Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) chose an unconventional hobby to occupy his middle age when he devoted himself in the 1950s to the study of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. His efforts were made easier by his fluency in English. “Georgie” had grown up speaking English with his father and Staffordshire-born grandmother and reading English books in the family library (Williamson 34). He would later call the time spent in that library “the chief event of [his] life” (“Autobiographical Notes” 42). In the following essay, “Thorkelin y el Beowulf” (“Thorkelin and Beowulf”), Borges sympathizes with a fellow student of Anglo-Saxon whose own moment of bookish revelation would come to define him: Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752–1829), the first modern editor of Beowulf. This unpublished essay recounts Thorkelin's seemingly predestined attraction to the Beowulf manuscript and the catastrophic course of his long devotion.