Kevin Barrett & Kevin MacDonald on “Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews (Re: Gaza)

 

[In this video Kevin Barrett talks with Dr Kevin MacDonald, and says:

“Evolutionary psychology scholar Kevin MacDonald discusses his new article ‘The Extreme Hyper-Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitudes Toward the Gaza War’ In it, he writes:

‘At least until the Gaza war, Jews have successfully depicted themselves as moral paragons and as champions of the downtrodden in the contemporary West…

This Jewish pose of moral superiority is a dangerous delusion, and we must be realistic what the future holds as Whites continue to lose political power in all Western countries. When the gloves come off, there is no limit to what Jews in power may do if their present power throughout the West continues to increase.

The ubiquitous multicultural propaganda of ethnic groups living in harmony throughout the West will quickly be transformed into a war of revenge for putative historical grievances that Jews harbor against the West, from the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans to the events of World War II.
This same revenge was fatal to many millions of Russians and Ukrainians. It’s the fate of the Palestinians that we are seeing unfold before our eyes.”

– KATANA]

TRANSCRIPT
(Words: 6,713 – 45:51 mins)

Kevin Barrett: Welcome Droopsy Hot Radio, broadcasting live from the [word unclear], the rooftop studio here in beautiful Stadia, Morocco. I’m Kevin Barrett, bringing on the most controversial, interesting, thoughtful, and often well informed guests that you’ll ever see in audio and video. And we are, of course, broadcasting live in video now here on Revolution Radio. Where you can find the ultimate in the free speech experience. No de-platforming, no censorship, nothing like that here at Revolution Radio.

Please support Revolution Radio however you can go to that website and figure out how. You can support me Kevin Barrett, at Kevin Barrett dot Substack.com. You can also check out my column over at the Unz’s Review at unzreview.com dot, and you can go to truthjihad.com to find even more rubrics. And I do still edit over at Veterans Today.

All right, let’s see what we can get going with here we have an interesting lineup today as usual. In the second hour, Fadi Lama comes on with an incredible new book which I finally got a chance to read. It’s called Why the West Can’t Win. And it’s a very good read. It goes into all of the reasons for the rise of the money power bankster dictatorship in the Western world, and the reasons that that dictatorship or that attempt to create a one world order based on the power of usury is, in fact, doomed! He provides strong empirical evidence for that.

Doctor Fadi Lama is a PhD in engineering, mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and he is also at, what does he have, other engineering degrees from other institutions! He’ll come on in the second hour.

The first hour, Doctor Kevin MacDonald just put out a great new piece called The Extreme Hyper Ethnocentrism of Jews on Display in Israeli Attitude Towards the Gaza War. And that’s what we’re going to talk about in the first hour, if we can find Kevin MacDonald. There we go.

Hello, Kevin. I can hear you now.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I don’t know what happened. Turned all the way up. It never had not worked before. I don’t understand it. I don’t get it.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s always conceivable that some of the usual suspects are sabotaging us, but it’s also quite possible that something else is going on. But I don’t know what it would be.

So let’s talk about your new article. I was just introducing it on the Extreme Hyper Ethnocentrism of jews on Display in Israeli Attitude Towards the Gaza War. And the striking things about your article, I guess, are the pretty serious warning about the fate of Gaza could be the fate of other countries and of the West. A lot of people, of course, would think that’s exaggerated. I’m not so sure.

So maybe you can elaborate on that. Why is the genocidal mania that’s overtaken Israel is related to jewish ethnocentrism and how that’s actually a threat to the West as well?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, well, I think every time jews have had, you know, absolute power, as they did in the Soviet Union for 20, 30 years there, and they have exercised it brutally against their enemies. And I’m concerned that we’ll see that again.

Now, you see, and you see it, you know, look at the Old Testament. I mean, all the injunctions for all the desires for genocide of these people who are their enemies. And all the jewish religious writing saying basically that gentiles are another species, they’re below us, they’re basically animals and that sort of thing.

And then you see that rhetoric regarding the Palestinians, and you will see that regarding Europeans. Because if and when we lose power, we haven’t lost power yet, obviously.

But I’m just concerned about the future because clearly the jewish establishment is desiring more and more immigration. So all the Western European countries, United States, Canada, Australia, they will all be minority White countries at some point. White people may not have enough power, political power, to really resist what is going on. And I just fear that jewish ethics is entirely self centered! For the interests of the group, nothing more! And completely the opposite of western ethics, which is universalist. You know, Kant’s categorical imperative.

Basically, you do what anybody else could do in that situation, you’d be okay with it.

So it’s like that sort of western universalism, which is unique in the world, really. Other cultures tend to be very ethocentric and they privileged their own group. But the West has this long liberal tradition really stemming from the Enlightenment, but in a way going earlier than that. And I trace it back to evolutionary roots in my book on Western Individualism. But that’s the basic idea that the West is tied to universalism. And there’s this sense that we should be universalist. It’s the moral thing to do, that we should basically take care of other people and see their point of view and all that.

Jewish ethics isn’t completely foreign! You know, it’s like you don’t care about what they think. The more Orthodox you get, and the Orthodox have taken over Israel. And I like today I get this email from Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, and he’s been in Israel. He comes back to this message and basically he says:

“What happened on October 7 was anti-semitism.”
 
And you always see this by the jewish apologists that there is no context to what happened on October 7. There’s nothing about the blockade that’s been going on since 2003, nothing about all the oppressive policies that Israel’s engaged in over the years.

And what Israel’s doing is absolutely destroying Gaza! It’ll never really come back for years and years, if ever.

Kevin Barrett: Let me just question the idea that the West is so much more universalist and completely non-ethnocentric.
I mean, I think there’s some truths you’re talking about.

Kevin MacDonald: I don’t say it’s completely non-ethnocentric. Okay. But there certainly can be ethnocentric, but it’s relatively less than other cultures. And again, if you look at Joseph Heinrich’s book as well on Individuals in the West. He talks about how unique Western culture is. He talks about western universalism. And that’s exactly the big point of my book.

We are different. And it’s a problem now because western universalism, it’s hard to oppose these movements, these jewish intellectual movements and political movements, because they’re always phrased in universal terms. They’re always phrased in moral terms. And Westerners are suckers for that!

I mean, they want to be good people. Westerners don’t rely on kinship. They rely on being a good person in the group, having a good reputation.

And right now, Western culture is completely determined by these often jewish elites in the media and the academic world and so on.

So what needs to be a good person is to be totally accepting of immigration and your culture is nothing special, and let them come in and don’t worry about anything in the future.

But in-group out, group conflict, based on ethnicity has been going on forever, and it’s not going to stop now!

So I’m pessimistic about the future because I don’t see any big force in the West trying to turn back this tide. It’s just not going to happen.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I actually, over time, I’ve become more sympathetic to your viewpoint. You know, when we first started having these discussions on my radio show, I don’t know, ten years ago or something, I was still, you know, kind of holding you at arm’s length and saying, but this and that.

Over time, I’ve realized that there’s a lot more truth to what you’re saying and a lot more of a good scholarly basis to your work than maybe I had realized, probably, than a lot of other people realized, too.

Let me say, however, I still think that when we talk about Western universalism, the way it manifests itself and often has in going back a ways in the history, is actually not much better, maybe even worse, than the kind of traditional tribalism of a lot of other traditional people.

That is, if you look at the way Americans behaved in Vietnam, with Korea, with Vietnam, with Indonesia in 1965, and all of these other “Holocaust”, quote, unquote, “the American Holocaust” that Chomsky and Wolczak wrote about in their book on Western terrorism, where they came up with about 60 million people murdered by US military and CIA interventions since World War Two.

The ugly American who goes to these places and murders millions of people to try to impose the American way and American hegemony on these cultures. He thinks he’s universalist, and he uses universalist propaganda in his media back home to get the people to imagine that they’re doing something universalist and non-ethnocentric. But there’s nobody more ethnocentric than an arrogant universalist who thinks that his way is the universal way!

And so I kind of question whether this so-called universalism has made Westerners so kind and nice and gentle. You know, when you take those 60 million people that the US murdered since World War Two, then you add another 30 million or so with a post 9/11 era, it seems to me that these kind general universalists are actually a lot more murderous than the tribalists.
Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, the Western culture has always been very militarized and very expansive and also been very inventive and prone to adventurism.

I mean, the Indo-European legacy in Western culture is basically that. And the West has been extremely successful, unlike other cultures when they had been able, … You look at around the world, cultures that have been successful have expanded. They have dominated other peoples and all that.

But the West, you know, there’s these two traditions in the West. One is that Indo-European militarized version, and that is still there to some extent. But you also have now, especially since 1965. I mean, before that, it was anti-communism, and they were very concerned, correctly so.

I mean, the Soviet Union was a dangerous foe, and they were opposing communism, I get it. But especially since 9/11 we’ve had these wars basically for Israel, and we have a new elite in the country. It’s a very aggressive leap. They want to maintain western hegemony desperately. That’s why we’re fighting in Ukraine, and we’re upping the ante now. They’re allowing Ukraine to target Russia. And so, yeah, that’s a part of our reality.

But you think about say, slavery. You know, we, Western conquest in America, then they brought in slaves from Africa and all that.

But, yeah, it was also, Western culture is the only culture that ended it for moral reasons. And this northern European culture of radical individualism. And they condemn slavery in the 19th century, especially the British started there, and they ended slavery in 1831. They abolished the slave trade in 1808 or something like that. And, it’s no other culture. I mean, you look around the world, slavery was endemic to just about every culture in the world.

So Western culture is now being singled out for things that other cultures have done throughout history.

But, yeah, there’s some ethnocentrism there, and it’s just relatively submerged. It’s easily overcome. I mean, you can make, they did this experiment where they had college students come in and they gave them a bunch of questions or pictures, photos, and they said:

“Well, your responses were racist, anti-semitic”
 
Or something like that. Boy, when they showed them, when they went through it again, the people responded much more slowly. They don’t want to feel they’re a bad person! And we see that over and over again, especially among women. Women want to fit into the group. They want to be nice people! And now the culture is totally anti-Western, anti-White, anti-European.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, the culture has certainly gone to extremes lately. Speaking of the tribalism and stuff, I have a good anecdote for you. I’m living in Morocco now, and I’ve had some, let’s say, difficulties working with the local zoning authorities and construction guys, putting up a little room on the top of the house to house a library.

So it’s been quite frustrating. And I talked to a couple of in-laws, a couple of friends, and they talked. They said:

“You know, if you want to get any construction done or any repairs done in Morocco, it’s hopeless! It’s crazy! These people, they’ll eat your lunch, they’ll steal you blind and stuff, and they’ll do a terrible job.”

And so I said:

“Well, so how did you guys get your excellent houses built?”
 
And they both said:

“Well, my cousin!”

Kevin MacDonald: Exactly!

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Each of them had hired a cousin one of them had, had to fire the first guy he hired who wasn’t a cousin and bring in his cousin who just happened to show up at the right point.

And you know, that’s, I think, a kind of a common thing around the world. Doesn’t mean that there’s no use of universal dimension to the culture here or in other places where they still have these kinship ties. But it is different from the United States and also Europe today. And these cultural differences are real and you should be allowed to talk about them.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, that’s the problem with the third world, is in kinship. If you a job or something like that, you’re expected to., … Well, you expect kin to help you out, you know, as long as you’re related. It’s all about kinship. African cultures are like that. Extremely so!

It happens in Europe, but much less. That’s the thing about Europe. You have these high trust cultures where your reputation group is not dependent on being a relative. It’s dependent on, are you trustworthy, can I do business with you? That sort of thing.

And so you don’t have to rely on your cousin to build your house. And you don’t expect the person to cheat you, that sort of thing. That’s why Western culture has been so successful.

But that’s the problem. It hasn’t stopped in other parts of the world. It’s absolutely hardwired in those cultures. The Middle East, but also Africa. You know, China has always been that way, actually tribal and all that, collectivists. But they seem to be able to square the circle. But there’s a lot of corruption, but they clamp down on it, and the central government, to some extent at least, really does not want that. And they get it about trust.
Kevin Barrett: There are these ideologies, whether universalist or nationalist, that seem to play a role in kind of overcoming the tribalism.

And in fact, in Islamic history, the success of the religion of Islam and the legal system and the weights and measures and the injunctions to fair trade with everybody, not just your relatives, that played a big role in the bringing together of tribal peoples into a super tribe, or a huge world straddling kind of empire where people could trust each other. You could travel from one end of the earth to the other and not be robbed.

So, and I think with China, the ideologies of communism and now kind of Confucian nationalism play that kind of a role.

And then that leaves the question of could the West be saved by some sort of return to the religious roots that actually produced the great works of the West and produced this universalism that seems to have fallen upon hard times now as the West enters its decadent phase.

I just attended a conference in Croatia with Doctor E. Michael Jones and a bunch of Catholics. I was one of the two token Muslims there. And those folks are hoping for a revival of Catholicism to revive the West. I’m a bit skeptical, but I do think that these kinds of religions or greater religious like ideologies are really the only thing that can get people to sacrifice for something bigger than themselves and overcome these pitfalls of tribalism and human nature. But I know you’re not an advocate of that, so why not?

Kevin MacDonald: Well, I’m not religious myself. I just can’t see any evidence for it, you know, sort of scientific. And my basic paradigm is evolution and evolutionary biology, and I just don’t see room for that.

But I can see, I do think that religion is good. I mean you think about the Reconquista in Spain. They were very religious, and they treated the Muslims and threw them out. And European Christianity served Europe well for a very long time. Once you got to the 19th century and science and then, you know, militant Marxism and everything, you know, some of it is jewish, but I think a lot of it isn’t. It’s just the changes in intellectual, the scientific perspective sort of militates against that. And I don’t know!

But I do think if you look at America, religious Conservatives are, you know, mainstay in the Republican Party. You know, I don’t agree with all their substantive things.

I mean, they seem obsessed with abortion. But they’re good on average.

But then you look at the mainstream religions and they’re all into this stuff, and it’s pretty much universal, the Southern Baptist. I mean, the officialdom there. For example, James Edwards is a good guy who’s in Tennessee, political, successful guy. He’s been basically shunned by these people.

And I grew up Catholic and Catholic Church, as far as I can see, the pope is a communist. I mean, he’s way on the Left.

Kevin Barrett: Well, he did just say something about how there’s too much faggotry these day!

Kevin MacDonald: Too much what?

Kevin Barrett: He used to use the slur, the anti-homosexual slur. He said there was too much faggotry in the Church. [chuckling]

Kevin MacDonald: And then he profusely apologized.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah.

Kevin MacDonald: I mean, it is true. But he’s been all in favor of immigration and all that.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, yeah. That’s why this made such a big splash was its the first thing this pope has ever done that wasn’t politically correct and woke!

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, exactly!

Kevin Barrett: But, Kevin, don’t you think, though, that the issue here is really that these, you know what’s left of Christianity in the West is mostly just sort of fronting for the real religion of the West, which is secular, progressive, materialist humanisms and that that real religion which has underline all of these kinds of liberal tendencies that you and I both are skeptical about, that actual religion, which involves something overcoming the normal human condition in a kind of pretty extreme submission to something greater than the self and to transcendent values, which is very foreign, of course, to the secular outlook, but also to the kind of these namby pamby liberal religions that we’re talking about today as not being solutions. I agree they’re not. But I think I’ve heard arguments, including from some recent radio show guests, that real religion actually might be the solution.

But the only way it’s ever going to come back is when the civilization collapses and people are fighting for survival in red and tooth and claw.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, this, you know, Western culture has been expansive that we’ve said, and it’s also with capitalism, it’s greedy, materialism, and we want things, and as all humans do. Everybody would be rich than poor, I guess.

Kevin Barrett: Kevin, if you could hold your phone a little stiller, that would be better because we’re getting a lot of, …

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, it’s what the Western culture is now ugly! You know, I’m rooting for Russia in the Ukraine war because to me, Western culture is completely bankrupt! You know, it’s gone, completely woke.

And if Ukraine would win, you’d have more mass immigration, there would be, religion would take a dive ultimately, and Ukraine would just become another vassal of the West, where traditional Ukrainian culture would be condemned, as there already. There’s a long, fraught history with jews and Ukrainians.

But anyway, you know, that’s the problem. The West is completely corrupt as far as I can see, and it’s not getting any better. In a sense, it is, as you say, I mean, secular humanism, greed, wanting material things and that sort of thing. That’s what we want.

Kevin Barrett: And how about what’s the role of this jewish ethnocentrism that you just wrote about in this new article in The Decline of the West and even a threat of some kind of global tyranny. We know that the mythology of jewish religion involves, as you wrote in the article, kind of these messianic millenarian expectations that the jews will one day triumph over the goyim or all the non-jewish peoples and basically enslave them and rule the earth.

And we do see that jews have become the most powerful ethnic group in the world probably, by taking over the US Empire. And now they’re completely out of control in their own ethno-state over an occupied Palestine and ready to tear down the Islamic world’s oldest and greatest architectural monument, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and put up a blood sacrifice temple and start sacrificing pink heifers to symbolize this new era in which jews rule the world. And their mythology tells them that every jew will have, I forget how many thousands of goyim slaves.
Now, of course, that all sounds pretty exaggerated and it sounds like a pipe dream, but the role that jews are playing in this process does seem outsized and rather dangerous and destructive, does it not?

Kevin MacDonald: It is very destructive and dangerous. And we see that Israel is continuing this offensive in the south of Gaza now, despite the fact that all these nations, I mean, it’s hard to, I can’t think of any country that’s gung-ho in favor of what Israel’s doing, but they’re just thumbing their nose at it. They don’t care! Your international criminal court, what was the arrest, Netanyahu and all that, it doesn’t matter. They are in the driver’s seat and they know they have America completely in their hands! And that’s the reality. And they will use America as long as they can.

And, yeah, they are in the driver’s seat right now, but we’re not at the end game yet. But, yeah, jewish power is really on display here! I mean, you think of all the European countries, America, the Biden administration even, is condemning what they’re doing. Then they say they’re going to withhold weapons and they don’t really do that.

But anyway, it’s amazing what the power that they have.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And it’s kind of just over the top sadistic cruelty in their approach to people of Gaza.

Kevin MacDonald: Oh, yeah!

Kevin Barrett: It’s making ethnocentrism look bad. People like you, Kevin, you’re kind of a White, pro-ethnocentric guy. People like Louis Farrakhan a black, pro-ethnocentric guy. And there are various people who are defending various kinds of ethnocentrism. But what Israel is doing right now is really an embarrassment to ethnocentrism, wouldn’t you say?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I mean, this is extreme ethnocentrism! And it’s what I call hyper-ethnocentrism. And what I would advocate is universal nationalism, that everybody be in their own country and stay there. And that you’d have a sort of ethnic nationalism as a basis of a country.

But, you know, that’s a long way off now, given what’s happened in the West. We used to be, you look at movies here, culture from the 1950s, and it’s a White country and proudly. So the same way with the Western European countries. But now it’s just not there. I don’t see how to get it back without a cataclysm.

And I think the Left wants a cataclysm because they have purged the military and all that, and they are in charge of legal system, as you can see in the Trump verdict, and we’ll see.

But I think we’re headed for a cataclysm or else the West just goes down with a whimper.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, my second hour guest today on this radio show is Fadi Lama, who wrote Why the West Can’t Win. And his analysis is that Western central bankers have presided over this expanding Western empire, of course, expanded during the colonial period, and now he thinks they’re going all out for a kind of a global takeover. And he thinks it’s going to fail. And that this nationalist alliance of multipolar nationalist forces led by Iran, Russia and China is likely to prevail over the Western banksters.

So if that’s the case, then the world that you want to see, which would be a world of multipolar sovereign nation states where each people is relatively unto itself and free to be itself, and then to deal with other peoples, hopefully in a reasonable manner, unlike what the Israelis are doing right now, that world is coming. But at what cost to the Euro-American countries that are losing the struggle, is the question.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, absolutely! I’m happy to see this other bloc forming. And Western globalism really means Western hegemony and control over the rest of the world via the economics, the banks and all that.

So, yeah, that’s why I favor Russia in the war. And I look favorably on Russia’s ties with Iran and China. And if you’re a country like Iran or Russia or China, you have to know what’s going on in the West. You know that you have this Western elite that really wants to control everything. And this globalist phenomenon is backed by a US military, and it’s not going away.
And that’s why Ukraine is seen as an existential issue for both sides. Russia and United States and Western Europe, I think. They see that if the West does not prevail in Ukraine, that Russia will really take off.

And I noticed in Georgia, the country of Georgia, they had this law, they just enacted the law, I guess, that prevents these foreign NGO’s from, … They have to register and say how much of the money is coming from the West. And they have to disclose all their sources. Well, this is a big source of the Western power. That’s why Putin clamped down on that. The West is where the money is.

So all these NGO’s, they go in there and they propagandise for pro-Western stuff and immigration and all this Leftist stuff and color revolution.

Kevin Barrett: Don’t forget that. What they want to LGBTQ, all that kind of thing.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, exactly! It’s going to happen in Ukraine, if Ukraine wins and Russia loses. This is existential! But that’s the danger here, that both sides here see it as existential. Well, then you’re heading for a World War, nuclear war, a disaster for humanity!

I mean, I don’t see how this ends now. Biden just allowing Ukraine to strike targets in Russia with American missiles? I mean, this is really serious!

Kevin Barrett: That was supposed to be a red line, wasn’t it?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, that was a red line and not anymore.

And so they keep erasing these lines:

“Oh, we won’t give them this, won’t give them that!”
 
And they give it to them eventually. And because they do not want to lose this! They realize that sanctions have not worked because of the alliances, really, Iran and China and other countries. India is favorable to them to some extent anyway. And Brazil, other countries like that they just look at where the power is and where it’s going to go.

But yeah, they understand that the West is [word unclear] about destroying all their cultures and really all their peoples. And one hodge-podge of humanity. And I just think that would be a disaster!

Kevin Barrett: What do you think is the reason that the Western elites are choosing such a seemingly wrong headed strategy from their own point of view? In terms of both, they’re watering down their own cultures and harming their own cultures and their own military capacity through all sorts of policies. The various woke policies and so on.

And then rather than a sort of a sensible policy of trying to sort of contain, say, China and then make nice with Russia and Iran while you try to contain China, and then if you ever have to shift a little bit and contain Russia, then you make nice with China a little bit. That kind of sensible strategic policy which characterized the US during the Cold War, to a certain extent, they’ve thrown that away and now they’re trying to go to war against Russia, China and Iran all at once driving them into each other’s arms, even as they tear apart their own societies.

It’s almost as if they have some kind of death wish and they want to go down in flames. How do you explain that?

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I’m wondering, … But part of it is, I think, jewish hatred towards the West. You know, they think in terms of what happened in the Middle Ages, they think in terms of the destruction of the temple by the Romans. The pogroms in Russia in the 19th century, as they see them, and of course, in the Holocaust.

And it’s like Western culture is to them is absolutely the real [word unclear]. And these people, it’s always the extremists that end up dominating what direction the jewish community goes in.

And right now, the extreme ethocentrism is on display! And to some extent, most of it went to Israel. But they’re an awful lot in the United States. And jewish power in the United States, you see now, like, for example, pro-Palestinian protests on universities, they’re getting arrested and all that they would never do that for Black Lives Matter in the same way.
And so they’re really clamping down. And anyone who supports the Palestinians, they’re going to have a hard time getting a job on Wall Street or in the media and all that.

So, yeah, they have the power right now, and they are using it.

Kevin Barrett: And that will provoke a reaction. And we’ve seen throughout history that when jewish communities went too far in their sharp practices towards the majority societies, they suddenly faced a big backlash.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah.

Kevin Barrett: And I’m wondering if some of these students are going to suddenly go from being Left-wing, woke pro-Palestine multiculturalists to saying:

“You know, I think Kevin MacDonald actually might have a point about the jews.”
 
Kevin MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah, I think that jews have always felt that they can manage, you know, Muslim immigration, Palestinian immigration, all that they had enough power to manage it.

And right now they do. I mean, they’re clamping down these protests. But they do see there’s some in Congress now who are pro-Palestinian. And so this policy of letting Muslims come into Europe, say, has backfired for the jews to some extent, a great extent. And you see all these articles about how jews are saying:

“Muslims are our allies!”

And the [chuckling] question is what are their allies against?

And of course, they’re allies against the White majority.

But now that’s breaking down. And so many of the immigrants into Europe are Muslim and they really don’t like to choose and they don’t, …

Kevin Barrett: Quick question. Yeah. I think you’re right that a lot of the Muslim immigrants in Europe are the ones who are supporting the pro-Palestine protests and things like that. But do you think there’s any kind of qualitative difference or meaningful difference between so-called Muslim immigrants in Europe and, let’s say, sub-Saharan Africans from non-Muslim backgrounds, whether Christian, animist or secular, what have you.

That is, I found this whole emphasis on the Muslim identity and the Islamic religion to be very deceptive, given that the kinds of problems that immigrants have created in these societies are actually problems that you’re going to see more from the less religious, the more secular elements, whether they’re sub-Saharan African from Christian backgrounds, or whether they’re northern African from Muslim backgrounds. It’s not the religious people that you have to worry about. It’s the non-religious ones

Kevin MacDonald: Well, I don’t know. I think Muslim religion certainly is a big unifying, motivating factor for Muslims.

But you talk about sub-Saharan Africa, you know, they’re really talking about a low IQ, criminality prone population that will never really contribute anything to any functioning society.

Kevin Barrett: Wait a minute! I played basketball with a bunch of guys from both northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa when I went to the University of Paris. And there were some very sharp college students from sub-Saharan Africa were playing on that basketball team, actually. So I don’t over generalize to that extent.

Kevin MacDonald: Well, there may be some, and there are, but you look at overall the average, and that’s critical, actually! And we see black culture has basically failed in this country despite the fact that there are some intelligent ones. Just look at it and it’s an academic disaster! And I just don’t see it.

They’ve tried to improve black academic achievement for decades now, since the sixties, with no success, really. And it’s getting worse. I think there’s actually selection now for that the people having children, … You know, these black women who are going to college and assuming all these high level positions, they’re not having children, very many children at least. Whereas the ghetto moms are having a lot of kids, relatively.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah. Well, hasn’t the breakdown of the black family is the biggest reason for all of this.

Kevin MacDonald: It’s a huge factor. Yeah, that was an effect of the 1960s. You look at the charts, because I used to teach child psychology every semester I look at these charts in my textbook, and they would be in the 1950s, very strong family structure.

And then all of a sudden in the sixties, everybody went south! But blacks much more than anybody else. They were sort of unleashed, you might say, from the social control. We couldn’t just get on welfare so easily. And those single mothers were not really supported that much. You had to have a man around. But not anymore. It hasn’t been that way for a long time! And it’s not changing.

Kevin Barrett: Religion, again, getting back to that topic, plays a role in this, in that the religious cultures typically put a strong emphasis on these kinds of family values and taboos on sexuality outside of reproductive marriage.

And so when that breaks down, then you get a breakdown of the culture and you have a lot of unwed mothers, etcetera. Once again, my argument is that religion is an indispensable part of civilized humanity, that giving it up for transcendent value is really necessary overall. There might be a few people who can do okay without that. But for the culture as a whole, it needs that. It needs to be infused with a traditional way of doing that.

Kevin MacDonald: You’re probably right. I think that’s a reasonable thing to say. I think most people seem to need religion for social support and moral compass and sort of meaning to their lives and all that. I agree.

Kevin Barrett: Wow! Just like I won an argument with Doctor E. Michael Jones last week. Actually, won an argument with Kevin MacDonald! Again, not too many people can say that. [chuckling]

All right, we only have a couple, couple of minutes left here. Well, you know, Kevin, we’re with two minutes left.

What can be done to stop this butchery in Gaza?

Kevin MacDonald: I just don’t know. Because the Israelis have free reign and they don’t care what anybody else thinks. And the Right militants, settlers, aggressive ones, they’re in charge. And they don’t care what anybody else thinks.

And I think they do think that over time it’ll blow over. They’ll do something for the Palestinians, or they’ll let them emigrate or something. The West will give in. Jordan, these other countries will give in, and they’ll let them come in. And they’ll just get rid of them!

And then Israeli settlers will set their sights on Jordan, and then they’ll set their sight., … You know, I believe they’re an expansive culture. And Gaza is just part of it. They want that land, and I think there will be jewish settlements back in the Gaza. You know, there were until 2000, was it three or something? When the Israeli army withdrew and all that, to great controversy, at which point they became an open air prison.

But yeah, it’s a very expansive, aggressive group, always has been. And we’ll see where it ends. And I think that maybe the rest of the world may start stand up to them at some point.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, I think it’s definitely at or even past the point that that needs to start happening.

Kevin MacDonald: Yeah, I’d say so!

Kevin Barrett: If they really think that we’re going to just roll over and forget all this. Come on, guys. You know, the Nakba* of 1947, 1948 has not been forgotten!

[* The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة an-Nakba, lit. ’the catastrophe’) is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Source: Wikipedia]

And today’s people are telling stories about what happened to their grandparents and great grandparents and they’re keeping that memory alive. And so what’s happening in Gaza now, that memory is going to be kept alive forever and it’s going to come back to bite the perpetrators.

Well, thank you so much, Kevin MacDonald. It’s always great to talk with you. A true original thinker and a fearless thinker! Keep up the good work.

Take care.

Kevin MacDonald: Thank you. Bye.

Kevin Barrett: That’s Kevin MacDonald, a fellow academic heretic from the University of Wisconsin. That’s where he went as well as where I got chased out of for talking about 9/11 in the way that certain folks didn’t like.

All right, we’ll be back in the next hour, God willing, with Fati Lama talking about why the West can’t win!

https://katana17.com/

Catch-23

Science journals regularly publish articles attacking intelligent design, but they routinely reject articles defending intelligent design. For example, Darwinists have criticized Michael Behe’s arguments for ID (Chapter Ten) in many peer-reviewed science journals, including Nature, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, and the Quarterly Review of Biology. But those journals routinely refuse to publish Behe’s responses. One journal editor to whom Behe submitted a response cited a reviewer who wrote: “In this referee’s judgment, the manuscript of Michael Behe does not contribute anything useful to evolutionary science.” The editor of another journal wrote to Behe: “As you no doubt know, our journal has supported and demonstrated a strong evolutionary position from the very beginning, and believes that evolutionary explanations of all structures and phenomena of life are possible and inevitable. Hence a position such as yours . . . cannot be appropriate for our pages.”16

In Joseph Heller’s classic novel about World War II, Catch-22, an aviator could be excused from combat duty for being crazy. But a rule specified that he first had to request an excuse, and anyone who requested an excuse from combat duty was obviously not crazy, so such requests were invariably denied. The rule that made it impossible to be excused from combat duty was called “Catch-22.”

Darwinists use a similar rule—I call it “Catch-23”—to exclude intelligent design from science: intelligent design is not scientific, so it can’t be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. How do we know it’s not scientific? Because it isn’t published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 17 Catch-23!

The 2004 publication of Meyer’s article shattered the rule. It also alarmed Darwinists at the Smithsonian Institution (SI), with which the Biological Society of Washington (BSW) is loosely affiliated. Smithsonian Darwinists teamed up with the militantly pro-Darwin National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to control the damage to their cause. NCSE staffers sent long, detailed e-mails attacking Meyer’s article to high officials at the Smithsonian. The NCSE then worked closely with Smithsonian employees to develop a strategy of character assassination to punish Sternberg for publishing the article. To protect himself, Sternberg lodged a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC), established by Congress to investigate such cases.18

Frankenstein’s castle?

To Dr. Richard Sternberg, concerning his treatment by the Smithsonian Institution (SI) after publishing a peer-reviewed article by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer on intelligent design: “Our preliminary investigation indicates that retaliation came in many forms. It came in the form of attempts to change your working conditions. . . . During the process you were personally investigated and your professional competence was attacked. Misinformation was disseminated throughout the SI and to outside sources. The allegations against you were later determined to be false. It is also clear that a hostile work environment was created with the ultimate goal of forcing you out of the SI.”

—U.S. Office of Special Counsel, 2005

In August 2005, the OSC sent Sternberg a letter notifying him that a recent administrative decision had removed his case from their jurisdiction, but confirming that “members of NCSE worked closely with SI and NMNH members in outlining a strategy to have you investigated and discredited,” noting that “OSC questions the use of appropriated funds to work with an outside advocacy group for this purpose.” The OSC letter also confirmed that the management of the Smithsonian had falsely accused Sternberg of mishandling specimens in his research and of violating Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington policies in the publication of Meyer’s article. These accusations “were published to several outside organizations,” severely damaging Sternberg’s reputation. The managers later admitted that the accusations were false, but the OSC saw no evidence that “any effort was made to recall or correct these comments once the truth was known.” There were other abuses, too, but since the OSC lost jurisdiction over the Sternberg case “the SI is now refusing to cooperate with our investigation.” Nevertheless, the OSC concluded that the management of the publicly funded Smithsonian Institution had deliberately “created a hostile working environment” for Sternberg, hoping that he would “leave or resign.”19

To investigate the Darwinists’ accusation that Sternberg had circumvented the normal peer-review process, the president of the Council of the BSW reviewed the file, and he found that the peer review had been properly conducted. Nevertheless, the council subsequently issued a statement declaring that “the Meyer paper does not meet the scientific standards of the Proceedings.”20 Although the BSW stopped short of formally retracting the article, the Darwinists did not end their ruthless campaign of character assassination against Sternberg.

Catch-23 is still enforced by most science journals, but it is now supplemented with an additional rule: if intelligent design theorists do manage to publish in a peer-reviewed science journal, Darwinists will make sure the editor suffers grievously for it.

16 Michael J. Behe, “Correspondence with Science Journals: Response to Critics Concerning Peer-Review,” Discovery Institute (August 2, 2000). Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=450.

17 Jonathan Wells, “Catch-23,” Research News & Opportunities in Science and Theology, July/August 2002. Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1212.

18 Jim Giles, “Peer-reviewed paper defends theory of intelligent design,” Nature 431 (2004): 114. Trevor Stokes, “Intelligent design study appears,” The Scientist 5 (September 3, 2004): 4. Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.the-scientist.com/news/20040903/04/ See the home page of Richard M. v. Sternberg, available online (April 2006) at: http://www.rsternberg.net/. The NCSE’s and SI’s misbehavior were documented by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). The OSC’s August 2005 report is available online (April 2006) at: http://www.rsternberg.net/OSC_ltr.htm.

19 David Klinghoffer, “The Branding of a Heretic,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.opinion-journal.com/taste/?id=110006220. Joyce Howard Price, “Researcher Claims Bias by Smithsonian,” Washington Times, February 13, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050213-121441-8610r.htm. Letter from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel to Dr. Richard Sternberg, August 5, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.rsternberg.net/Documents/OSC-Sternbergpreclosure-ltr2.pdf. Barbara Bradley Haggerty, “Profile: Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom,” transcript of “All Things Considered” (NPR), November 10, 2005. Available online (January 2006) at: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=CSC%20-%20Views%20and%20News&id=3083.

20 Richard Monastersky, “Biology Journal Says It Mistakenly Published paper That Attacks Darwinian Evolution,” Chronicle of Higher Education Daily News, September 10, 2004. “Statement from the Council of the Biological Society of Washington,” October 4, 2004. Available online (April 2006) at: http://www.biolsocwash.org/id_statement.html.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design 

Jonathan Wells 

Letter From a Madman - Guy de Maupassant

 LETTER FROM A MADMAN FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE FEBRUARY 17, 1885 ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE GIL BLAS, UNDER THE PEN NAME “MAUFRIGNEUSE”

  My dear Doctor, I place myself in your hands. Do with me what you like.

I am going to tell you my state of mind very frankly, and you will judge whether it isn’t better to have me taken care of for a little while in a sanatorium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that are plaguing me.

Here’s the story, lengthy and precise, of the singular illness of my soul.

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

It was a phrase from Montesquieu that suddenly illumined my thinking. Here it is:

“One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”

 I reflected on that for months on end, and, little by little, a strange clarity came to me, and this clarity let there be night.

In fact, our organs are the only intermediaries between the exterior world and ourselves. That is to say, the inner being, which constitutes the ego, is in contact, by means of a few nerve endings, with the exterior being, which constitutes the world.

Beyond the fact that this exterior being escapes us by its size, its lengthy existence, its countless and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its aims, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs provide us only with information as uncertain as it is paltry about the portion of it that we can know.

Uncertain, because it is nothing but the properties of our organs that determine for us the apparent properties of matter.

Paltry, because since our senses number only five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are both quite limited.

I will explain. The eye transmits dimensions, shapes, and colors to us. It deceives us on these three points.

It can reveal to us only objects and beings of an average dimension in relation to human size, which has led us to apply the word “large” to certain things and the word “small” to certain other things, only because the eye’s weakness does not allow it to be aware of what is too immense or too tiny for it. Hence, it knows  and sees almost nothing, and almost the entire universe remains hidden from it, the star that inhabits space as well as the microbe that inhabits a drop of water.

Even if our eye had even a hundred million times more than its normal strength, if it perceived in the air that we breathe all the races of invisible beings, and all the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist an infinite number of races of animals so small, and worlds so distant, that the eye could not see them.

All our ideas about size, then, are false, since there is no limit possible to largeness or to smallness.

Our awareness of dimensions and shapes has no absolute value, since it is determined solely by the power of the organ and in constant comparison with ourselves.

Let us add that the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. A flawless glass tricks it. It confuses it with the air, which it does not see either. Let us move on to color.

Color exists because our eye is constituted in such a way that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways that bodies absorb and break down, in accordance with their chemical composition, the light rays that strike them.

The various proportions of this absorption and breaking down make up the shades of color.

Thus this organ imposes on the mind its way of seeing, or rather its arbitrary way of noting dimensions and perceiving the relationships of light with matter.

 Let us examine the sense of hearing.

Even more than with the eye, we are the playthings and dupes of this fanciful organ.

Two bodies colliding produce a certain shock in the atmosphere. This movement makes a certain tiny piece of skin vibrate in our ear, which changes immediately into a sound something that is in fact nothing but a vibration.

Nature is silent. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us all the quiverings of invisible waves in space in the form of meaning, meaning that changes depending on the number of vibrations.

This metamorphosis, which is performed by the auditory nerve over the short trajectory from the ear to the brain, has allowed us to create a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

What shall we say of the senses of taste and smell? Would we recognize smells and the quality of various foods without the peculiar properties of the nose and the palate?

Humanity, however, could exist without the ear, without taste and smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or smell.

Thus, if we had a few organs less, we would be unaware of admirable and unusual things, but if we had a few organs more, we would discover around us an infinity of other things we would never have suspected while we lacked the means to observe them.

 So we deceive ourselves when we pass judgments on the Known. We are surrounded by an unexplored unknown.

Everything is uncertain, and can be perceived in different ways.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

Let us formulate this certainty by using the old dictum: “Truth this side of the Pyrénées, error beyond.”

And let us say: Truth inside the sense organ, error outside.

Two and two no longer have to make four outside of our atmosphere.

Truth on Earth, error further away. So I conclude that the mysteries we have glimpsed—like electricity, hypnotic sleep, transmission of will, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena—remain hidden from us, because nature has not provided us with the organ, or organs, necessary to understand them.

After I had convinced myself that everything my senses reveal to me exists only for me as I perceive it, and would be completely different for someone else differently organized, after having concluded that a differently made humanity would have about the world, about life, about everything, ideas that are absolutely opposite to our own, since the consensus of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and differences of opinion come only from slight differences in the functioning of our nerve endings, I made an effort  at superhuman thought in order to get some inkling of the impenetrable universe that surrounds me.

Have I gone mad?

I told myself: “I am surrounded by unknown things.” I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me—afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

And this confused terror of the supernatural, which has haunted mankind since the birth of the world, is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing other than what remains veiled to us!

Then I understood terror. It seemed to me that I kept brushing against the discovery of a secret of the universe.

I tried to sharpen my organs, to excite them, to make them perceive glimpses of the invisible.

I told myself, “Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?”

 How many men feel them, tremble at their approach, shudder at their imperceptible contact. We feel them around us, but we cannot discern them, for we do not have the eyes to see them, or specifically the unknown organ that could discover them.

Then, more than anyone else, I felt them myself, these supernatural passersby. Beings or mysteries? How can I know? I can’t say what they are, but I can always indicate their presence. And I have seen—I have seen an invisible being—as much as one can see them, these beings.

I remained motionless for entire nights, seated in front of my table, my head in my hands, thinking of that, thinking of them. Often I thought an intangible hand, or rather an ungraspable body, was lightly grazing my hair. He didn’t touch me, since it wasn’t a carnal essence, but an imponderable, unknowable essence.

One evening, I heard the floor creak behind me. It creaked in a strange way. I trembled. I turned around. I saw nothing. And I thought no more of it.

But the next day, at the same time, the same sound occurred. I was so afraid that I got up, certain, certain, certain that I was not alone in my bedroom. I could see nothing. The air was clear, transparent everywhere. My two lamps lit up all corners of the room.

The sound was not repeated, and little by little I calmed down; I remained uneasy, though, and often looked around.

 The next day I shut myself in early, looking for a way I could contrive to see the invisible being that was visiting me.

And I saw him. I almost died from the terror of it.

I had lighted all the candles on my mantelpiece and chandelier. The room was illumined as if for a celebration. Both my lamps were burning on my table.

Opposite me, my bed, an old oaken four-poster. To my right, my fireplace. To my left, the door, which I had locked shut. Behind me, a very large wardrobe with a mirror. I looked at myself in it. My eyes looked strange, and my pupils quite dilated.

Then I sat down, as I did every day.

The sound had occurred, the night before and the night before that, at 9:22. I waited. When the precise moment arrived, I perceived an indescribable sensation, as if a fluid, an irresistible fluid, had penetrated me through all the pores of my skin, drowning my soul in an atrocious, true terror. And the creaking sounded, right next to me.

I got up, turning around so quickly that I almost fell down. You could see everything there as if in full daylight, but I couldn’t see myself in the mirror! It was empty, clear, full of light. I was not inside it, and yet I was facing it. I looked at it with panic-stricken eyes. I dared not go towards it, since I knew he was between us, he, the invisible one, and he was concealing me.

I was terrified. And then I began to see myself in a mist far back in the mirror, in a mist as if through  water; and it seemed to me that this water shimmered left to right, slowly, making me more precise from second to second. It was like the end of an eclipse.

What was hiding me had no outlines, but a kind of opaque transparency that little by little became clearer.

And finally I could see myself clearly, just as I do every day when I look at myself.

I had seen it!

And I did not see it again.

But I wait for it ceaselessly, and I feel that my mind is wandering in this waiting.

I remain for hours, nights, days, weeks, in front of my mirror, waiting for him! He does not come anymore.

He has understood that I’ve seen him. But I feel that I will wait for him always, until death, that I will wait for him without rest, in front of this mirror, like a hunter lying in wait.

And, in this mirror, I am beginning to see crazy images, monsters, hideous corpses, all kinds of terrifying beasts, atrocious beings, all the unlikely visions that must haunt the minds of madmen.

That is my confession, my dear Doctor. Tell me, what should I do?

—February 17, 1885

Borges on Beowulf

 BEOWULF. DESCRIPTION OF THE GERMANS. ANCIENT FUNERAL RITES

UNDATED, PROBABLY OCTOBER 15, 19661

In our last class, I said that today we would discuss the epic poem, Beowulf. As we shall see, the protagonist is a knight who embodies all the virtues held in high regard during the Middle Ages: loyalty, bravery—this is all in the book by the Venerable Bede. But let’s dig into Beowulf. The name in itself is a metaphor that means “bee-wolf,” in other words “bear.” It is truly a long poem: it contains a little fewer than 3,200 lines, all of which follow the law of Germanic versification: alliteration. Its language is intricate; it makes constant use of what is called “hyper-baton,” that is, the alteration of the logical sequence of words in a sentence. We know this was not the usual form of the Germanic language, and much less so of its poetry, because another fragment that has been preserved, the Finnsburh Fragment, employs very direct language.

It was previously believed that the style of Beowulf belonged to a primitive, barbaric stage of poetic creation. Subsequently, however, a Germanist discovered that lines from the  Aeneid were woven into the poem, and that elsewhere, passages from that epic poem were brought in, then interspersed in the text. Hence, we have realized that we are not dealing with a barbaric poem, but rather with the erudite, baroque experiment of a priest, that is, someone who had access to Latin texts, and who studied them. 

The author took an ancient Germanic legend and turned it into an epic poem that follows the syntactic rules of Latin. Thanks to those few interpolated lines, we can see that the author set out to compose a German Aeneid. One clear indicator of this is the aforementioned contrast with the direct language used in the heroic Finnsburh Fragment and the other texts we have from that era (such as incantations, etcetera). But the author faced a problem in attempting to carry out his intention: according to the decorum of the time, he could not praise the pagan gods. In the eighth century, the pagan era was quite recent, and still very much alive among the populace. It was not until the seventeenth century, almost ten centuries later, that we see Góngora speak calmly, without qualms, about the pagan gods.2 However, [the author of Beowulf] could not speak about Christ and the Virgin, either. The fact is, he never names them anywhere. But two concepts make their appearance, and we do not know if the author understood that they contradicted each other. The word “god” appears, as does wyrd or “fate.” Fate, in Germanic mythology, was a power greater than even the gods themselves. We know this from Norse mythology. Wyrd has survived in modern English: Shakespeare uses it in Macbeth to speak of the witches, though it probably did not have the same meaning. In any case, the word [in  Beowulf] is not “witch,” but “emissary of fate,” “weird sister,” “sister of fate.”3 Throughout Beowulf, the concepts of God—the new God, and the old one, the one of wyrd—are woven into the text and used indiscriminately.

 The Germanist Ker has criticized Beowulf, for he considers the plot to be childish.4a>The idea of the hero who kills an ogre, that ogre’s mother, and then a dragon, belongs to a children’s tale. But these elements are, in fact, inevitable; they are there because they must be. Once he chose that legend, the author could not possibly omit the ogre, the witch, or the dragon. The public expected them, because it knew the legend. Moreover, these monsters were symbols of the powers of evil; they were taken very seriously by that audience.

 One of the poem’s most curious aspects is that it takes place first in Denmark and then in southern Sweden. This indicates that after three hundred years of living in new lands, the Anglo-Saxons still felt homesick for their old homelands on the Baltic Sea; this further suggests that there is a strong affinity between the Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons. The characters in the poem are Scandinavian. The hero himself is a Swedish prince. This might tempt some scholars to claim that the lore of the Goths contains the legend of their origins, which says they come from Northern Europe. But there is no proof of this. (We actually know that the first news of these people has them hailing from south of the Danube.) However, Charles XII of Sweden believed this. So much so that during a conflict with the pope, he wrote to him [the pope], warning him not to feel too secure; he said his ancestors had already entered Rome once, and their descendants were no less brave. He was hinting at a possible invasion that would repeat the Gothic invasions of Italy. (Now, if we look closely at the word “Geats,” we see that it can easily be associated with “Goths.”5a> Hence, if we identify the Geats with the Goths, the Spaniards would be relatives of the Norsemen. Hence, all descendents of the Spaniards would be relatives of Beowulf!)

In the  Odyssey and the  Iliad, we see that the bloody and bellicose events are the most paramount. The poet of Beowulf was interested in hospitality, manners, gift-giving, and minstrels more than in military feats; in other words, he was interested in what we would now call “social life.” All of these things were valued at that time and must have been quite appealing to the Saxons, who lived in a violent era and in inhospitable lands. Europe was colder then. We know this because research has shown that the animals who lived at that time in the south of Europe now live in the north. For example, reindeer used to live in Germany and are now found only in Scandinavia. England was a marshy land. The Germans considered it to be a terrible, noxious place. They populated all those swamps with evil beings, devils. Moreover, the psychology of these people is revealed by the fact that they counted the years by the winters, and the days by the nights. The cold that prevailed in that land is what constantly shows up in these texts; always mentioned are the terrors of the snow, the hardships of winter. The arrival of spring was welcomed as a great event.

 Returning to the poem, the first episode deals extensively with the mythic king of Denmark, Scyld Scefing, which means “shield with the sheaf.” This name is derived from the legend of his origins. One day, a baby arrives on the coast of Denmark in a mysterious ship. There was nobody manning the ship, and the child is lying on the bottom, on a bed of weapons, sheaves of wheat, and jewels. This prodigious child becomes king and was so strong that he made his people great. This is, in the concept of the era, a “good king”: one who terrifies his neighbors, is strong, and is a warrior, and whose men fear and respect him. Time passes and the king grows old; he feels that the hour of his death is upon him. So he plans his  funeral and gives orders for it to be carried out according to his instructions. These include building a ship exactly like the one he came in and placing him next to the mast surrounded by weapons and jewels, then pushing him out to sea.

All peoples have believed that the territory of death lies beyond the sea. Life was associated with the course of the sun; since the sun is born in the east and dies in the west, a parallel was drawn to human life. It was believed that when it was over, one went to the land where the sun dies, to the west, beyond the sea. Hence, in the Celtic legends, paradise was thought to be in the west. In Greek mythology, the kingdom of death was beyond the water, and one had to cross the water to reach it. So, this ship they push out to sea has that meaning. Next comes a description of the ship and the king lying next to the mast, and then of the subjects crying, pushing the ship out to sea. This is one of the most powerful scenes in the poem.6 We cannot know if in the mind of the poet—who genuinely felt this scene—if this king being pushed out to sea (in the ship he arrived in) is a symbol of man mysteriously returning to the place from which he mysteriously came. In any case, this ritual of launching the ship is not an invention of this poet but rather a Germanic custom. Ships containing the skeletons of men and animals have been found at the bottom of the sea. We can deduce from this that they not only pushed the dead out to sea, but on their last trip, they were accompanied by their servants and their favorite animals. It was a Germanic custom to bury the dead with their dogs at their feet. In the book Beau Geste, the hero says that he “had his Viking’s funeral with a dog at his feet.”7 He was talking about a sergeant who had been buried. There is an ancient text that also says that after the ship was launched, it would be set on fire.

The author [of Beowulf] intentionally described different burial rites of the Germanic people. This can be seen at the end of the poem, with Beowulf’s funeral next to the sea, on a pyre so high it can be seen by sailors out at sea, and that is heaped with weapons, shields, and helmets. This detail also appears in the  Odyssey, where there is also a funeral rite.

In the next class we will continue our study of Beowulf and probably examine the Finnsburh Fragment.

CLASS 3

BEOWULF. BRAVERY AND BOASTFULNESS:BEOWULF AS COMPARED TO THE COMPADRITOS.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1966

In the previous class, we discussed the epic poem Beowulf. Today, we will pick up where we left off. I recounted one of the most poetic episodes of the poem: the one about the child who arrives mysteriously on the coast of Denmark, who becomes king and instills fear in his enemies. The poet notes that he is a good king because what is expected of a king is that he be strong and warlike and that his neighbors fear his people. Then the years pass and when death approaches, he gives instructions for his  funeral. So they prepare the funeral ship.

The poet says that this ship was “isig ond utfus.” The first word means “frozen,” and is related to the English word “iced” and the German word eisig. But we don’t know if the ship is covered with ice (it is strange that the poet hadn’t spoken of ice earlier), or if he meant “resplendent,” “shimmering,” “as clear as ice.” The third word is difficult to translate because fusmeans “eager” and ut means “out.”1 In other words, the ship was eager to leave, as if it were a living being. Then the ship is described; the poet says that it flew a flag made of gold fabric, and that the king was placed in a seated position, leaning against the mast: “The powerful one against the mast.” Then his vassals, crying, push the ship out to sea, and then we have these lines that I know by heart: “Nobody, neither the counselors in their assemblies nor the heroes under the heavens, knows who received that cargo.” And it is said that the ship was pushed far away by the power of the sea: “Under the power of the sea, it traveled far.” Now, an ancestor is also mentioned, who is also called Beowulf, like the eponymous hero of the poem, but he is a different Beowulf. And this lets us imagine that there is a connection between the royal house of Denmark and the royal house of the Geats—that tribe that is a bit mysterious—which some have identified with the Jutes who invaded England, and others, with the Goths, in other words, the ancestors of the Spaniards, who were the Visigoths. But there is a lot of disagreement about this.

One peculiar feature of Beowulf is that the story we are looking at is a primitive one—even puerile, according to some. Yet the atmosphere in which this barbarous and primitive fable takes place is not the fantastical atmosphere of a fairy tale even if the events that take place are. The story abounds in realistic details, especially regarding the genealogy of the characters. It has, as the English Germanist Ker has said, the solid atmosphere of a realist novel.2The events are fantastical, but we feel the characters as real, as garrulous as if they were right there, and given to oratory; they are characters who like good manners, conviviality, ceremony. It is true that all of this was highly valued during that dangerous era, a violent era when people perhaps did not much like violence; it was a barbarous era that nonetheless was drawn to culture, that enjoyed culture.

 The poet lists the names of the kings of the royal house of Denmark, until he gets to a king named Hrothgar. These consonant clusters are common in Anglo-Saxon, but have since been lost: hr, and the runic letter following it, can be transcribed as th.3 We have another example in the Anglo-Saxon word for “ring.” In German and, I think, in Scandinavian languages, it is ring, whereas the Anglo-Saxons said hring, and there are other analogous sounds. For example, “neigh” in English is the verb hnægan in Anglo-Saxon.4 There are other consonant clusters we cannot pronounce, because we don’t know how they were pronounced. For example, for “haughty” they said wlanc. I don’t know how the wl should be pronounced. It’s possible the W was pronounced as a U. But let’s return to the poem.

The poet names several kings until he finally gets to Hrothgar, the king of Denmark, who builds a palace called Heorot. And this palace, the poet tells us, is the most splendid of palaces, though we should imagine it built of wood. I have seen beautiful houses in the United States, luxurious houses—the house of Longfellow, the house of Emerson—houses that are three hundred years old, and these houses are built of wood. Currently, in Buenos Aires, to say “a wood house” is to mean a shack. This is not the case in New England: a wood house can be very beautiful, with many floors, a salon, a library, and they are well built so there are no drafts.

The king builds the palace, and the poet tells us that this is the palace that shines over all the neighboring kingdoms; in other words, it is famous. We can imagine a large central hall where the king meets with his vassals and where he dines. I assume they ate pork and deer and drank beer from drinking horns; wine was quite rare, as it had to be brought from the south. In the poem, there is a minstrel who livens up the banquets singing and accompanying himself on the harp. The harp was the national instrument of all the Germanic peoples. The music would be, undoubtedly, very simple.

The king has his court. And there he hands out gold rings and bracelets to his vassals. This is why one of the king’s titles is “ring-giver” or beahgifa. We find this word, beag, in French as bague, meaning “ring.” The king is very powerful, but the din of the court, or the music, frightens or disturbs a monster who lives nearby in an area full of swamps, marshes, and moors. Some believe that certain regions of England are recognizable in the description of where the monster, named Grendel, lived. Lincolnshire, for example. But this is pure conjecture. The monster is described as looking like a human being, but gigantic. He is an ogre and apparently belongs to ancient German mythology, but as the poet is Christian, he wanted to tie him to the Christian tradition, rather than the pagan tradition, so he tells us that he is a descendent of Cain. And this monster wanders around the moors and lives with his mother under a lake, so deep down that the hero swims for an entire day to reach the underground cavern where he lives with his mother, who is a witch. The poet calls her “the she-wolf of the sea,” “the sorceress of the sea.” There are also storms, which make this lake seem like the sea, and there is a description of the forests surrounding the lake. It says that crows are afraid to fly near the lake, for it is a zone of tempests, fog, solitude, and because of what could be called sacred horror. The description of the lake and its surroundings lasts about twenty lines. Now, this does not surprise us, but remember that the poem was written at the end of the seventh century or, according to the scholars, the beginning of the eighth, and it is full of sentiment for the natural world. This sentiment does not appear in other literatures until much later. One often says, too hastily—because in addition to  Beowulf, there is also Shakespeare—that this sentiment for nature is the same as the romantic sentiment. In other words, the same as in the eighteenth century, about ten centuries after Beowulf. The truth is that there are books, notable books, in which the natural world as we feel it now makes no appearance. And to turn to the most famous example, I believe—I don’t know if I am certain—I suspect that in Don  Quixote, it does not rain a single time. The landscapes described in Quixote have nothing in common with the landscapes of Castile: they are conventional landscapes, full of meadows, streams, and copses that belong in an Italian novel. On the other hand, in Beowulf, we sense nature as something fearsome, something that is hostile to man; the sense of night and darkness as fearsome, as it surely was for the Saxons, who had settled in an unknown country whose geography they discovered only as they were conquering it. Undoubtedly, the first Germanic invaders had no precise idea of England’s geography. It is absurd to imagine Horsa or Hengest arriving with a map. Completely unbelievable. We don’t even know if they would have understood  Beowulf, which is written in a very contorted language and is full of metaphors that, undoubtedly, were not used by the Anglo-Saxons in their spoken language. In any case, these metaphors never appear in their prose. And in the Scandinavian Norse regions, those most closely connected to the Saxons, we find a very marked and deliberate division between prose, which can be very eloquent and full of pathos, but is very simple, and the language of poetry, which is filled with kennings, the name for those metaphors that, as we have seen, reached an extraordinary level of complexity. 

So, King Hrothgar rules over Denmark. Naturally, nobody thought of empires at that time; the idea of empire is totally foreign to the Germanic mind. But he was a prosperous king, a victorious, opulent king, and his court’s jubilant celebrations—one of the metaphors for the harp is “wood of joy” or “party-wood”—upsets Grendel, who attacks the castle. The fable is poorly wrought, for at the beginning we have a very powerful king, and then this same king and his vassals and his troops, the only measure they take is to pray to the gods, to ask for help from their ancient gods, Odin, Thor, and the others. The poet tells us that all their prayers were in vain. The gods have no power at all against the monster. And thus, improbably, twelve years pass, and every few nights the ogre breaks down the castle’s double doors—there were no other doors—enters, and devours one of the men. And the king does nothing. Then news of the ogre’s attacks spreads. The ogre is gigantic and invulnerable to all weapons. The news reaches the neighboring country of Sweden. And in Sweden there is a youth, a prince, Beowulf, and throughout his childhood this prince has shown himself to be clumsy, slow, but he wants to gain fame with a great feat. He has already fought in a war against the Franks, but this isn’t enough for him, so he departs in a boat with fourteen companions.

 Naturally, the poet makes the sea stormy, so that the trip won’t be easy, so it will be difficult, and Beowulf lands in Denmark. The king’s sentinel comes out to greet him, an aristocrat like Beowulf, a prince. Beowulf says that he has come to save the country and is received courteously by the court. There is one character, however, who questions Beowulf’s personal courage, so Beowulf proposes a kind of contest, a swimming race, which improbably lasts ten days, a competition against another famous swimmer named Breca. The two swim for ten days and ten nights. They fight against sea monsters, who drag Beowulf to the bottom of the sea, where he kills them with his sword or chases them away. Then he surfaces, keeps swimming, and wins the race.

Now, we find ourselves up against a modern custom, a modern prejudice that distances us from the poem. Today we say, or better, we have the idea, that a brave man should not be a braggart. We think that all bragging is like that of the Miles Gloriosus, of the Latin comedy, who is a coward.5 But, generally speaking, this idea did not exist in antiquity. Heroes boasted of their deeds, and were permitted to do so. In fact, doing this gave them courage. I’d like to recite here some couplets of the compadritos[toughs, braggarts] from the beginning of the century in Buenos Aires. I don’t think anybody would think a man was a coward because he said:

Soy del barrio ’e Monserrá

donde relumbra el acero,

lo que digo con el pico,

lo sostengo con el cuero. 

[I am from the Monserrat neighborhood, / where blades abound, / what I say with my lips, / I back up with my hide.]

or:

Yo soy del barrio del norte,

soy del barrio del Retiro,

yo soy aquel que no miro

con quién tengo que pelear,

y aquí en el milonguear

 ninguno se puso a tiro. 

[I’m from the northern neighborhood, / I’m from Retiro, / I never stop to look / at who I have to fight, / and here in the fray / nobody was up to the dare.]

or:

Hágase a un lao, se lo ruego,

que soy de la Tierre ‘el Fuego.

[Step aside, if you please, / for I am from Tierra del Fuego.]

That is, from the neighborhood around the penitentiary. 

In any case, Beowulf had a lot in common with our compadritosfrom Monserrat or Retiro. Beowulf wanted to boast about how brave he was. And no one thought he was a coward. To find a more famous example, we can turn to the  Iliad, in which the warriors state who they are, and their reputations do not suffer. On the contrary, they are enhanced. It is a necessary prelude to combat, their way to warm up. They could even insult each other, too, and could accuse each other of cowardice.

In Beowulf, after the swimming race and the battle against the sea monsters, everyone goes to bed and falls asleep. This is another poorly wrought episode: they are expecting the ogre’s attack, yet they sleep peacefully. The only one who stays awake is Beowulf, and Beowulf is unarmed, because he knows that no weapon can harm the monster. Moreover, he has confidence in his physical strength, which is extraordinary. The poet tells us that he has in his fist the strength of thirty men.

Then the monster arrives, circles the castle, and although the door is locked with strong iron bars, he breaks it down, surprises the first sleeping warrior he comes upon, and devours him whole, raw. Also, he devours the warrior’s hands and feet, then rashly approaches Beowulf. And then Beowulf, who has not yet risen, grabs the ogre’s hand and breaks it. And the two begin to fight—a fight others do not participate in—which allows the hero to show off even more. And Beowulf, with only the strength of his hands—imagine we have before us a northern Hercules—pulls off the ogre’s arm and shoulder. As they fight, they shout. This is realistic. For example, when infantrymen charge, they shout. There is a poem by  Kipling that describes this. So, they are both shouting. The entire palace of Heorot trembles, it is about to collapse, but finally the ogre receives a mortal wound and runs off to die in his swamp. The next day, they celebrate the death of the ogre and hang his arm in the hall as a trophy. There is another banquet, but that night the ogre’s mother, who is a witch and also very strong, comes to recover her dead son’s arm, and she takes it and kills a warrior. Then Beowulf decides to look for the swamp where the ogre lives, and that’s where we get the description of the swamp, one of the classic passages in the poem. Some men want to accompany Beowulf, but he is the hero: it is better for him to perform his feats alone, as Hercules did centuries before. And he sees pieces of flesh, human flesh, possibly the ogre’s, in the swamp. And there is also foam, which seems to be bloody. The hero dives in and swims for a whole day before he reaches the cavern. The cavern is dry; it is illuminated by a supernatural, magical light. And there is the ogre’s mother, horrible, as strong as the ogre himself. Beowulf fights her and is on the verge of being defeated: she is actually stronger than her son. But [Beowulf] manages to grab a sword hanging on the wall. The ogre’s mother is not invulnerable to iron; he kills her with the sword, but the sword melts because the witch’s blood contains some kind of poison. Then, Beowulf takes the ogre’s head and also the hilt of the sword, though not the blade, which has melted. On shore, they are waiting for him anxiously. He rises to the surface with this trophy, and here the poet invents an incidental detail: the giant’s head is so heavy that two men are needed to carry it. Then Beowulf, covered in blood, wounded and triumphant, returns to Hrothgar’s palace, where Hrothgar thanks him for what he has done and showers him with gifts—accepting these gifts is not dishonorable—and Beowulf returns to his own kingdom, in the south of Sweden.

Now, Beowulf was not actually Swedish. The Swedes belonged to a different tribe. The Geats were enemies of the Swedes. . . . Well, in this way, five years passed . . . excuse me, fifty years, “fifty winters,” the poet says. The Saxons counted time by winters because of the harshness of the climate. In the meantime, Beowulf performs many military feats, but the poet mentions them only in passing because he is interested only in Beowulf’s first and last feat. It has been said that one of the aims of the poem was to portray an exemplary prince, according to the concept of the time. That is, one who is strong—supernaturally strong, for he has the strength of thirty men—as well as a slayer of monsters who are a danger to everyone—again this coincides with Hercules—and also just. Because when he dies at the end of the poem, he invokes God and says that he never dealt out death to a single relative in the great banquet hall. And this is considered to be a rather extraordinary fact, and it probably was at the time. 

Fifty years pass, fifty years of victories, and, finally, a triumphant peace, and then another character appears, a dragon who has lived for time immemorial in a cave guarding treasures. The idea of the dragon as a guardian of treasures is common in ancient Germanic myth. We remember the case of Sigurd, or Siegfried, and the dragon; and there was also the griffin in Pliny’s Natural History, who guards mountains of gold and fights against the one-eyed Arimaspians.6The idea of the dragon as the guardian of treasures is so common that in Norse poetry one of the most common metaphors for gold—immediately understood by everybody—was “the dragon’s bed.” That is, people imagined the gold, and the dragon lying on top of it, sleeping on it in order to guard it better. The poet tells us about an escaped slave who enters the cave when the dragon is asleep and steals a golden pitcher. Then the slave disappears from the fable. The following day, the dragon awakes, notices that the golden pitcher is gone, and leaves his cave, thinking he must take revenge for the theft. Then we see a human trait: before destroying the Geats’ land, he goes back into the cave and carefully looks through everything, just to make sure the pitcher isn’t there somewhere. But he doesn’t find it, so he terrorizes the kingdom of the Geats, just as the ogre, half a century before, had done in Denmark. Then the news of what is happening reaches old Beowulf, and again he decides to fight a monster. And if we want to use our imaginations a little, we can see this as a story about a man pursued by a fate: to fight a monster and die. The dragon is, in some way—and whether or not it is understood this way by the poet, it really shouldn’t matter to us because an author’s intentions are less important than the success of his execution—the dragon is yet another encounter with his fate. That is, the dragon is again the ogre of Denmark. And the king goes there with his men, who want to help him, but he says no, he’ll manage on his own as he did fifty years before with the ogre and the ogre’s mother. He reaches the mouth of the cave of the dragon, who has been described with many metaphors—he has been called “spotted horror of dusk” and “guardian of gold”—and Beowulf  challenges him. The dragon emerges, and they engage in battle. There is a rather bloody description of the battle; Beowulf slays the dragon, but the dragon breathes fire, and Beowulf knows that this fire will poison him. And there is a servant named Wiglaf, the only one who has accompanied him there; and the king says that he is going to offer his soul to the Lord—this paragraph is Christian—and he knows he will be going to heaven because his life has been righteous, and he gives instructions for his funeral. The funeral is not like the one we saw earlier: there will be no funeral ship. He tells them to erect a pyre and pile it high with helmets, shields, and shining armor—“Helmum behongen, hildebordum, beorhtum byrnum, swa he bena wæs.” Helmum behongen means “adorned with helmets”—the Germanic word helm is the same. And hildebordum is “battle board”: that’s what the shield was called, which was round, made of wood, and wrapped in leather. And then beorhtum byrnum means “bright armor,” and swa he bena wæs means “just as he ordered.” Then they lie him out on top of the pyre and set it on fire, and he has instructed them to build a burial mound that can be seen from the sea, so that people will remember it. He is then buried in the burial mound, and twelve warriors on horseback ride circles around the king’s tomb and sing his praises and celebrate his brave deeds.

Now, in a medieval text about the history of the Goths, by  Jordanes, Attila’s burial and the same ritual is described: the pyre, the burial mound, and the warriors who ride circles around it singing praises of the king.7 It is clear that the poet was an erudite poet: in his poem he wanted to describe the various funeral rites of the Germanic peoples. (They considered Attila to be one of their own, even though he was a Hun, because many Germanic kings were his vassals.) The poem ends with praise of Beowulf, and this praise is quite odd. Though I don’t agree, some have believed it to be an interpolation, for one might expect there to be mention of the ogre, as well as of the dragon, and of the other Swedes against whom he fought, and his victories, but none of this is mentioned. The penultimate line says that he was manna mildust, the mildest of men, the kindest of men, and one most eager for praise. This also contradicts our current sensibility, because we live in an era of propaganda: a man’s desire to be famous is not seen as an admirable characteristic. But we have to remember that this poem was written in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that all praise was just: that men wished to be praised, deserved to be praised. The poem ends with these words: “the mildest of men and the most eager for praise.” Nothing is said about his courage. However, we have seen that courage exemplified throughout the entire poem.

There’s another curious aspect of this poem, and this is the appearance of a minstrel, and this minstrel sings—but doesn’t finish—a Germanic legend predating Beowulf: the story of a princess from Denmark named Hildeburh. Her name means “castle of war” or “castle of the battle.” Now, this fragment as sung by the minstrel might not be the same as the song—the old ballad—because the language is like the rest of Beowulf. That is, it is in rhetorical language with an abundance of metaphors, and undoubtedly Germanic primitive poetry was much simpler. We can see this, for example, in The Lay of Hildebrand; although composed more or less at the same time as Beowulf, it corresponds to a much more primitive era, for there are few alliterations, and I believe there is only one metaphor, and even that is a dubious one: armor is called “battle vestments,” or “war vestments,” which may or may not be a metaphor. It is far from the complexity of “weave of men” for “battle,” as we find among the Norsemen, or “swan-road” for “sea.” 

Now, this story is told only in part, and it is the subject of the other ancient Anglo-Saxon epic fragment,  Finnsburh Fragment, which contains about sixty lines and must be, I suspect, prior to Beowulfbecause of the directness of the language.8

The fable chosen by the author of Beowulf does not lend itself to pathos. In it we have two feats performed by the same hero. The two are separated by an interval of fifty years, and there is no conflict in the poem. In other words, Beowulf always fulfills his duty as a brave man, and that’s all. He dies bravely. The poem is full of pious pronouncements. Some are obviously pagan, for example, when it says that it is “better to avenge than mourn a dead friend.” This is clearly pagan. It belongs to an era when revenge was not only a right but a duty—a man was obliged to avenge the death of his friend. So there is no conflict. The story of Hildeburh, on the other hand, which is interpolated into Beowulf, contains conflict. This is the story. There is a princess in Denmark named Hildeburh, and there is discord between the Danes and the Frisians, the people from the Low Countries. And so it is decided that a princess, the princess of Denmark, will marry the king of the Frisians, so that through this alliance between the two royal houses, the conflict will be resolved. This practice was so common that one of the metaphors for the princess used in the Saxon poem is “peace-weaver,” not because she was particularly peaceful but because she served to weave peace between neighboring, rival nations. Hildeburh marries the king of the Frisians and then her brother comes to visit her, arriving at court with sixty warriors. They are received hospitably and given lodgings in rooms that surround a central hall with two doors. Identical, let’s say, to Hrothgar’s palace. But at night, the Frisians attack. The Danes defend themselves and fight for several days, during which the princess of Denmark’s brother kills his nephew. Finally, the Frisians realize that they are no match for the Danes. Both Anglo-Saxon poems express true sympathy for the Danes and for the Geats, that is, for the Norsemen. After a few days, when [the Frisians] realize that they can no longer fight, that they are unable to defeat them [the Danes], they propose a truce, which the princess’s brother accepts. He waits for the winter to be over to set sail—because during the winter, the sea was obstructed by ice—then he returns to his country. There he assembles a force larger than the one with sixty warriors that previously accompanied him. He returns, attacks the Frisians, kills the king, and carries his sister, the princess, back with him to his country.

Now, if this poem existed in its entirety—and we have to assume that it once did—we would have the possibility of a tragic conflict, because we would have the story of the princess whose son dies by the hand of his uncle. In other words, the poet would have more opportunity for pathos than in Beowulf, which simply recounts two brave feats, neither credible to us, against an ogre and a dragon. In the next class we are going to examine—and we can examine it in great detail—the Finnsburh Fragment. We’ll leave out the beginning of the fragment, because I’ve already told it. We will start from the moment the Danes realize that the Frisians have forcibly entered their rooms and are going to attack them, and we will continue until the Frisians realize they are no match for the Danes and that they have been defeated by them. We are going to analyze it almost line by line. There are about sixty lines. You will see how direct the language is, so different from the pompous language of Beowulf. Maybe its author was a man of action. In the case of Beowulf, on the other hand, we can imagine the author as a monk, from Northumbria, in the north of England, a reader of Virgil, who set himself the task, quite audacious at that time, to write a Germanic epic poem. And this brings us to a small problem, which is this: why is it that in the Germanic nations—and here I am thinking of Ulfilas, I am thinking of the Saxons, I am thinking later of Wycliff, and of England in the sixteenth century, of Luther—why were there translations of the  Bible in the Germanic nations before the Latin nations?9There is a Germanist of Jewish origin,  Palgrave, who had an answer, and the answer is this: the Bible that was read in the Middle Ages was the Latin Vulgate Bible, that is, it was a Latin text.10 Now, if anyone would have thought of translating the Bible into Provençal or Italian or Spanish—these languages are too similar to Latin for the translation not to run the risk of seeming like a parody of the original. On the other hand, the Germanic languages are so totally different from Latin that the translation could be undertaken without running that risk. What I mean is, in the Middle Ages, those who spoke Provençal or Spanish or Italian knew that they were speaking a language that was a variant or a corruption of Latin. So it would have seemed irreverent to go from Latin to Provençal. On the other hand, the Germanic languages were totally different. [Translations of the Bible] that were undertaken for people who knew no Latin did not run any risks. Now, maybe we can apply this to Beowulf. Why was Beowulf the first epic poem written in a  vernacular language? Because that vernacular language was profoundly different from Latin, so that nobody reading Beowulfcould think that they were reading a parody of the  Aeneid. On the other hand, quite a lot of time had to pass for the Romance-language minstrels to have the courage to try epic poetry in their own language.

In the next class, then, we will look at the Finnsburh Fragment, and at a much later Anglo-Saxon epic poem, and with that we’ll bring the first unit to an end.

PROFESSOR BORGES

A COURSE ONENGLISH LITERATURE