Public-domain ebook
Legends & Romances of Spain
by Lewis Spence
Language: en1,530 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Mythology, Legends & Folklore
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #38530.
About this book
Lewis Spence’s Legends & Romances of Spain is a scholarly survey of Spanish chivalric literature, aimed at English‑speaking readers who have long overlooked the peninsula’s rich tradition. The opening essay laments the neglect of Spanish romance since Southey, then sets out a panoramic view of the sources, from the medieval cantares de gesta and the Poema del Cid to the sprawling Amadis cycles, Catalan tales, Moorish romances, and even humorous ballads. Spence promises concise summaries of the most important works, many of which have never before been described in English, and he stresses that his translations strive for “tolerable accuracy” rather than mere paraphrase. The book is organized into clearly titled chapters that trace the evolution of the genre, its linguistic roots, and its cultural cross‑currents, offering a compact yet comprehensive guide to a literature that remains largely hidden behind the Spanish language.
Written in the early‑twentieth‑century academic style of a Scottish literary historian, the work combines earnest erudition with a lyrical appreciation of the myths it surveys. Spence’s prose is dense but readable, peppered with vivid geographical and historical sketches that evoke the rugged sierras, the Moorish courts of Granada, and the troubadour courts of Catalonia. Readers who enjoy literary history, comparative romance studies, or the mythic world of medieval chivalry will find this volume a rewarding entry point, while scholars of comparative linguistics and folklore will appreciate its detailed attention to the interplay of Romance, Provençal, and Arabic influences.
Characters in Legends & Romances of Spain
- Cid CampeadorMiddle‑aged Castilian knight, long dark beard, steel helm with plume, chainmail, gauntleted hands, riding a warhorse
- GayferosValiant medieval warrior, short cropped hair, scar across cheek, leather cuirass, sword at side, stern gaze
- Gonzalvo de CordovaTall Spanish noble, flowing brown hair, polished breastplate, embroidered surcoat, gauntleted forearms, regal bearing
The opening · free to read
Since the days of Southey the romantic literature of Spain has not received from English writers and critics the amount of study and attention it undoubtedly deserves. In no European country did the seeds of Romance take root so readily or blossom so speedily and luxuriantly as in Spain, which perhaps left the imprint of its national character more deeply upon the literature of chivalry than did France or England. When we think of chivalry, do we not think first of Spain, of her age-long struggle against the pagan invaders of Europe, her sensitiveness to all that concerned personal and national honour, of the names of the Cid Campeador, Gayferos, and Gonzalvo de Cordova, gigantic shadows in harness, a pantheon of heroes, which the martial legends of few lands can equal and none surpass. The epic of our British Arthur, the French chansons de gestes, are indebted almost as much to folklore as to the imagination of the singers who first gave them literary shape. But in the romances of Spain we find that folklore plays an inconsiderable part, and that her chivalric fictions are either the offspring of historic happenings or of that brilliant and glowing imagination which illumines the whole expanse of Peninsular literature.
I have given more space to the proofs of connexion between the French chansons de gestes and the Spanish cantares de gesta than most of my predecessors who have written of Castilian romantic story. Indeed, with the exception of Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly, whose admirable work in the field of Spanish letters forms so happy an exception to our national neglect of a great literature, I am aware of no English writer who has concerned himself with this subject. My own opinion regarding the almost total lack of Moorish influence upon the Spanish romanceros is in consonance with that of critics much better qualified to pass judgment upon such a question. But for my classification of the ballad I am indebted to no one, and this a long devotion to the study of ballad literature perhaps entitles me to make. I can claim, too, that my translations are not mere paraphrases, but provide renderings of tolerable accuracy.
I have made an earnest endeavour to provide English readers with a conspectus of Spanish romantic literature as expressed in its cantares de gesta, its chivalric novels, its romanceros or ballads, and some of its lighter aspects. The reader will find full accounts and summaries of all the more important works under each of these heads, many of which have never before been described in English.
If the perusal of this book leads to the more general study of the noble and useful Castilian tongue on the part of but a handful of those who read it, its making will have been justified. The real brilliance and beauty of these tales lie behind the curtains of a language unknown to most British people, and can only be liberated by the spell of study. This book contains merely the poor shadows and reflected wonders of screened and hidden marvels.
L. S.
The Sources of Spanish Romance
Romance, Romance, the songs of France, The gestes of fair Britaine, The legends of the sword and lance That grew in Alemaine, Pale at thy rich inheritance, Thou splendour of old Spain!
Anon.
If, spent with journeying, a stranger should seat himself in some garden in old Granada, and from beneath a tenting of citron and mulberry leaves open his ears to the melody of the waters of the City of Pomegranates and his spirit to the sorcery of its atmosphere, he will gladly believe that in the days when its colours were less mellow and its delicious air perhaps less reposeful the harps of its poets were the looms upon which the webs of romance were woven. Almost instinctively he will form the impression that the Spaniard, having regained this paradise after centuries of exile, and stirred by the enchanted echoes of Moorish music which still lingered there, was roused into passionate song in praise of those heroes of his race who had warred so ceaselessly and sacrificed so much to redeem it. But if he should climb the Sierra del Sol and pass through the enchanted chambers of the Alhambra as a child passes through the courts of dream, he will say in his heart that the men who builded these rooms from the rainbow and painted these walls from the palette of the sunset raised also the invisible but not less gorgeous palace of Spanish Romance.
Or if one, walking in the carven shadows of Cordova, think on the mosque Maqsura, whose doors of Andalusian brass opened to generations of poets and astrologers, or on the palace of Azzahra, built of rose and sea-coloured marbles rifled from the Byzantine churches of Ifrikia, will he not believe that in this city of shattered splendours and irretrievable spells the passion-flower of Romance burst forth full-blown?
But we cannot trace the first notes of the forgotten musics nor piece together the mosaic of broken harmonies in the warm and sounding cities of the Saracens, neither in "that mine of silk and silver," old Granada, nor among the marble memories of Cordova, whose market-place overflowed with the painted parchments of Moorish song and science. We must turn our backs on the scarlet southern land and ascend to the bare heights of Castile and Asturias, where Christian Spain, prisoned for half a thousand years upon a harsh and arid plateau, and wrought to a high passion of sacrifice and patriotism, burst into a glory of martial song, the echoes of which resound among its mountains like ghostly clarions on a field of old encounter.
Isolation and devotion to a national cause are more powerful as incentives to the making of romance than an atmosphere of Eastern luxuriance. The breasts of these stern sierras were to give forth milk sweeter than the wine of Almohaden, and song more moving if less fantastic arose in Burgos and Carrión than ever inspired the guitars of Granada. But the unending conflict of Arab and Spaniard brought with it many interchanges between the sensuous spirit of the South and the more rugged manliness of the North, so that at last Saracen gold damascened the steel of Spanish song, and the nets of Eastern phantasy wound themselves about the Spanish soul. In a later day an openly avowed admiration for the art and culture of the Moslem leavened the ancient hate, and the Moorish cavalier imitated the chivalry, if not the verse, of the Castilian knight. [1]
The Cradle of Spanish Song
The homeland of Spanish tradition was indeed a fitting nursery for the race which for centuries contested every acre of the Peninsula with an enemy greatly more advanced in the art of warfare, if inferior in resolution and the spirit of unity. Among the flinty wastes of the north of Spain, which are now regarded as rich in mineral resources, are situated at intervals luxuriant and fertile valleys sunk deep between the knees of volcanic ridges, the lower slopes of which are covered with thick forests of oak, chestnut, and pine. These depressions, sheltered from the sword-like winds which sweep down from the Pyrenees, reproduce in a measure the pleasant conditions of the southern land. Although their distance one from another tended to isolation, it was in these valleys that Christian Spain received the respite which enabled her to collect her strength and school her spirit for the great struggle against the Saracen.
In this age-long contest she was undoubtedly inspired by that subtle sense of nationhood and the possession of a common tongue which have proved the salvation of many races no less desperately situated, and perhaps her determination to redeem the lost Eden of the South is the best measure of the theory that, prior to the era of Saracen conquest, the Castilian tongue was a mere jargon, composed of the elements of the Roman lingua rustica and the rude Gothic, and, according to some authorities, still lacking in grammatical arrangement and fixity of idiom. [2] It is certainly clear that the final phases in the evolution of Castilian took place subsequently to the Arabic invasion, but it is a straining of such scanty evidence as we possess to impute to the form of Castilian speech current immediately before that time the character of an undisciplined patois.
The use of Latin as a literary tongue in that part of Spain where the Castilian speech was evolved considerably retarded its development from the condition of a patois to a language proper. Nevertheless it continued to advance. The processes by which it did so are surprisingly obscure, but the circumstance of its literary fixity in the early eleventh century is proof that it must have achieved colloquial perfection at least before the era of the Moorish invasion. The Saracen conquest, by forcing it into the bleak north-west, did it small disservice, for there it had to contend with other dialects of the Roman tongue, which enriched its vocabulary, and over which, ultimately, it gained almost complete ascendancy as a literary language.
The Romance Tongues of Spain
Three Romance or Roman languages were spoken in that portion of Spain which remained in Christian hands: in Catalonia and Aragon the Provençal, Catalan, or Limousin; in Asturias, Old Castile, and Leon the Castilian; and in Galicia the Gallego, whence the Portuguese had its origin. The Catalan was almost entirely similar to the Provençal or langue d'oc of Southern France, and the accession of Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, to the throne of Provence in 1092 united the Catalonian and Provençal peoples under one common rule. Provençal, the language of the Troubadours, was of French origin, and bears evidence of its evolution from the Latin of Provincial Gaul. It appears to have been brought into Catalonia by those Hispani who had fled to Provence from Moorish rule, and who gradually drifted southward again as the more northerly portions of Spain were freed from Arab aggression. The political connexion of Catalonia with Provence naturally brought about a similarity of custom as well as of speech, and indeed we find the people of the Catalan coast and the province of Aragon deeply imbued with the chivalry and gallantry of the more northerly home of the Gai Saber.
Throughout the whole Provençal-Catalan [4] tract were held those romantic courts of love in which the erotic subtleties of its men and women of song were debated with a seriousness which shows that the art of love had entered into competition with the forces of law and religion, and had, indeed, become the real business of life with the upper classes of the country. Out of this glorification of the relations of the sexes arose the allied science of chivalry, no less punctilious or extravagant in its code and spirit. This spirit of Provençal chivalry gradually found its way into Castile, heightened and quickened the imagination of its people, and prepared the Spanish mind for the acceptance and appreciation of Romantic literature. But at no time was Castilian imagination passively receptive. It subjected every literary force which invaded it to such a powerful alchemy of transmutation that in time all foreign elements lost their alien character and emerged from the crucible of Spanish thought as things almost wholly Castilian.
The book keeps going
Keep reading, and see it illustrated
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
