Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden: Borges Marathon, Part 30

Read the title of this one, and you might imagine it’s about a warrior rescuing a captive maiden, that familiar staple of fairytales and legends. But in fact, in “Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden”, Borges juxtaposes two stories from very different times and places.

The first is a tale of heroic betrayal, based on a real historical figure called Droctulf, a Lombard warrior who switched sides and fought for the dying Roman Empire that his people were besieging. As usual, Borges takes liberties with the facts—he calls attention to this by saying he doesn’t even know when the events took place: “Let us imagine (this is not a work of history) that it was the mid-sixth century.” This turns out to be one of the few parts of the story that’s accurate.

Droctulf was indeed a Lombard warrior who switched sides, but the details of how that happened are invented. Borges imagines him emerging from the forests and being struck by the sight of “daylight and cypresses and marble”. He can’t understand most of the artifices that he sees in the city of Ravenna, but they affect him profoundly:

“They strike him as we would be struck today by a complex machine whose purpose we know not but in whose design we sense an immortal intelligence at work.”

He fights against his own people to defend Ravenna, and when he dies, the people of the city erect a gravestone with a moving epitaph. Borges describes Droctulft not as a traitor but as a convert. In fact, he was merely the first of many, as the descendants of the people who’d invaded Italy gradually became Italians, giving their name to a region that still exists today. He imagines one as the father of Dante.

Reading this story makes Borges think of a story his grandmother once told him about feeling uprooted living in Argentina, so far from where she had grown up in England. She soon discovered that there was another Englishwoman in the town, although she was dressed in Indigenous clothes and had a painted face. The woman had emigrated from Yorkshire with her parents, but they were later killed in a raid by the Indigenous Pampas people, who took her captive. She was now the wife of a minor chieftain and had two sons; she had been living with them so long that she struggled now to speak English.

His grandmother imagined her “savage and uncouth life” and was outraged at the thought of “an Englishwoman, reduced to such barbarism!” But when she offered to rescue her and her children, the woman said she was happy and returned to her husband in the desert.

Borges acknowledges that the stories may seem unconnected, separate as they are by thirteen centuries and an ocean. But I think the parallels are quite clear. Both the warrior and the captive maiden choose humanity over the group. They find a new life in a new place with new people, even if that means cutting themselves off from their roots. It’s a story that’s as old as humanity itself and as integral to our evolution, no matter how much today’s politicians may try to split us into groups and convince us to resent the other.

I think this story is also a rejection of articial divides, such as that between civilisation and barbarism. Droctulf’s people were seen as barbarians destroying the civilisation of Rome, and Borges’s grandmother sees the Englishwoman as leaving behind civilisation for barbarism. But Borges seems to reject these divisions in his final paragraph:

Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and please check out other posts in my Borges Marathon, a project to read and review all 100+ stories in the Collected Fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.