text places the emphasis repeatedly on their bellicose nature and, more crucially, on their desire and capacity for territorial protection. ‘Los gallaicos’, he asserts, ‘se hallaban por efecto de su atraso social fuera de las leyes internacionales, y unida esta circunstancia á sus hábitos de feroz independencia, constituia un obstáculo poderoso á toda transacción pacífica con ellos’ (The Gallaic peoples, owing to the backwardness of their society, were outside international laws. This, combined with their habits of fierce independence, made any peaceful dealings with them truly difficult) (19). Saralegui’s account of the clash between Phoenician invaders and Celtic populations is a good example of how early versions of Galician celtismo were bound to the rhetoric of warfare and force, which thereby linked the inaugural moments of Galician national construction to the idea of fiercely defended historical difference:
al desembarcar en nuestro territorio, arrastrados por la presciencia de sus grandes riquezas, debieron encontrar una resistencia desesperada por parte de los naturales, cuya agreste rudeza hacia muy difícil entrar en tratos ni aun en comunicacion con ellos. Debió, pues, haber un choque rudo, formidable, entre el pueblo invasor y el pueblo indígena, entre el fenicio que llegaba y el celta que resistia con la fiereza indomable de su raza: choque violento, terrible, de qué la tradicion nos ha conservado el recuerdo en la simbólica lucha de Hércules y Gerion sobre las costas de nuestra pàtria. (1867: 19)
(after disembarking on our territories, driven here by the foreknowledge of its wealth, they must have confronted a desperate resistance from the indigenous populations, whose rugged spirit made it truly difficult to begin negotiating or even communicating with them. A formidable, cruel clash must have ensued between the invaders and the indigenous peoples, between the Phoenician newcomers and the Celts, who resisted with the full indomitable fierceness of their race. A violent, terrible clash, whose memory has been preserved in the symbolic fight between Hercules and Geryon on the shores of our fatherland.)
Saralegui was claiming explicitly that Galicia’s origin as a nation was rooted in a heroic defence of its difference and autonomy, made possible by the Celtic people’s innate adeptness at war. It is for this reason that the historian’s account of the Roman invasion of the north-western regions of the Iberian Peninsula is explained in openly colonial terms, with recourse to the vocabulary of subjection, domination and resistance. Interestingly too, the historian posits that the bitter memory of Roman enforced rule over the ‘Galician Celts’ is a central part of Galicia’s inherited lore, as well as a constant reminder of their original sovereignty and self-sufficiency. His description of how the Galician character is naturally averse to foreign interventions can be read as an important formulation of Galicia’s colonial condition in the nineteenth century. Importantly too, the theory of Galicians’ Celtic ancestry acts here as a historical reminder of the threat of future division and separation:
La población indígena, si asi podemos llamarle, aquella parte de la gran familia galaica en quién vive como perpetuada la primitiva raza céltica, conserva aun hoy, como parte de su carácter, un sentimiento de repulsion hácia todo lo extraño, hacia [sic] todo aquello que no ha heredado de sus padres y que no ha sido santificado por la tradicion. Y esa particularidad, propia del carácter gallego, tal vez no es otra cosa que un resto del antiguo odio á la soberbia Roma, ejemplo vivo del perpétuo anatema que reserva la historia á las grandes iniquidades y á los sangrientos atentados contra la independencia de los pueblos. (1867: 58)
(The indigenous people – if we can thus name that part of the great Gallaic family in which the primitive Celtic race lives on – still displays today, as a part of its character, a sense of repulsion towards anything that is foreign, anything that has not been directly inherited from its parents and sanctified by tradition. And this particularity of the Galician character is perhaps nothing less than a trace of that ancient hatred towards proud Rome: a living example of the perpetual curse that history reserves for the gross injustices and cruel attacks executed against the independence of peoples.)
One final point needs to be added to this delineation of a pre-sentimental period of Galician national historiography, and this is the one that concerns the politically loaded association between Galicians’ capacity for poetry or lack thereof. Colonial representations of Galicians as inept at poetic composition had emerged and become widespread from the early Spanish modern period: Lope de Vega’s adage ‘Galicia, nunca fértil en poetas’ (Galicia, never fertile in poets) is perhaps one of the best-known formulations of this idea, which has peppered many a description of Galicia and Galicians from a centralist viewpoint since the Spanish Golden Age.1 That this negative stereotype was enjoying wide circulation at the time of Saralegui y Medina’s writing is demonstrated by the prolonged counterargument he included in his 1867 book. The conception that Galicians were unsuited for poetry may well have been, as Saralegui acknowledged, ‘la injuria que lastima, pero no es la amarga realidad que desconsuela’ (an injurious comment that may hurt, but not a bitter reality that causes despair) (120). In his attempt to dismantle the demeaning stereotype about Galicians about which ‘sueña la inmensa mayoría de los españoles’ (the vast majority of Spaniards dream) (120), the historian explains that, although the climate of the region is not perhaps most conducive to the ‘desarrollo de la imaginacion’ (development of the imagination) necessary for poetic inspiration (117), Galician oral traditions of sung celebrations and legend-telling prove that this is not ‘un pueblo á quien ha negado el cielo el divino don de la poesia y la aptitud para las artes liberales’ (a people to which the heavens have denied the divine gift of poetry and aptitude for the liberal arts) (117). Saralegui’s passages on this question show that the coordination between Galician identity and sentimentality had not yet been forged at the time of his writing:
De qué el génio poético no haya llegado á desarrollarse entre nosotros, por efecto de circunstancias que todos conocemos, se ha querido sacar la consecuencia de que la inspiracion y el sentimiento son incompatibles con nuestro caracter y con nuestro clima, como si bajo el cielo todavia màs nebuloso de Bretagne, hombres de nuestra misma raza y del mismo caracter que nosotros no hubieran dado á la Francia épocas enteras de verdadera gloria literaria … (1867: 115–16, emphasis mine)
(From the fact that poetic genius has not yet developed among us owing to circumstances which we all know, some have reached the conclusion that inspiration and sentiment are not compatible with our character and climate, as if under the Breton sky, which is even cloudier than ours, men of our race and character had not given France whole periods of true literary glory.)
Saralegui’s words above outline a fundamental discursive structure of colonial power play between Spain and Galicia: the notion of sentimentality was, in the decades before the political articulation of Galician nationalism, a desirable feature for Galicia’s national character profile, one which would conveniently help counteract Spanish stereotypical depictions of Galicians as boorish and barbaric. It is with this function in mind that Saralegui saw it as necessary to ascertain that poetic skill was ‘uno de los caractéres peculiares de nuestra raza’ (one of the specific traits of our race) (115). However, as we are about to see, a second discursive turn emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, during a key period in the development of Galician nationalist discourses, whereby the trope of sentimentality would be reappropriated by centralist positions as a colonial stereotype with which to stall the political articulation of Galician national insurgence.
For a historical elucidation of the origins of this trope, I would like now to focus on the polemics among the historians Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Antonio Sánchez Moguel, Manuel Murguía and the Marqués de Figueroa, who between 1886 and 1889, and in a discursive interaction moving transnationally between Madrid, Galicia and Havana, rearranged the imagery and language of Galician sentimentality for decades and, arguably, centuries to come. The 1880s were a heady and transformative decade for Galician national insurgence. The years before had seen a proliferation of texts and enterprises which had the purpose of national construction at their core, from the publication of Manuel Murguía’s first two volumes of his Historia de Galicia (History of Galicia) (1865–6), to Benito Vicetto’s Historia
