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edge and learning which pepper his writing, while the
subject of the fantastic complements completely the
strange insights which inform his vision.
The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the
unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salamander.
What Borges brings to his description of these
creatures, which many readers may think themselves
already familiar with, is the learning which marks much
of his best work (‘research’ is somehow an inadequate
word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly.
European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient
Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric
Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually
surface and recede as the moment demands.
Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated
with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of
medicinal qualities: “Buddhists affirm that Dragons
are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many
concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred
cipher exists to express their exact number.”
The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient
Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded
to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they
fixed the intervals of the fiery bird’s visits as once every
1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity
vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn’t just lie
down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into
Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches.
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These witches were also known as Norns or Fates, grim
augurs of the future the memory of which survives in
the weird sisters of Macbeth.
References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius,
and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men
of the day considered all these ‘imaginary beings’ as
‘real’, believed in every bit as much we today accept
the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on television
screens. These beings informed the landscape
of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of
history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who
shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches,
their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather
more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house,
the Harpies, who we learn “wielded weapons of gold
– lightning – and milked the clouds” , all these dwelt
in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense
than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked
among them.
While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and
fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and
show us far more of the subjects than we could have
imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with
narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is
Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4,000
eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on
the back of the great fish Bahamut, “All the seas in the
world placed in one of the fish’s nostrils would be like
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