Legends & Romances of Spain

by Lewis Spence

The Moor Reduan

We may pass by “The Lord of Butrayo” and “The King of Arragon” and come to the ballad of “The Moor Reduan,” a piece based on the siege of Granada, last stronghold of the Moors, and the first of those in which Lockhart deals with the romanceros fronterizos, or romances of the frontier, which, as we have before remarked, may have been influenced by Moorish ideas, or may even represent borrowings or données of a kind more or less direct. In his critique of this romancero Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly says: “Lockhart is, of course, not to blame for translating the ballad precisely as he found it in the text before him. Any translator would be bound to do the same to-day if he attempted a new rendering of the poem; but he would doubtless think it advisable to state in a note the result of the critical analysis which had scarcely been begun when Lockhart wrote. It now seems fairly certain that Pérez de Hita ran two romanceros into one, and that the verses from the fourth stanza onward in Lockhart,

They passed the Elvira gate with banners all displayed,

are part of a ballad on Boabdil’s expedition against Lucena in 1483.” This is only partially correct. Lockhart knew perfectly well that the piece was not homogeneous. Indeed he says, “The following is a version of certain parts of two ballads,” although he seems to have been unaware that one of them was that dealing with Boabdil’s expedition. That portion, indeed, provides by far the best elements in the composition.

What caftans blue and scarlet, what turbans pleach’d of green;

What waving of their crescents, and plumages between;

What buskins and what stirrups, what rowels chased in gold,

What handsome gentlemen, what buoyant hearts and bold!

Reduan had registered a rash vow to take the city of Jaen so that he might win the daughter of the Moorish king. The ninth verse is full of a grateful music, not too often found in the poetry of the Britain of 1823:

But since in hasty cheer I did my promise plight,

(What well might cost a year) to win thee in a night,

The pledge demands the paying, I would my soldiers brave

Were half as sure of Jaen as I am of my grave;

although, I confess, the internal rhyming of “paying” and “Jaen” detracts from the melody of the whole. And this is the besetting sin of Lockhart, that he mars his happiest efforts by crudities which he evidently confounded with the simplicity of the ballad form. In all British balladry, if memory serves me, there is no such vulgarism as this.

---

[1] Besides the collection of romances alluded to, which may be said to represent the standard sources of the subject, collections were published at Antwerp and Saragossa, in the middle of the sixteenth century, by Martin Nucio and Esteban de Nájera respectively. The reader may also consult the Primavera y Flor de Romance, by Wolf and Hofman, in the reprint published by Señor Menéndez y Pelayo, the collection of Depping (two vols., Leipzig, 1844), and the English translations of Lockhart and Bowring.

[2] If Scott wrote this verse himself (as Lockhart admits), he wrote others.

[3] I take these two quatrains from two different versions.

Chapter X: The Romanceros or Ballads—continued

There was crying in Granada as the sun was going down,

Some calling on the Trinity, some calling on Mahoun;

Here passed away the Koran, there in the Cross was borne,

And here was heard the Christian bell, and there the Moorish horn.

In this vivid verse, the first two lines of which seem to me especially successful, Lockhart, with a stroke or two of his pen, provides us with a moving sketch of the confusion and turmoil attending the Moorish flight from Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain, which fell to the victorious arms of Ferdinand and Isabella on the 6th of January, 1492, the year of the discovery of America. The remainder of the ballad is no better than Lorenzo de Sepúlveda’s rather unmusical original. It is pity that a ballad beginning with such a spirited couplet should be lost in the shallows and the miseries of such stuff as:

“Unhappy King, whose craven soul can brook” (she ’gan reply)

“To leave behind Granada—who hast not heart to die—

Now for the love I bore thy youth thee gladly could I slay,

For what is life to leave when such a crown is cast away?”

Here the spirit of the metre has deserted the body of the verse, which is now merely galvanized into life by an artificial current of pedantry. The striking inequalities in the work of Lockhart are surely eloquent of the tragedy of the half-talent.