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Thorkelin y el Beowulf / Thorkelin and Beowulf

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jorge Luis Borges  and
Joe Stadolnik
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Extract

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) chose an unconventional hobby to occupy his middle age when he devoted himself in the 1950s to the study of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. His efforts were made easier by his fluency in English. “Georgie” had grown up speaking English with his father and Staffordshire-born grandmother and reading English books in the family library (Williamson 34). He would later call the time spent in that library “the chief event of [his] life” (“Autobiographical Notes” 42). In the following essay, “Thorkelin y el Beowulf” (“Thorkelin and Beowulf”), Borges sympathizes with a fellow student of Anglo-Saxon whose own moment of bookish revelation would come to define him: Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), the first modern editor of Beowulf. This unpublished essay recounts Thorkelin's seemingly predestined attraction to the Beowulf manuscript and the catastrophic course of his long devotion.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 2 , March 2017 , pp. 462 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017

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References

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