"Borges had been reading English translations of the epics throughout his life, but when he was fifty-nine, he set out to teach himself Anglo-Saxon, a process he called “the pure contemplation of a language at its dawn.” The epics provided him with a kind of literary ideal: concrete, precise, and suffused with the glow of the sword as a magical object. His reader’s eye was keen, and interestingly unpredictable. He admires the “Finnsburh Fragment” over Beowulf, for instance, though it consists of a mere sixty lines, preserved from what surely was a much longer poem, and composed, perhaps, as early as the late seventh century." Michael Greenberg • NYRB

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