Jorge Luis Borges, Maria Esther Vázquez. Texts by Giovanni Mariotti
1973 / 248 PAGES.
Language: Italian edition
Here, Jorge Luis Borges brings together almost all the writings left to us by Old Germanic literatures (Anglo-Saxon, German, Scandinavian), accompanied by the magnificent illuminations of the Minnesänger manuscript, which can be found in Heidelberg.
Borges’ Viking Iceland, where the ages are as fierce as the feelings from which they draw inspiration: not out of historical necessity, but due to the sporadic and fatal impulses of the human heart. The warriors whose feats are sung have no empire, faith or mission for which to fight; they fight for themselves or even for nothing at all – almost as if the clash of weapons and the whirlwind of actions were the only things capable of distracting them from their gloomy thoughts. Everything is at once endlessly cruel and peripheral, remote: the Vikings discovered America, but their discovery went down in history as something lighter than a dream or an omen.