SPANISH LITERATURE (called also Cas tilian literature, since the dialect of Castile is the dominant and literary speech of Spain). Litera ture in the Spanish tongue began only when the process of reconquest restored to the Christian Spaniards a considerable portion of their ances tral domain. This first literature was epic song reflecting the warlike spirit of an heroic age. Very little of the Old Spanish epic poetry has been preserved to us in anything like its original form. The only considerable remains are some poems on the Cid, of which one, the Pomo del Cid, is the oldest extant monument of Spanish literature, some fragments of a poem or of poems on the lnfantes of Lara, and a learned poem on Ferndn Gonzillez. But allusions and records in the Chronicles and elsewhere lead us to believe that there once existed epics now lost. It was the jualares or minstrels who popularized and de veloped Spanish epic tradition, according to the theory of Gaston Paris. at first singing only the heroes celebrated by the French jongleurs. It was quite natural that the French tales dealing with Charlemag,ne's wars against the Spanish Arabs should most impress the Spaniards; and it was equally natural that the Spanish juglares should seek to make native heroism play some part in the conflicts with the Moors. This they did by inventing the figure of Bernardo del Car pi° to supplant the French hero Roland. The traditions concerning Bernardo are preserved for us only in the prose accounts of the Chronicles, especially the Cron-ica general of Alfonso the Wise; but the Chronicles drew upon the poems of the juglares for the matter that they contain.
We come to a thoroughly domestic tradition in the story of Fern5n Gonzalez, Count of Castile (932-970), with whom began the actual though not the nominal independence of that region. An extended poetic account of his active life we owe to a monk of the monastery of San Pedro de Ar lanza. This work was written in the second half of the thirteenth century, but we now possess it only in a late manuscript of the fifteenth century, which is incomplete. The Cronica general, how ever, affords us the substance of what must have been the second part of the poem. A purely Spanish tradition is found again in the tragic story of the seven Infantea of Lara (or Salas), done to death through the perfidy IA their uncle and aunt, and later avenged by their Moorish half brother, Mudarra. Here, also, the legend is preserved by the Cro ?Lica general, which has, in this case, absorbed many verses of the Old Spanish poems on the subject without wholly obliterating their rhyme and metre. fly good fortune we still possess two
of the Old Spanish poems dealing with the story of the doughtiest of all the native heroes, the Cid (q.v.), an historical personage of the eleventh century. The Pomo del Cid has survived in but a single and incomplete manuscript of the four teenth century, and, besides, its versification is in an exceedingly corrupt state. There are two main divisions (or cantarcs) ; the first begins with Rodrigo's exile from Castile, and ends with the conquest of Valencia and the marriage of his two daughters to the unhistorical Infantes of Carrion; in the second, the necessity of punishing the In fantes for their abuse and desertion of their spouses brings the Cid to the Court of Castile and affords an opportunity for completely reconcil ing him and his liege lord. The poem ends with a second marriage of the Cid's daughters, who, now wedding the princes of Barcelona and Na varre, make the Cid an ancestor of the later royal house of Spain. An imaginative account of the Cid's youth is found in the poem termed the Cronica rimada, a document of the thirteenth cen tury relating particularly Rodrigo's slaying of Count Gormaz and the marriage of the youthful slayer to the Count's daughter, Ximena.
Much greater than the bulk of the heroic poetry preserved is that of Old Spanish religious, didac tic, and narrative verse. The greater part of this verse is in the form of quatrains of alexan drines, with a single rhyme in the stanza (the so-called cuaderna via). There is no knowledge of the existence of this learned poetry before the thirteenth century, but in the first half of that pe riod it is found fully developed in a mystery play, in translations from the French o• Provencal. and in poems. The mystery play, which is incom plete, is El misterio de los relics magos. It is an outgrowth of the liturgic-al dramas or offices of the Church. No other important remains of the early Spanish drama have been discovered. Of the matter composed in cuaderna via a large proportion is due to the cleric Gonzalo de Ber teo, who is the first Spanish poet that w•e know by name. He flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century. Most of his productions deal with religious subjects. There is now attributed to him furthermore a long poem dealing with pro fane matter, the Libro de Alexandre, which re lates in some 2500 stanzas the life of Alexander the Great.