In reading the ballads relating to Bernardo del Carpio, it is impossible not to be often struck with their resemblance to the corresponding passages of the “General Chronicle.” Some of them are undoubtedly copied from it; others possibly may have been, in more ancient forms, among the poetical materials out of which we know that Chronicle was in part composed.[209] The best are those which are least strictly conformed to the history itself; but all, taken together, form a curious and interesting series, that serves strikingly to exhibit the manners and feelings of the people in the wild times of which they speak, as well as in the later periods when many of them must have been written.
The next series is that on Fernan Gonzalez, a popular chieftain, whom we have already mentioned, when noticing his metrical chronicle; and one who, in the middle of the tenth century, recovered Castile anew from the Moors, and became its first sovereign Count. The number of ballads relating to him is not large; probably not twenty. The most poetical are those which describe his being twice rescued from prison by his courageous wife, and those which relate his contest with King Sancho, where he displayed all the turbulence and cunning of a robber baron, in the Middle Ages. Nearly all their facts may be found in the Third Part of the “General Chronicle”; and though only a few of the ballads themselves appear to be derived from it as distinctly as some of those on Bernardo del Carpio, still two or three are evidently indebted to that Chronicle for their materials and phraseology, while yet others may possibly, in some ruder shape, have preceded it, and contributed to its composition.[210]
The ballads which naturally form the next group are those on the Seven Lords of Lara, who lived in the time of Garcia Ferrandez, the son of Fernan Gonzalez. Some of them are beautiful, and the story they contain is one of the most romantic in Spanish history. The seven Lords of Lara, in consequence of a family quarrel, are betrayed by their uncle into the hands of the Moors, and put to death; while their father, by the basest treason, is confined in a Moorish prison, where, by a noble Moorish lady, he has an eighth son, the famous Mudarra, who at last avenges all the wrongs of his race. On this story there are about thirty ballads; some very old, and exhibiting either inventions or traditions not elsewhere recorded, while others seem to have come directly from the “General Chronicle.” The following is a part of one of the last, and a good specimen of the whole:—[211]
What knight goes there, so false and fair,
That thus for treason stood?
Velasquez hight is that false knight,
Who sold his brother’s blood.
Where Almenar extends afar,
He called his nephews forth,
And on that plain he bade them gain