Note 16 — Chapter I · : The Sources of Spanish Romance

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.