Legends & Romances of Spain. Lewis Spence

Type of Spanish Romance

       Table of Contents

      The type of Spanish romance at its best is that in which the spirit of wonder is mingled with the spirit of chivalry. Old Spain, with her glorious ideas of honour, her finely wrought sense of chivalry, and her birthright of imagination, provided almost a natural crucible for the admixture of the elements of romance. Every circumstance of climate and environment assisted and fostered the illusions with which Spanish story teemed, and above all there was a more practical interest in the life chivalric in Spain than, perhaps, in any other country in Europe. The Spaniard carried the insignia of chivalry more properly than Frenchman or Englishman. It was his natural apparel, and he brought to its wearing a dignity, a gravity, and a consciousness of fitness unsurpassed. If he degenerated into a Quixote it was because of the whole-hearted seriousness with which he had embraced the knightly life. He was certainly the first to laugh when he found that his manners, like his mail, had become obsolete. But even the sound of that laughter is knightly, and the book which aroused it has surely won at least as many hearts for romanticism as ever it disillusioned.

      The history of Spanish conquest is a chronicle of champions, of warriors almost superhuman in ambition and endurance, mighty carvers of kingdoms, great remodellers of the world’s chart, who, backed by a handful of lances, and whether in Valencia, Mexico, Italy, or Araucan, surpassed the fabulous deeds of Amadis or Palmerin. In a later day the iron land of Castile was to send forth iron men who were to carry her banners across an immensity of ocean to the uttermost parts of the earth. What inspired them to live and die in harness surrounded by dangers more formidable than the enchantments of malevolent sorcerers or than ever confronted knights-errant in the quest of mysterious castles? What heartened them in an existence of continuous strife, privation, and menace? Can we doubt that the hero-tales of their native land magically moved and inspired them—that when going into battle the exploits of the heroes of romance rang in their ears like a fanfare from the trumpets of heralds at a tournament?

      And as we gat us to the fight

      Our armour and our hearts seemed light

      Thinking on battle’s cheer,

      Of fierce Orlando’s high prowess,

      Of Felixmarte’s knightliness

And the death of Olivier.25

1 The moro latinado, or Spanish-speaking Moor, is a prominent figure in later Spanish story.

2 Bishop Odoor’s will (747) shows the break-up of Hispanic Latin, and Charles the Bald in an edict of 844 alludes to the usitato vocabulo of the Spaniards—their “customary speech.” On the Gothic period see Père Jules Tailham, in the fourth volume of Cahier and Martin’s Nouveaux Mélanges d’Archéologie, d’Histoire, et de Littérature sur le Moyen Age (1877).

3 This jargon owed much more to the lingua rustica than to Gothic, which has left its mark more deeply upon the pronunciation and syntax of Spanish than on its vocabulary.

4 Catalan differed slightly in a dialectic sense from Provençal. It was divided into plá Catalá and Lemosé, the common speech and the literary tongue.

5 “On the whole,” says Professor Saintsbury, “the ease, accomplishment, and, within certain strict limits, variety of the form, are more remarkable than any intensity or volume of passion or of thought” (Flourishing of Romance and Rise of Allegory, pp. 368–369). He further remarks that the Provençal rule “is a rule of ‘minor poetry,’ accomplished, scholarly, agreeable, but rarely rising out of minority.”

6 D. 1214.

7 It was entitled El Arte de Trobar, and is badly abridged in Mayan’s Orígenes de la Lengua Española (Madrid, 1737).

8 On Provençal influence upon Castilian literature see Manuel Milá y Fontanal, Trovadores en España (Barcelona, 1887); and E. Baret, Espagne et Provence (1857), on a lesser scale.

9 Still they found many Spanish-speaking people in that area; and it was the Romance speech of these which finally prevailed in Spain.

10 Madrid, 1839.

11 In the Cancionero de Romances (Antwerp, 1555).

12 See the article on Alfonso XI in N. Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Vetus.

13 English translation by James York.

14 Reigned 1407–54.

15 Gaston Paris, La Littérature Française au Moyen Age (Paris, 1888), and Léon Gautier, Les Épopées Française (Paris, 1878–92), are the leading authorities upon the chansons de gestes. Accounts of these in English can be found in Ludlow’s Popular Epics of the Middle Ages (1865) and in my Dictionary of Medieval Romance (1913).

16 See W. Wentworth Webster, in the Boletin of the Academia de Historia for 1883.

17 See Manuel Milá y Fontanal, Poesía heróico-popular Castellana (Barcelona, 1874).

18 The term, first employed by Count William of Poitiers, the earliest troubadour, at first implied any work written in the vernacular Romance languages. Later in Spain it was used as an equivalent for cantar, and finally indicated a lyrico-narrative poem in octosyllabic assonants.

19 In German it was known from 1583, and in English from 1619. Southey’s translation (London, 1803) is (happily) an abridgment, and has been reprinted in the “Library of Old Authors” (1872). I provide full bibliographical details when dealing with the romance more fully.

20 Omniana, t. ii, p. 219 (London, 1812).

21 Don Quixote, Part I, chap. vi.

22 English translation by Southey, 4 vols. (London, 1807).

23 In the chapter entitled “Moorish Romances of Spain” the reader will find specimens