1 Castilian Literature

1. CASTILIAN LITERATURE By the time of the Muslim invasion (7i I) the Latin spoken in the peninsula was already in process of transformation into a Romance patois which, from the few words that have come down to us (some of them preserved in jest by the Arabic-speaking conquerors), seems to have resembled the modern dialect of Galicia rather than that of Castile. The earliest documents date from the loth century; while the revival of the study of Latin in northern Spain in the uth century led to the neglect of the vulgar tongue by the learned, and the complete separation between the spoken and the written language. Castilian, romance castel lano, became the official language for public documents under Ferdinand III. (1217-52) and Alfonso X. (1252-84)• Heroic Poetry, 1050-1250.—Castilian literature begins with the poem of the Cid (Cantor de mio Cid), an historical character named Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar (d. 1o99) and usually known by his Arabic title, Sid (lord). The poem, as the brilliant re searches of Menendez Pidal have abundantly proved (see bibli ography), dates from 114o, the only existing ms. is an imperfect copy made in 1307. It was first printed in 1779. The Cantar de mio Cid is a work of noble inspiration. Apart from all questions of originality—whether it owes more to French or to Germanic models, the poem is intensely Castilian in its directness of expression and unflinching realism. The assonant metre seems to be on the same principle as that of the other early Spanish epics which have partly survived—Los siete infantes de Lara, reconstructed by Menendez Pidal from a prose chronicle in which it had been incorporated, and the Roncesvalles fragment, recently discovered in the cathedral at Pamplona. It is versification irregu lar; that is, it depends not on the number of syllables (1 1-20) in the line, but on a system of "pointing," a regular number of accents or beats such as would naturally be made by a minstrel in the process of chanting. The frequent allusions in the chron icles to the narratives of the minstrels, or juglares, suggest that Castilian heroic poetry was far richer than the scarcity of mss.

would lead us to believe. These poems were composed not only by minstrels, but also in monasteries in which a hero happened to be buried—a distinction which was considered worthy of advertisement. Thus the Poona de Fertan Gonzalez (the first independent Count of Castile) is the work of a learned Bene dictine in the monastery of San Pedro de Arlanza.

Berceo.

The same form was used for the religious and didactic poetry of the 13th century, the chief representative of which is Gonzalvo de Berceo (d. after 1246), the earliest Spanish poet whose name is known. Born at Berceo near Logrolio at the end of the 12th century, he entered a Benedictine monastery in the neighbourhood of Calahorra, where he put into poetical form the lives of Spanish saints, the miracles of the Virgin Mary, and other devotional subjects; and his verse gives the impression of a child-like wonder which Spanish poetry was never able to re capture. Berceo called his poems prosa, decir or dictado, indicat ing that he intended them to be read or recited, and not sung like the cantares; yet he maintains the fiction that he is really a minstrel, singing in the language in which a man speaks to his neighbour and adds that his prosa should be worth a cup of good wine. The single-rhyme quatrain was also the form in which two other 13th century poems were written : El Libro de Alixandre (the mediaeval legend of Alexander) and El Libro de Apolonio (Apollonius of Tyre), both of considerable length and derived from French and Latin sources. To the 13th century also are assigned a life of Santa Maria Egipciaca, derived ultimately from a poem attributed to Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (d.

1253) ; an Adoration of the Magi (Libro de los tres reyes de oriente) of Provençal origin, and a fragment of a Debate be tween the Soul and the Body (Disputa del alma y cuerpo), closely related to an Anglo-Norman version of one of the me diaeval Latin poems, entitled Rixa animi et corporis.