‘If thou sleepest, Don Rodrigo, I pray thee now awake;
[87]Thine evil fate is on thee, thy kingdom it doth fall,
Thy people perish, and thy hosts are scattered one and all,
Thy famous towns and cities fall in a single day,
And o’er thy forts and castles another lord bears sway.’
The romances of this series have perhaps met with rather more success than they deserved on their intrinsic merits. The second ballad translated by Lockhart—
Despues que el rey don Rodrigo á España perdido habia[16]—
is quoted by Doña Rodríguez in Don Quixote; and the simple chance that these romances were lodged in Cervantes’s memory has made them familiar to everybody. Nor is this the end of their good fortune, for the first ballad translated by Lockhart caught the attention of Victor Hugo, who incorporated a fragment of it in La Bataille perdue.[17] Among the twenty-five romances on Roderick in Durán’s collection, those by Timoneda, Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, and Gabriel Lobo Lasso de la Vega can, of course, be no older than the middle or the latter half of the sixteenth century. Others, though anonymous, can be shown to belong, at the earliest, to the extreme end of the sixteenth century.
In a note to the eighth poem in his anthology—The Escape of Count Fernan Gonzalez—Lockhart mentions ‘La Cava,’ and remarks that ‘no child in Spain was ever christened by that ominous name after the downfall of the Gothic Kingdom.’ Sweeping statements of this kind are generally dangerous, but in this particular case one might safely go further, and say that no child in Spain, or anywhere else, was ever christened ‘La Cava’ at any time. ‘Cava’ appears to be an abbreviation or variant of the name ‘Alataba,’ and it is first given as the name of Count Julian’s daughter by the Moor Rasis, an Arab historian who lived two centuries after the downfall of the Gothic kingdom, and whose chronicle, as I have already said, survives only in a fourteenth-century Spanish translation made through the Portuguese. We cannot feel sure that the name ‘Cava’ occurred in the original Arabic; and, even if it did, no testimony given two hundred years after an event can be decisive. But why does Lockhart think that ‘Cava’ was an ominous name? Perhaps because he took it to be the Arabic word for a wanton. This is, in fact, the explanation given in the Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo y de la pérdida de España, which purports to be a translation from the Arabic of Abulcacim Tarif Abentarique. It is nothing of the kind. Abentarique is a mythical personage, and his supposititious chronicle was fabricated at Granada by a morisco called Miguel de Luna who, by the way, was the first to assert that ‘La Cava’s’ real name was Florinda. These circumstances enable us to assign a modern date to certain romances which are popularly supposed to be ancient. If a romance speaks of Roderick’s alleged victim as ‘La Cava’ in a derogatory sense, we know at once that it was written after the publication of Luna’s forgery in 1589: and accordingly we must reject as a late invention the notorious ballad beginning—
De una torre de palacio se salió por un postigo.[18]