DIVINA COMEDIA, Macbeth (y, para mí, algunas de las sagas del Norte) prometen una larga inmortalidad …

Borges, “Sobre los clásicos.”¹

… In the preface to Literaturas germánicas medievales (1978), Borges states that the aim of his book is “to trace the origins of three literatures which emerged from a common root, and whose complex historical vicissitudes transformed and separated, as occurred also with the diverse languages in which they were written” (“Medieval Germanic Literatures” 7, hereafter referred to as MGL; my trans. Translations hereafter are my own). My aim here is to trace elements from those literatures in several poems included in his...