Explore "The Monster Acheron" by Jorge Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Only one person, one time, ever saw the monster Acheron; this took place in the twelfth century in the Irish town of Cork. The original version of the story, written in Gaelic, is now lost, but a Benedictine monk from Regensburg (Ratisbon) translated it into Latin, and from this translation the tale passed into a number of languages, among them Swedish and Spanish. Of the Latin version there are some fifty-odd manuscripts extant, agreeing in all the essentials. Visio Tundali (Tundal's Vision) is the story's name, and it has been considered one of the sources of Dante's poem. Let us begin with the word ‘Acheron'. In the tenth book of the Odyssey it is one of the rivers of hell, flowing somewhere on the western borders of the inhabited world. Its name is reechoed in the Aeneid, in Lucan's Pharsalia, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Dante engraves it in a line: Su la trista riviera d'Acheronte (‘On the sad shores of the Acheron').
In one myth, Acheron is a Titan suffering punishment; in another, dating earlier, he is placed close to the South Pole, below the constellations of the antipodes. The Etruscans had ‘books of fate' that taught divination and ‘books of Acheron' that taught the ways of the soul after bodily death. In time, Acheron came to stand for hell.