Cervantes makes strange blunders with these northern nations, of which he evidently knew very little. It seems singular, for one so well informed as he was on many points, to be so ignorant about their history at the same period as his own. He here talks of the King of Danea, having already a Danish prince in his story; but I have ventured to suppose that Cervantes considers the countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway as being all included in the word Danes, which was the general appellation given to the Scandinavian tribes in the ninth and tenth centuries. There were the Western Danes, inhabitants of what is now called Denmark. The Eastern Danes are now Sweden. The Northern Danes are Norway. These people had all one common language. Later in the book, Periander hears the language of Norway, and recognizes it as his own. I have therefore changed the word Danea, and made Leopold King of Norway. It was a curious oversight that Cervantes fell into, giving imaginary sovereigns to all the northern kingdoms, and, as Sismondi observes, in fact, knowing no more of them than his own Don Quixote did. "The Poles, the Norwegians, the Irish and the English are all introduced in their turns, and represented as possessing manners no less extraordinary, and a mode of life no less fantastic, than that of the savages with whom he peoples his unknown isles; nor is the scene laid in that remote antiquity, the obscurity of which might admit of such fables."—Sismondi: Roscoe's Translation.
But otherwise, one might suppose that Cervantes, entirely abandoning the field of reality, and forgetting that, in other parts of the story, he intends us to be actually within that sober realm, by making mention of personages who were existing about his own time, had wandered away into the dreamy countries of romance, and that he is speaking of those imaginary kingdoms we read of in Amadis de Gaul—"El Reyno di Dinamarea o el di Sobradisa," kingdoms in romance, situated in the imaginary maps of the Chronicle of Amadis de Gaul. Of the Dinamarea damsel, the chief confidante of the Lady Oriana, and of the kingdom of Sobradisa, which was bounded by that of Seroloys on one side, and by the sea on the other, we have frequent mention, especially in chapters 21 and 22.—Note in Don Quixote, by Pellicer, v. 1, pt. 1.
[Note 5.] Page 256.
In the middle ages, riding full gallop down a precipice occurs in Froissart, as a common but distinguished act of chivalry.—Fosbroke's Encyclopædia of Antiquities.
BOOK III.
[Note 6.] Page 281.
In this poet Cervantes describes himself. His first literary compositions were dramas; he was poor; he had returned home from his career as a soldier with the loss of his left hand, and had been five years and a half in slavery at Algiers.
[Note 7.] Page 338.
Cervantes hated the Moors; which was, perhaps, not wonderful after his five years' slavery among them. But he is clearly a courtier, too; and the story seems introduced for the sake of this tirade against their nation; and the apostrophe to the king, Philip III., in whose reign was perpetrated that deed of violence, cruelty, and short-sighted folly, the consequences of which Spain will never recover, and which will ever remain a dark blot in the page of her history.