This study was awarded the Faculty Prize 2006 by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kiel. Following a discourse-analytical framework, this study attempts to explore the concept of Northernness in the works of the Argentine homme de lettres Jorge Luis Borges. It not only addresses the question of what kind of North is depicted in Borges' oeuvre but also, more importantly, how this North is constituted as a discourse structure. The implicit thesis here is that Borges locates a specific Northernness south of the South, where the lines of order are, however, gaps in the discourse. Thus, they invite transgressions that, in the spirit of a poetics of the imaginary, play out both the contingency of knowledge and the fictional nature of reality. Borges' diverse boreal spatiality can therefore be understood as a genuine expression of the interplay between Northernness and the imaginary.