language, with the exception of English and Norse, and undoubtedly stand in an ancestral relation to all modern European literature.
These chansons were intended to be sung in the common halls of feudal dwellings by the itinerant trouvères, who composed or passed them on to one another. Their subject-matter deals more with the clash of arms than the human emotions, though these are at intervals depicted in a masterly manner. The older examples among them are written in batches of lines, varying from one to several score, each of which derives unity from an assonant vowel-rhyme, and known as laisses or tirades. Later, however, rhyme crept into the chansons, the entire laisse, or batch, ending in a single rhyme-sound.
Castilian Opposition to the Chansons de Gestes
In these poems, which probably originated in the north of France, the genre spreading southward as time progressed, Charlemagne is represented as the great bulwark of Christianity against the Saracens of Spain. Surrounded by his peers, Roland, Oliver, Naymes, Ogier, and William of Orange, he wages constant warfare against the Moors or the ‘Saracens’ (pagans) of Saxony. Of these poems Gautier has published a list of one hundred and ten, a moiety of which date from the twelfth century. A number of the later chansons are in Provençal, but all attempts to refer the entire cycle in its original condition to that literature have signally failed.
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
But if the Castilians did not accept the matter of the chansons, they assuredly adopted their form. Their literary revolt against the alien spirit and politics of the chansons seems to have taken place at some time soon after the diffusion of these throughout Spain. A Spanish priest of the early twelfth century wrote the fabulous chronicle of Archbishop Turpin of Rheims, which purported to be the work of that warlike cleric, but in reality was intended to popularize the pilgrimage to Compostella to which it had reference. Many Franks travelled to the shrine, among them trouvères, who in all likelihood passed on to the native Castilian singers the spirit and metrical system of the chansons, so that later we hear of Spanish cantares de gesta, most of which, however, unlike their French models, are lost to us. The famous Poema del Cid, dealing with the exploits of a great Castilian hero, is nothing but a cantar de gesta in form and spirit, and we possess good evidence that many of the late romanceros or ballads upon such heroes as Bernaldo de Carpio, Gonzalvo de Cordova, and Gayferos are but ancient cantares ‘rubbed down,’ or in a state of attrition.
As in France, so in Spain, degeneration overtook the cantares de gesta. In course of time they were forced into the market-place and the scullions’ hall. Many of them were worked into the substance of chronicles and histories; but the juglares who now sang them altered them, when they passed out of fashion, into corrupt abridgments, or broke them up into ballads to suit the taste of a more popular audience.17
The Chronicles
But if the majority of the cantares de gesta are irreplaceable as regards their original form, we find fragments of them in the ancient chronicles of Spain. Thus the General Chronicle of Spain (c. 1252), which, according to the latest research, is believed to have undergone at least three specific alterations or rearrangements of its text, tells the stories of Bernaldo de Carpio, Fernán González, and the seven Children of Lara, and provides sketches of Charlemagne, while its latter portion recounts the history of the Cid, and at times even appeals to the cantares as its authority for such and such an episode. Many of the passages in the chronicles, too, are obviously copied in their entirety from certain cantares. So strongly, indeed, do they retain the assonant verse-formation typical of the cantares that many of the later balladeers seem easily to have cast them into verse again, especially those relating to Bernaldo de Carpio and the Infantes de Lara, and in this manner they appeared once more in the cancioneros, or collections of folk-songs.
The Ballads
The immortal ballads of Spain have been the subject of the sharpest controversy, and their importance as Romantic material demands special treatment in a separate chapter. Regarding the period to which they belong and their relations to the larger narrative poems and chronicles, we must deal briefly with them here. Some authorities ascribe them to an early age and insist upon their priority to such poems as the Poema del Cid and such chronicles as that of Alfonso the Learned, while others are equally assured of the late date of the greater number. It seems to me that the truth resides in both hypotheses, and that in this case, as frequently in literary navigation, it is wise to steer a middle course. In my view the ballads of Spain are of four fundamental types: those which arose spontaneously in Northern Spain at some time subsequent to the formation of the Castilian language, and which, if we possess any remnants of them at all, have probably come down to us in such a form as would render them unrecognizable to
