Ballads, Spanish; Legends -- Spain; Spanish literature -- History and criticism
That this immense body of romantic material found its way into
Castile is positively certain. Whether it did so by way of Provence
and Catalonia is not clear, but it is not impossible that such was the
case. It might be thought that Christian Spain, in the throes of her
struggle with the Moors, took kindly to a literature so constant in its
reference to the discomfiture of her hereditary foes. At first she did
so, and certainly accepted the chanson form. But two barriers to her
undivided appreciation of it presently appeared. In the first place,
the Castilian of the twelfth century seems to have been aware that
if Charlemagne invaded Spain at all, he encountered not only the Moor
but the Spaniard as well. This is not borne out, as some authorities
imply, by a piece in the popular poetry of the Basques known as the
Altobiskarko Cantar, or Song of Altobiskar, which tacitly asserts that
the defeat of Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncesvalles was due not to
Saracens, but to Basques, who resented the passage of the Frankish
army through their mountain passes. The whole piece is an effusion
written in Basque by a Basque student named Duhalde, who translated
it from the French of François Garay de Montglave (c. 1833). [16]
A second battle of Roncesvalles took place in the reign of Louis le
Debonair in 824, when two Frankish counts returning from Spain were
again surprised and defeated by the Pyrenean mountaineers. But there
appears to have been a still earlier battle between Franks and Basques
in the Pyrenees in the reign of Dagobert I (631-638). The folk-memory
of these contests seems to have been kept alive, so that the Spaniard
felt that the Frank was somewhat of a traditional enemy. Archbishop
Roderic of Toledo inveighed against those Spanish juglares who sang
the battles of Charlemagne in Spain, and Alfonso the Learned belittles
the mythical successes of the Frankish emperor.
But this was not all. The idea that Charlemagne had entered Spain
as a conqueror, carrying all before him, was offensive to the highly
wrought pride and patriotism of the Castilians, who chose to interpret
the spirit of the chansons de gestes in their own way, and, instead
of copying them slavishly, raised an opposing body of song to their
detriment. Accepting as the national hero of the Carlovingian era an
imaginary knight, Bernaldo de Carpio, they hailed him as the champion
of Castile, and invented songs of their own in which he is spoken
of as slaying and defeating Roland at Roncesvalles at the head of a
victorious army composed not of Arabs or Basques, but Castilians.
The Cantares de Gesta
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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