Many a casement in the grey castle of Spanish Romance opens upon vistas of fantastic loveliness or gloomy grandeur, but none commands a prospect so brilliant, so infinitely varied, or so rich in the colours of fantasy as that aery embrasure overlooking the region of marvel and high chivalry where is enacted the gallant and glorious history of Amadis de Gaul. The window of which I speak is perched high in a turret of the venerable fortalice, and displays such a landscape as was dear to the weavers of ancient tapestries or the legend-loving painters of old Florence. Beneath is spread a princely domain of noble meadow-land, crossed and interlaced by the serpent-silver of narrow rivers and rising northward to dim, castellated hills. Far beyond these, remote and seeming more of sky than of earth, soar the blue and jagged peaks of dragon-haunted mountains. This scene of almost supernatural beauty presents, at the first glance, an unbroken richness of colour and radiance. The meadow-land is populous with pavilions and the air is painted with pennons and gilded with the blazonry of banners. The glitter of armour thrills the blood like the challenge of martial music. Strange palaces of marble, white as sculptured ice, rise at the verges of magic forests, or glitter on the edges of the promontories, their gardens and terraces sloping to silent and forlorn beaches. The scene is indeed “Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise.”
Such seems the book of Amadis when first we glance through its rainbow-coloured pages. But when we gain a nearer view by the aid of the romancer’s magical glass we find that the radiant scene is deeply shadowed in places. Ravines profound as night lie near the castled hills, in which all manner of noxious things swarm and multiply. The princely fortresses, the gay palaces, are often the haunts of desperate outlaws or malignant sorcerers. Hideous giants dwell in the mountains, or in the shadowy islands which rise from the pale sea, and dragons have their lairs in fell and forest. But whether it breed light or gloom, the atmosphere of Amadis is suffused with such a glamour that we come to love the darker places; we feel that the horror they hold is but the stronger wine of romance, a vintage which intoxicates.
And if we remain at our point of vantage until nightfall and watch the illumination of this wondrous region by the necromancy of moonshine we shall be granted an even more inspiring draught from the strange chalice of romance. In the mystery of moonlight armour is silvered to an unearthly whiteness, blood-red lights gleam from the turrets of the magicians, and the sylph-like shapes of sorceresses flit from sea to forest like living moonbeams. From the deserts between the hills and the distant mountains come the cries of ravening monsters, and all the fantastic world of Faëry is vivid with life.
What marvel then that when this surpassing picture was unveiled to the eyes of a nation of knights it aroused such a fervour of applause and appreciation as has been granted to few works in the history of literary effort? The author of Amadis displayed to the chivalry of Spain such a world as it had dreamed of. Every knight felt himself a possible Amadis and every damsel deemed herself an Oriana. The philosophy and atmosphere of the book took complete possession of the soul of Spain, banishing grosser ideals and introducing a new code of manners and sentiment. The main plot and the manifold incidents which arise from it were coherently and skilfully arranged, and were not made up of isolated and disconnected accounts of combats, or tedious descriptions of apparel, appointments, or architecture, interspersed with the boastful bellowings of rude paladins or vociferous kings, as the ‘plots’ of the cantares de gesta had been. Moreover, the whole was powerfully infused with the love-philosophy of chivalry, in which woman, instead of being the chattel and plaything of man, found herself exalted to heights of worship, and even of omnipotence, undreamed of by the ruder singers of the cantares.
Origin of the “Amadis” Romances
The first Peninsular version of Amadis appeared in a Portuguese dress, and was the work of a Lusitanian knight, Joham de Lobeira (1261–1325), who was born at Porto, fought at Aljubarrota, where he was knighted upon the field by King Joham of happy memory, and died at Elvas. But Southey’s protestations notwithstanding, everything points to France as being the original home of the romance, and there is even a reference in Portuguese literature to the circumstance that a certain Pedro de Lobeira translated Amadis from the French by order of the Infante Dom Pedro, son of Joham I. The original French tale has vanished without leaving a trace that it ever existed, save in the Peninsular versions to which it gave birth, and we are no more fortunate as regards the Portuguese rendering. A manuscript copy of Lobeira’s romance was known to exist at the close of the sixteenth century in the archives of the Dukes of Arveiro at Lisbon, and appears to have been extant as late as 1750. After that period, however, it disappears from the sight of the bibliophile, and all the evidence points to its having been destroyed at the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755, along with the ducal palace in which it was housed.
Its fame, as well as its matter, was, however, kept alive by the Spanish version, and if we must regard Portugal as the original home of Amadis in the Peninsula, it is to the genius of Castile that we owe not only its preservation, but its possible improvement. At some time between 1492 and 1508 Garcia Ordoñez de Montalvo, governor of the city of Medina del Campo, addressed himself to the task of its translation and adaptation. At what precise date it was first printed is obscure. Early copies are lacking, but we learn that the Spanish conquerors of Mexico remarked upon the resemblance of that city to the places of enchantment spoken of in Amadis. This occurred in 1519, not 1549, as stated by Southey. They may, perhaps, have referred to the Portuguese version, but in any case an edition of Amadis is known to have been published in that year, and another at Seville in 1547. Reference has already been made to the numerous translations of the romance in all languages, and to the equally manifold continuations of it by several hands, but it is necessary to remark that only the first four books of Amadis—that is, those which constitute the Amadis proper—were written by Montalvo, the remainder being the independent and original work of imitators.[1]