Spanish Literature: Epic Poems, Prose, and Ballads
El Cantar de Mio Cid
Like all epics, El Cantar de Mio Cid highlights the exploits of a hero. In this case, the protagonist is El Cid, a nobleman unjustly banished who must fight to regain his honor.
Manuscript and Authorship
The document is a typical minstrel manuscript of the fourteenth century; a copyist named Per Abbat signed a copy. The composition of Cantar de Mio Cid is situated at the beginning of the 13th century. The author of the poem is unknown; therefore, El Cantar de Mio Cid is an anonymous work.
The Argument
El Cantar de Mio Cid, like other epic poems, highlights a story that begins with enormous difficulties and ends just as gloriously. The poem is divided into three parts:
- Cantar del Destierro (Exile): The poem leads us directly to the matter: the hero, crying, leaves home because he has been unjustly banished by his king.
- Cantar de las Bodas (The Weddings): El Cid conquers Valencia and gets a royal pardon. The king allows his wife and daughters to join him and further requests that El Cid marry his daughters to the heirs of Carrión.
- Cantar de la Afrenta de Corpes (The Outrage at Corpes): This part starts with some anecdotes that reveal the cowardice of the heirs of Carrión. As subjects mock El Cid’s infants, they decide to take revenge by whipping their wives. El Cid calls for justice to the king, who convenes the court in Toledo. Finally, the infants of Navarra and Aragon ask the hero’s daughters to marry them.
Themes and Protagonist
The central theme of the poem is the restoration of honor in two ways:
1. Social honor as a vassal.
2. Personal honor as an injured father.
The protagonist embodies different virtues. As a knight, he is the perfect model vassal, faithful to his king, brave in battle… In short, El Cid represents the model of the epic knight broadcast in the Middle Ages.
Historicity and Style
The historicity of the poem is remarkable. El Cantar de Mio Cid tells a part of the biography of a historical figure, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar.
In style, El Cantar de Mio Cid presents verses of varying length with assonant rhyme. In the middle of the verse, there is a pause that divides it into two parts. All the stylistic features are unique to the minstrel style epic, such as epithets and changes in point of view.
El Conde Lucanor
Don Juan Manuel is the author of El Conde Lucanor, a set of stories linked by two characters: the Count Lucanor and his servant Patronio. This fourteenth-century work is considered the first prose fiction authored in Castilian.
Structure and Themes
The structure of the narratives or examples always follows the same pattern:
- The Count asks his servant Patronio about a problem.
- Patronio replies that he knows a story on the same subject and explains it; a teaching is derived from that narrative.
- They say very briefly that the Count put the advice into practice and did very well.
- The author sums up the idea in a moral teaching.
The issues raised by Don Juan Manuel reflect the concerns of the aristocrats of the time.
Fifteenth-Century Poetry
Fifteenth-century poetry is cultured in style and explores different themes: love, satire, morality, etc. It is housed in songbooks, which are compilations of poetry from different times and places. Love poetry follows the pattern of medieval courtly love, from the Provençal troubadour tradition. Moral lyrical poetry mimics Dante’s allegorical Italian stream.
Jorge Manrique
Jorge Manrique was a great poet of the songbook tradition. His love poetry shows one of the most personal voices of the moment. He is ranked as the best poet of his century for Coplas a la Muerte de su Padre (Verses on the Death of His Father).
Author and Theme
Jorge Manrique belonged to one of the great families of the Castilian nobility. He fought in different battles with his father and died in the heat of combat at the age of 39. In Coplas a la Muerte de su Padre, Don Rodrigo, the poet creates an elegy, a composition that expresses the poet’s pain.
The verses develop the theme of death: they start with a meditation on the transience of life and end with the death of the poet’s father. From a Christian perspective, death was seen as liberating, as it opened the door to eternal life.
In general, Manrique exalts spiritual values, which do not fade, in contrast to the deciduous worldly goods.
Structure and Style
The composition consists of 40 stanzas of 12 lines: the coplas manriqueñas, formed by a double sextuplet of eight and four-syllable lines, called broken-foot verses. The rhyme scheme is 8a8b8c8a8b4c8d8e4f8d8e4f.
Thematically, the work is organized in three parts:
- Reflection on the transience of life and the certainty of death.
- Emotional, nostalgic evocation of the past.
- Focus on the figure of the father, Don Rodrigo, presented as an example for his virtues, his exploits, his Christian resignation, and his calm before the coming of death.
The style of the verses is simple. The naturalness of language contrasts with the profound truth of the subject matter.
Meaning and Ballads
The figure of his father embodies the virtues of chivalry and the medieval Christian. Manrique shows pre-Renaissance features, such as the valuation of fame and the delicacy and elegance with which he treats the subject of death.
Ballads
The prestige of ballads is linked to the valuation of the traditional, which emerged in the late fifteenth century through the influence of humanism.
Ballads are classified according to their origin into old and new ballads.
- Old ballads are anonymous and were transmitted orally. Some of these ballads are about the same topics as the chansons de geste.
- New ballads, or artistic compositions, are written by known authors in imitation of the old ballads.
Features and Style
A ballad is a lyric-narrative composition created to be sung. It consists of octosyllabic verses with assonant rhyme in even-numbered verses, while the odd-numbered verses are loose: 8-, 8a, 8-, 8a.
It’s an epic-lyrical composition that tells a short story combining resources of epic and lyric poetry. The language used is far from colloquial.
The ballad has a fragmentary nature; that is, it presents a small story without much context.
The tone of the poem is always simple, strong, agile in the narrative, and emotional. Narration often dominates over description.