NOTES
The heavy figures refer to pages of the text; the light figures to lines.
ROMANCES. The Spanish romances viejos, which correspond in form and spirit to the early English and Scotch ballads, exist in great number and variety. Anonymous and widely known among the people, they represent as well as any literary product can the spirit of the Spanish nation of the period, in the main stern and martial, but sometimes tender and plaintive. Most of them were written in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the earliest to which a date can be assigned is Cercada tiene á Baeza, which must have been composed soon after 1368. Others may have their roots in older events, but have undergone constant modification since that time. The romance popular is still alive in Spain and many have recently been collected from oral tradition (cf. Menéndez y Pelayo, Antología, vol. X).
The romances were once thought to be relics of very old lyrico-epic songs which, gathering material in the course of time, became the long epics that are known to have existed in Spain in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries (such as the Poema del Cid, and the lost cantares of Bernardo del Carpio, the Infantes de Lara and Fernán González). But modern investigation has shown conclusively that no such age can be ascribed to the romances in their present form, and that in so far as they have any relation with the epic cycles just cited they are rather descendants of them than ancestors,—striking passages remembered by the people and handed down by them in constantly changing form. Many are obviously later in origin; such are the romances fronterizos, springing from episodes of the Moorish wars, and the romances novelescos, which deal with romantic incidents of daily life. The romances juglarescos are longer poems, mostly concerned with Charlemagne and his peers, veritable degenerate epics, composed by itinerant minstrels to be sung in streets and taverns to throngs of apprentices and rustics. They have not the spontaneity and vigor which characterize the better romances viejos.
A few of the romances were printed in the Cancionero general of 1511, and more in loose sheets (pliegos sueltos) not much later in date; but the great collections which contain nearly all the best we know were the Cancionero de romances "sin año," (shortly before 1550), the Cancionero de romances of 1550 and the Silva de varios romances (3 parts, 1550). The most comprehensive modern collection is that of A. Durán, Romancero general, 2 vols., Madrid, 1849-1851 (vols. 10 and 16 of the Biblioteca de Autores españoles). The best selected is the Primavera y flor de romances of Wolf and Hofmann (Berlin, 1856), reprinted in vols. VIII and IX of Menéndez y Pelayo's Antología de poetas líricos castellanos. This contains nearly all the oldest and best romances, and includes poems from pliegos sueltos and the second part of the Silva, which were not known to Durán. Menéndez y Pelayo, in his Apéndices á la Primavera y flor (Antol. vol. IX) has given still more texts, notably from the third part of the Silva, one of the rarest books in the world. The fundamental critical works on the romances are: F. Wolf, Ueber die Romanzenpoesie der Spanier (in Studien, Berlin, 1859); Milá y Fontanals, De la poesía heroico-popular castellana (1874); and Menéndez y Pelayo, Tratado de los romances viejos (vols. XI and XII of the Antología, Madrid, 1903-1906).
The romances, as usually printed, are in octosyllabic lines, with a fixed accent on the seventh syllable of each and assonance in alternate lines.
Many English translators have tried their hand at Spanish ballads, as Thomas Rodd (1812), J. C. Lockhart (1823), John Bowring (1824), J.Y. Gibson (1887) and others. Lockhart's versions are the best known and the least literal.
In the six romances included in this collection the lyrical quality predominates above the narrative (cf. the many rimes in-or in Fonte-frida and El prisionero). Abenámar is properly a frontier ballad, and La constancia, perhaps, belongs with the Carolingian cycle; but the rest are detached poems of a romantic nature. (See S.G. Morley's Spanish Ballads, New York, 1911.)
[1.—Abenámar] is one of a very few romances which are supposed to have their origin in Moorish popular poetry. The Christian king referred to is Juan II, who defeated the Moors at La Higueruela, near Granada, in 1431. It is said that on the morning of the battle he questioned one of his Moorish allies, Yusuf Ibn Alahmar, concerning the conspicuous objects of Granada. The poem was utilized by Chateaubriand for two passages of Les aventures du dernier Abencérage.
[1. Abenámar] = Ibn Alahmar: see above.