Epic and Hispanic Ballad

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Spanish Epic and Hispanic Ballad: The Medieval Origins of the CorridoAuthor(s): Samuel G. ArmisteadSource: Western Folklore, Vol. 64, No. 1/2 (Winter - Spring, 2005), pp. 93-108Published by: Western States Folklore Society

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Spanish Epic and Hispanic BalladTheMedieval Origins of the orrido1Samuel G. Armistead

We are here to honor Americo Paredes. We heard yesterday and todayof Don Americo's many contributions to our fields of interest. I neverhad the privilege of meeting him. But, frommy personal perspective,Iwould like tomention first of all his Texas-Mexican Cancionero (1976),which captures superbly the highly distinctive traditional poetry of thelower border and its complex cultural ambiance. For me, as a romancista,this splendid book has been of great use in identifying some of thosevarious Pan-Hispanic ballad narratives which were taken over into thecorrido tradition and were dynamically and poetically

recreatedby

corrido singers. From the perspective of a person who has spent the lasthalf-century studying the Medieval Spanish epic and the Pan-Hispanicnarrative ballad tradition?the Romancero?Americo Paredes's path finding book about the corrido of Gregorio Cortes (1958) is even moreimportant for several reasons. In this pioneering book, Americo Paredes

demonstrated, in the most elegant and eloquent terms, how a narrativepoem in the oral tradition is continually recreated, reshaped, and reinterpreted by traditional singers as it is passed on from one generationto another, in a dynamic process of poetic creativity. Americo Paredes'sbook is a milestone; itwas, it is, and it will continue to be of transcendent importance for our correct understanding of the corrido and for allsubsequent studies of corrido poetry.Let us look for a moment at the work of another great explorer of

Hispanic traditional poetry: Paul Benichou should also be honored asone of the founding fathers of modern studies of the Hispanic traditional ballad. Mi maestro, Paul Benichou has been, without doubt, themost important role model and mentor of my own Hispanic balladresearch. Paul Benichou, in his late 80s, died at home in Paris, inMay2001, leaving us all deeply saddened and bereaved by his departure. In1944, 1954, and 1963-64, Benichou published a series of brilliant, highlyoriginal articles concerning the modern Hispanic ballad tradition, asWesternolklore4:18c2 (Winter Spring2005):93-108.Copyright 2006,WesternStatesFolkloreSociety

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94 SAMUEL G. ARMISTEAD

an ongoing process of poetic creativity. These articles culminated inthe publication, in 1968, of a path-breaking book, Creadon poetica en elromancero tradicional, a book that established the groundwork for futureresearch on Hispanic ballads in oral tradition.2The publication ofAmerico Paredes's book on GregorioCortes (1958)and Paul Benichou's Creadon poetica (1968) represent twovery positive,ground-breaking landmarks. What is, I believe, not so positive a factoris that neither of these great scholars was aware of what the other onewas doing. Don Americo did not know ofBenichou's earlywork, nor didBenichou know about GregorioCortes. Corridos and romancesboth are ballads and both are still alive today in theHispanic oral tradition. Thereare, as we shall see presently, many features that they share in common.

Yet the circumstances attendant upon the creation?the brilliant andmutually independent creation?of these two crucial books, AmericoParedes's Gregorio Cortes and Paul Benichou's Creadon poetica, bespeak,as much from one side as from another, a disciplinary insularity fromwhose eventual

disappearanceboth corrido studies and romance stud

ieswould greatly benefit. Corrido scholars could certainly benefit fromknowing more about romance studies and romanceristas could benefitincalculably from learning more about corridos, still living and stillverycreative ballad tradition, whose contemporary traditional life, in many

ways, replicates the conditions under which romances were created, attheir very origins, in the 14th and 15th centuries, and continued to bere-created on up into the contemporary tradition. In many ways, romanceand corrido reach out to one another?Se dan la mano. And scholarshipabout these two genres would gain from doing likewise. We need tobuild bridges.That the corrido is a uniquely important, highly distinctive, highlycreative manifestation of Mexican and Chicano culture is indubitablycorrect. Much very useful scholarship has been devoted to this aspectof corrido studies. The corrido is certainly also a ballad, a ballad with particular, distinctive characteristics, some rather different from those ofmost other ballads, but it is a ballad all the same. Like the romance, this isepico-lyric poetry. The corridos perspective also shares a good deal withthe epic. As John McDowell has aptly expressed it: "The world view ofthe corrido isdecidedly heroic" (McDowell 1981:53).3 I also believe thatthe connections between the corridos and Pan-Hispanic balladry?the

Romancero tradicional?are genetic and undeniable. On many differentlevels, the corrido can be seen as a highly distinctive, latter-day manifestation of the Pan-Hispanic romance and this, precisely, constitutes, I



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Spanish Epic and Hispanic Ballad 95

believe, the incalculably important contribution that corridosand corridoscholarship can make to the studyof the Pan-Hispanic and internationalballad traditions.4Ifwe are going to look at the corridosmedieval origins, we will, Ibelieve, need to go all theway back tomedieval epic poetry and itsowndistant?and ultimately unknowable?origins. The genetic relationshipbetween the Pan-Hispanic romance and medieval Spanish epic poetry wasfirst suggested by Don Ramon Menendez Pidal, the great expert on themedieval epic and the founder ofmodern Spanish philology, along thelines of rigorous late 19th-century Central European norms.5 MenendezPidal's theory of a genetic relationship between epic and ballad has beenamply confirmed bymy own research on Hispanic balladry and that ofa number of other scholars. Just now, Diego Catalan has published amonumental, 1000-page monograph (2000) that further confirms andgreatly adds to what has been previously accomplished.6 There cannow be no reasonable doubt concerning this genetic relationship. Theevidence has become so abundant as to be irrefutable and even moreevidence will be brought forward in forthcoming volumes of our FolkLiterature of theSephardicJews?We have now gone from theory to established fact: A substantial number of Hispanic ballads?some printedin 16th-century broadsides and cancioneros, others, clearly of medievalorigin but only now recovered from the modern oral tradition?can beshown to be genetically related, through direct oral tradition, toOldSpanish epic poems known to have been sung on the Iberian Peninsuladuring theMiddle Ages.

During his work on the Spanish epic, the ballad tradition, and OldSpanish dialectology, Menendez Pidal identified an important culturalphenomenon, which he described as el estado latente (the latent state): Aword, an oral-literary genre, or some other cultural feature may be verymuch alive in popular oral tradition, but its existence may go largelyor even totally unnoticed by the dominant literate culture (MenendezPidal 1950; 1963) .8 ow detailed, we may ask, is our knowledge of howserfs and peasants really lived and spoke in theMiddle Ages, as opposedto kings, nobles, landholders, and the clergy? Obviously these lattergroups and their value systems provide us with the lion's share of ourdocumentation and, obviously too, that documentation will be inLatinand not in the colloquial languages. In this regard, the great Frenchhistorian, Jacques Le Goff, envisions a new type ofmedieval scholarshipthatwill eventually have tomove beyond the obvious limitations of Latindocumentation:



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Le Moyen Age est encore affaire de clercs. Le temps ne semble pas venu, pour lemedieviste,de renoncer la liturgie e Vepiphanie eruditeetdeperdre son latin(LeGoff 1977:21 ).9Of how everyday people actually spoke, of what their amusementswere, and especially of the actual textsof their songs, the songs they sangor listened to,we stillknow precious little.10Such thingswere scorned bythe dominant culture and, at best, theywill be documented sporadicallyand, if t all, often only indirectly and at relatively late dates. Such a situ

ation isdirectly applicable to our fragmentary knowledge of the originsofmedieval epic poetry.I will mention just a few of the earliest bits and pieces of evidencefor the existence of oral epic poetry inWestern Europe: The Old HighGerman Hildebrandslied comes tous in aMS fragment that can be datedaround 810, but obviously much more ancient traditions are involved.11The first full-length Middle High German epic ismuch later: The vastmythical and part courtly Nibelungenlied was crafted from earlier epicnarratives around the year 1200 (Andersson 1987). The first, even indirect indication of epic poetry inMedieval French, theHague Fragment,can be dated paleographically between 980 and 1030.12 The Song ofRoland, the first extensive text, dates from around 1100.13 Again, obviously, various much more ancient traditions lie behind these narratives.The firstevidence of epic poetry in Spain involves a Latin summary, theNota Emilianense, based on an Old Spanish version of an Old FrenchSong ofRoland, but a Song ofRoland very, very different from our earliestknown French Roland poem, the Oxford Roland, which, as we just saw,dates from circa 1100. In theNota Emilianense, dating from before 1076,we have clear and indisputable evidence of the existence of a Spanishversion of the Old French poem, a version ofwhich antedates, by at leasta quarter of a century, the first Old French redaction that has comedown to us.14 The Old Sp. Cantor deMio Cid, the earliest known fulllength Spanish epic poem, probably existed, in approximately itspresent form, around 1150, though our only known MS may not have beencopied until around 1200.15All these poems bear witness to an extensive

multi-secular estado latente which antedates by many years the very firstdocumentation we have at hand. And all of these epic narratives sharethree crucial features in common: Each poem involves ethnic or religious conflict; each also involves armed confrontation along a disputedfrontier (today we would say a border)', and each narrative, too, has, at itsbeginnings, a more or less distant historical nucleus, a core of historical



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fact, that, over the years, usually over centuries, may have acquired adense overlay of legendary elaborations, but which, all the same, canstill yield its basic historical outline to informed philological analysis.In all of this,we seem to be getting curiously close to important, crucialcharacteristics ofGregorio Cortes and other early corridos.One of themost important functions of themedieval epic?ultimatelythe ancestor of the medieval and the modern Hispanic romance?is itsrole as a vehicle for recording and recreating events of the immediatepast. The great Spanish national epics?the Cantar deMio Cid, the Cercode Zamora, the Infantes de Lara?recreated and continued to recreateevents in Castilian history.16 This is noticiero poetry and this essentialfunction of the epic was carried over into the Romancero, where eventsfrommedieval and even later Spanish and Portuguese history were perpetuated inoral tradition, in romances historicos nd in romancesfronterizos,the latter concerned with the last stages of the Christian reconquest ofMuslim Spain. Some of the romances concern events of national or evenof international importance?the famous romance of La muerte del principe donJuan, for example?but most historical romances were inspiredby relatively minor, local events, events whose significance hardly transcends the restricted limits of a small geographic region and a veryspecific moment in time.17 In this respect, then, the romance historico, inits evolution out of the epic, attests to a concern with local history notunlike, ifnot identical to that ofmany corridos.

One of the most important areas where corridos have flourished andwhere they have experienced their most dynamic ongoing existence, inoral and in written tradition, is as border poetry, corridos de la frontera.Americo Paredes, in his pathbreaking, brilliant study of JoseMosqueda(1958), tells us of "corridos of border conflict" (1975:55; 1973)?andthe current development of modern narco-corridos continues to stressthe essential role of the border, lafrontera. In this, the corridohighlightsthe essential role of borders and border conflicts as an ideal seed-bedfor epic and epico-lyric adventures recreated in narrative verse. Epicexamples of such conflicts are legion; conflicts between Goths and Hunsalong the Danube in the 4th-century Balkans; the role of the Rhine asa border inGermanic and Old French epics; the ubiquitous ChristianMuslim conflict in Spain and later in theHoly Land inOld French andOld Spanish epics; Medieval Russian clashes between Christians andTurkic Kumans; the Greek-Arab borderlands in Byzantine and Arabicheroic narratives; the conflicts between Muslim Bosnians and CatholicCroats on the eponymous South Slavic Krayina, in the Muslim epics



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collected by Milman Parry and Albert Lord in early 20th-centuryBosnia.18 And borders are just as important in ballads as in epics: Weneed only think ofAnglo-Scottish border ballads and Spanish romancesfronterizos or of more recent conflicts between Greeks and Turks inModern Greek balladry.19 So, in its fronterismo?to coin a word, the corrido also emerges as a modern link to a very old, a multi-secular andmulti-cultural oral tradition.

Let us look for a moment at the historical development of theRomancero. The genre started when individual episodes, particularly thefavorite, most dramatic peak-points

of the epics,came to be separatedfrom their original narrative context and eventually came to be sung asautonomous poems in their own right. Early on, the epic fragments ledto the creation of a new poetic genre: the epico-lyric Hispanic ballad.20Once established, thispoetic formwas tobe nurtured and supplemented

by diverse narrative and lyric materials. The Romancero would thus gradually acquire itshallmark flexibility, its capacity to absorb and naturalize,in romance form, variegated material drawn from very diverse sources.The primitive Hispanic lyric nd continental European ballad narrativesboth must also have contributed to the formation of theHispanic balladand, once recognized as an autonomous oral-literary form, the octosyllabic romance came to be used as a convenient metrical form, in which tonarrate events from the immediate past, inwhich to retell episodes frommedieval adventure romances, from Arthurian legends, from Biblicaland Classical narratives, and also to tell original stories about the mostdiverse human adventures, both admirable and not so admirable: fidelity and infidelity, tragic love, heroic endurance, and bloody vengeance.In their thematic flexibility and their capacity to recreate, accordingto their own distinctive metrics, poetic material taken over from othertraditions, romances and corridos once again seem to be strikingly similar.

The romances, starting already in medieval times and right up to the20th century, gradually absorbed into their dominant monorhymedoctosyllabic assonant pattern, various narratives, some in hexasyllabicromancillo form and in coplaspareadas, narratives thatprobably had originally reached Spain from beyond the Pyrenees: Don Bueso y su hermana,El condeAlemdny la reina,El veneno deMoriana, among others.21 Similarly,we may observe that the corrido, as the dominant form inMexico, CentralAmerica, and the U.S. Southwest, has adapted a number of romances,which ultimately go back to medieval peninsular sources. Such romanceshave been thoroughly adapted to the usual corridopattern of octosyllabic assonant quatrains, which change their rhyme every 32 syllables:



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We might mention here such "corridized" romances as Delgadina, BernalFrances, La vuelta del marido (e) (known as La recien casada inMexico andthe Southwest), and La Blancanina (which, inMexico, is now usuallycalled La Martina).22 In other cases, corridos that originated in Mexicohave absorbed, through a well known process of creative contamination,verses that originally formed part of romances. Such is the case with thefamous corridoof El hijo desobediente,which, likemany romances in Spainand in Spanish America, has taken over crucial verses from El testamentodel enamorado:

Si me muero deste mat, / que no me entierren en sagrado.Me entierren en camp verde, / donde me trille el ganado,con un letrero que diga: / "Aqui murio un desgraciado. "23

But the poetic representation of historical events (noticierismo), concern with border conflicts (fronterismo), poetic creativity, and thematicflexibilityare characteristic ofmany different epic and ballad traditions.That they exist in both corridos nd in romancesdoes not, in and of itself,necessarily prove that there is a direct, genetic connection between thetwoballad genres. It iswhen we begin to look at the small pieces and partsof the corridos,the poetic building blocks of which the corridosare constructed: their formulistic diction, their recurrent narrative motifs, andtheir octosyllabic assonant prosody, that we begin to find even more convincing evidence of the unbroken continuity of theHispanic ballad tradition in corridos and in romances.24 For example, the date-formula, whichintroduces innumerable corridos, is exactly paralleled in Spanish romances,particularly, of course, in historical (noticiero) ballads, most of them relatively late, even though we already find the formula in at least one late15th- or early 16th-century romance. "A veinte y siete de julio, / un lunesen fuerte dia" (Muerte del duque de Gandia: Duran 1945:no. 1251).

Compare the following corrido examples, among innumerable othersthat could be cited:El quince de julio / del ano sesenta y siete . . .Mil novecientos catorce, / mes dejunio veintitres . . .En mil novecientos quince, /Jueves Santo, en la manana . . .El dieciseis de septiembre, / como a las tresde la tarde . . .Ano de mil ochocientos / ochenta y dos al contado . . .(Mendoza 1964:nos. 9, 25, 27, 81, 110)Another introductory formula shared by the corridoand late romancesthatbegan their traditional life inprinted form, is the invocation of holy

names. So in two late romances we read:



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En el nombre de Dios Padre / Criador de Cielo y tierra . . .(Cepeda 1984:11, 176)En el nombre defesus, / que todo el mundo haformado . . .(Duran 1945:no. 357)

The formula is even more frequently used in the corridos:En el nombre de Dios, / con carino verdadero . . .En el nombre sea de Dios, / voy a empezar a cantor. . .En el nombre de Dios, / poderoso de los cielos . . .En el nombre de Dios, / y de la Virgen Maria . . .(Mendoza 1964:nos. 14, 46, 48, 137)

Yet another formulaic construction common to romances and corridosis the ya actualizante. Innumerable examples could be cited from bothgenres. Iwill quote here some instances from corridos:

Ya la muertefue llegando . . .Ya venimos, ya llegamos . . .Ya se va Julian Garcia . . .(Mendoza 1964:nos. 7, 8, 112)

Not to mention, of course, the universally present, Ya con esto me despidoPYet another shared formula is Otro dia por lamanana, which aboundsin both genres.26 We could also take note here of various motifs, com

monplaces, topoi, that occur frequently in the Romancero and also showup in the corridos.One is the placing of events on aMonday. In corridos:

Un lunes seria por cierto, / como a las diez, mas temprano . . .Le sacaron su retrato, / el lunes por la manana. . .El lunes por la manana, / a la mina se acerco. . .(Mendoza 1964:nos. 35, 38, 124)The Monday motif is even more abundant in the Romancero and it

goes back to a very early date, since Juan Ruiz, parodying the heroicballad style, in his episode of the country mouse and the citymouse,already uses it to good effect in El librode buen amor (datable in 1330):Mur de Guadalfajara un lunes madrugava . . .(Joset 1974:v. 1370)What seems to have been lost in the corridos,however, is the implica

tion?universally attested in the early Romancero?that actions initiatedon Monday bring extremely bad luck.27 Further shared motifs involve



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the corridos' decided preference for sorrel horses: el caballo alazan,2^ andagain the hero's habit of speaking to his horse:

/Caballo prieto mentado, / no se te olviden tus manasljEntrale caballo prieto, / delfierro de Catalina(Mendoza 1964:88fo's, 3)The motif of the intelligent horse is shared by theRomancero and bythe corridoswith other traditions and particularly with ballads of Balkan

linguistic communities.29All these verbal, formulaic agreements, shared motifs, and common features that unite the two enormously successful poetic genres,

strongly suggest an uninterrupted continuity, a direct genetic relationship between romances and corridos.As Merle E. Simmons (1963) hasshown, songs very similar to corridos, in form and in style, began toappear in various areas of Spanish America, starting in the late 18thand early 19th centuries. Simmons cites convincing examples fromUruguay, Argentina, and Chile, while the term corrido, to designate

anarrative song, is also widely distributed and we can document itsusein Spain, particularly inAndalucia, and inChile, Argentina, Colombia,Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.30 I believe that Simmons'analysis is correct: "Since ballads from Argentina or Colombia couldnot possibly have exerted any influence whatsoever inMexico, the onlyreasonable explanation of their affinities to the corrido is to suppose[that] the songs of all three areas were drawn from a common source.

Most remotely this source could only have been the Iberian Peninsula'sromance vulgar, which itself had already developed numerous corridotraitsbefore it transmitted them to theNew World" (Simmons 1963:12).But the corridos ultimate derivation from its Peninsular ancestor, in nosense, "deprives it of its just claims to fame as a vigorous creation of theMexican popular genius" (Simmons 1963:13). The dramatic, heroic,and tragic events of theMexican Revolution afforded Mexican popular poets a unique opportunity to forge, out of balladic trends alreadycommon to Spanish America, a brilliant, new, highly distinctive ballad,whose overwhelming popularity would carry everything else before itand extend its poetic hegemony throughout the American Southwestand far into Central America.We have come a very long way in a very short time: from medieval

Europe and its earliest known epic poetry to Spanish America and thecorridos of the Mexican Revolution. All the same, I believe that thematic agreements between the medieval epic, its genetic offspring, the



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Hispanic ballad, and our corridos re strongly suggestive of an unbroken,ultimately genetic relationship: narrative themes of ethnic and religiousconflict; the role of frontiers, boundaries, and borders as the stage uponwhich such conflicts take place; and, again, the function, common to allthree genres?epics, ballads, and corridos?as a medium for reportingon and remembering important events from the immediate past. Whenwe juxtapose such common thematic features with a significant numberof formulaic components shared by late 18th- and 19th-century Spanishballads and the Spanish-American corridos, I strongly believe we canmake a very good

case for the medievalorigins

of the Mexican corrido.University ofCalifornia, Davis

NOTES1. Iwould like to thank my esteemed friend and admired colleague, Professor

Joseph F. Nagy, for honoring me with an invitation to participate in thissplendid conference. It is a great pleasure and an honor to be here, onceagain, at UCLA, where long ago I taught Spanish literature, for a dozenyears. It is also appropriate in the present context to recall?with affectionand deep, abiding gratitude?a great folklorist, who played a key role, a crucial role, in the early stages of my own research?as a guide, as a mentor, asa role model?a great folklorist, whose generous, enthusiastic support wasall-important to our work and kept us going when, as happens from timeto time, the going got rough. I am thinking, of course, of a great scholar inthe Folklore and Mythology Program here at UCLA: Wayland D. Hand. Iwill never forget his generous support during those long-ago years.

2. Note also Benichou's Romancero judeo-espanol (1968b) and his article onthe death of the prince of Portugal (1975), the latter published after theappearance of Creadon poetica (1968a).3. See now also McDowell (2000:63-65 et alibi).

4. For a modest start in such a direction, see my article, "El corrido y la baladainternacional" (Armistead 2002, in press).

5. Concerning Menendez Pidal's achievements, see now my article on hisrelationship to the Generation of '98 (Armistead 2001).6. Menendez Pidal explained his theory of the epic origins of Spanish balladsin his book, L'epopee castillane (1910; Spanish text 1959). For one among

many confirmations of Menendez Pidal's theory, see Armistead (1992;updated, 2000b:121-27).

7. Concerning our work on Judeo-Spanish romances, see FLSJ, II, 4-22. Forrecent epic-ballad discoveries confirming Menendez Pidal's findings, seemy articles, "Judeo-Spanish and Pan-European Balladry" (1996) and "ElRomancero y la epica carolingia" (2000a).



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8. Most Africanisms inAmerican English survived a protracted period of estadolatente. In 1921, such a respected authority as H.L. Mencken could confi

dently state: "The early slaves, of course, retained many words and phrasesfrom their native languages, but they have all disappeared from the speechof their descendants today, save for a few surviving in the Gullah dialectof the South Carolina" (Mencken 1921:113). The eighty-plus Africanismsidentified by David Dalby (1972) eloquently attest to the error of such anassumption. Some of these Africanisms are homophones hiding behindtheir English counterparts (cat, dig, jelly), or semantic Africanisms whichhave expanded the meaning of English words (bad 'very good'; kill 'to affectstrongly'). Such phenomena would be difficult, if not impossible, to huntdown without the extensive knowledge of African languages controlled byDalby. Mencken modifies his opinion in SupplementI (1948:263-70).

9. For the distinctive approach and perspectives of the Annates school of historical scholarship, see The French Historical Revolution (Burke 1990).

10. One notable exception is the intimate and quite exact knowledge we haveof medieval Castilian vernacular curses and insults. Since these were legallyactionable and specific fines were imposed on whoever uttered them, theyare recorded very exactly inmedieval law books (fueros). Marta Madero hasstudied them indetail (1992).11. See Braune (1928:83-4, 186-98); Broszinski (1985); Renoire (1988:133-56).12. See Menendez Pidal (1960:372-81); for the text:Riquer (1952:364-77).

13. "The Digby MS . . . [is] descended from a lost original (X) composed at theend of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century" (Whitehead1970:vi). For studies on the dating of the Chanson de Roland, see Duggan(1976:34-5).

14. On the Nota Emilianense, see D. Alonso (1954) and Menendez Pidal (1960).On the date: "L'ecriture de laAotaparait remonter aux annees 1065-1075"(1960:385). On later Roland narratives in Spain, see FLSJ, III, 37-46,233-38 et alibi.

15. See Rico 1985. On the Cantar de Mio Cid, see Montaner's massively documented new edition (1993).

16. For the texts of the Infantes de Lara and the Cerco de Zamora, epic poemsabsorbed in prosified form by medieval Spanish chronicles, see MenendezPidal (1971; 1980) and Carola Reig (1947).17. Concerning the ballad of the death of Prince John, see Benichou (1963-64;

1968:95-124) and now Diego Catalan's new analysis, based on recently discovered documentation (1998-99:11, 35-107).18. The Old Norse poem of The Battle of the Goths and theHuns, "perhapsthe oldest of all the heroic lays preserved in the North," was saved fromoblivion by being joined to the prose Saga ofKing Heidrek theWise. The

early poem would seem to embody authentic late 4th- and early 5th-century data. See Tolkien (1960:viii, xxi-xxix) and Davidson & Fisher (1998:11,82, nn. 91, 94, 95; 84, nn. 99, 102; 85, nn. 109-10). The Rhine is seen as acrucial boundary between Huns and Germans in the 9th- or 10th-century



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Germano-Latin epic of Waltharius (clearly based on a vernacular source), aswell as in theNibelungenlied (circa 1200). See Kratz (1984:22-23, w. 431-32)and Bartsch (1944:240-52: Aventiure 25). The Rhine is also the frontierbetween Charlemagne's Christian warriors and the pagan Saxons (represented as Muslims) in La Chanson des Saisnes (Riquer 1968:219-23). Russiansconfront Kumans along the River Don in The Song ofPrince Igor (Nabokov1960). For Greek-Arab conflicts in medieval Anatolia, see Gregoire (1933;1944) and Christides (1962) and, on Bosnian Muslim epics, Lord (1964)and Lord and Bynum (1954-86).

19. For Greek guerrilla warfare against Turkish rule, see Baud-Bovy (1958);more data: Armistead (2002).20. For the subsequent development of the Romancero, see Menendez Pidal(1953); Diaz-Mas (1994).21. For the three romances cited here, see CMP H2, M13, NI; for other origi

nally non-octosyllabic songs that were (or were in the process of being)transformed into eight-syllable romances, see CMP, I, 56, n. 66.

22. See, for example, Paredes (1976:nos. 5, 6); Mendoza and Mendoza(1952:65-67); Henestrosa (1977:19-41); for additional bibliography:Armistead (1992:64-68).23. See Mendoza (1964:256-57); Ortiz Guerrero (1992:27). For another corrido

like song (a Louisiana decima), which, like numerous traditional romances,has absorbed these same verses, see Armistead (1992b:68-69 and n. 13),where additional bibliography is listed.

24. Note McDowell's pioneering, crucially important study of the corridos'' formulistic diction (1972).25. For multiple examples of the ya actualizante in romances, see Armistead and

Silverman (1979:34, n. 31) and FLSJ, I, 39, n. 1.26. See Mendoza (1964:203, 205, 210, 221, 224); McDowell (2000:228).27. See FLSJ, I, 177-79, n. 6; also the Stith Thompson motif: Ml28.2. Mondayas unlucky day.28. See, for example, Mendoza and Mendoza (1952:79); Mendoza (1964:155,274, 292); Ortiz Guerrero (1992:62, 75, 82, 96); McDowell (2000:222); for

the caballo alazdn in romances: Armistead and Silverman (1982:118-23).29. See FLSJ, I, 174, 179-80; II, 263, n. 59; III, 163-64, 275, n. 54; compare also

S. Thompson: B211.1.3. Speaking horse.30. For thePhilippines,see Fansler (1916:204-05); Eugenio (1987).

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