IN ONE of his most remarkable short stories, Story of the Warrior and the Captive, Jorge Luis Borges recounts two seemingly unrelated historical episodes. One concerns Droctulft, a Lombard warrior who, according to Paul the Deacon, at some time in the mid-6th century abandons his people to defend Rome. The other tells of an Englishwoman captured by indigenous tribes on the Argentine frontier who, after years among them, refuses to return to European society.
