Volume 1 / Part 2 — Footnotes

Krönike Riim. By Severin Grundtvig. Copenhagen, 1829.

“A wild swine sat on his shoulders broad, Upon his bosom a black bear snor’d.”

The original ballad may be found in the Kjæmpe Viser, and was translated into German by Grimm, who expressed the greatest admiration for the poem. Svend in Danish means “swain” or “youth,” and it is characteristic of Borrow’s mystification of proper names that he should, by a quasi-translation and archaic spelling, give the title of the Danish ballad the appearance of an actual English surname.

“The hounds they howled and backward fled, As struck by Fairy charm” (stan. 16).

John Leyden, M.D., was born in 1775, near Hawick, and died in Java in 1811, after an adventurous and varied life. His ballad of Lord Soulis is of the same character as that so highly praised by Borrow.

“What down the hill comes hurrying there?— With a hey, with a ho, a sword and a gun! Quesada’s bones, which a hound doth bear. Hurrah, brave brothers!—the work is done.”

—[Note by Borrow.]

The cathedral referred to by Borrow was finished about 1300, after having been at least a hundred years a-building, and is in the early pointed style of what we call Gothic, but the Spaniards Tudesque. The west front and the painted glass windows in the aisles are of unrivalled beauty.

The church of San Isidoro, with the tombs of that great metropolitan and of Alfonso el Batallador, of inferior æsthetic interest, is even more attractive to the antiquary.

Monsieur Francisque Michel, in his Races Maudites de la France et de l’Espagne (Paris, 1847), has nothing to say of these Maragatos, though he notices (ii. 41–44) a smaller tribe, the Vaqueros, of the neighbouring Asturias, whose origin is also enveloped in mystery. See De Rochas, Les Parias de France et l’Espagne, p. 120. [The Cagots were also found in northwest Spain as well as in France, but not, as far as we know, to the west of Guipuzcoa. For an account of these Cagots and the various etymologies that have been suggested for their names, see De Rochas and F. Michel, ubi supra, tom. i. ch. i.]

The Vierzo extends about 10 leagues east and west by 8 north and south. This amphitheatre is shut out from the world by lofty snow-capped mountains, raised, as it were, by the hand of some genii to enclose a simple valley of Rasselas. The great Asturian chain slopes from Leitariegos to the south-west, parting into two offshoots; that of El Puerto de Rabanal, and Fuencebadon (Fons Sabatonis) constitute the east barrier, and the other, running by the Puertos de Cebrero and Aguiar, forms the frontier; while to the south the chains of the Sierras de Segundera, Sanabria, and Cabrera complete the base of the triangle. Thus hemmed in by a natural circumvallation, the concavity must be descended into from whatever side it be approached; this crater, no doubt, was once a large lake, the waters of which have burst a way out, passing through the narrow gorge of the Sil by Val de Orras, just as the Elbe forms the only spout or outlet to hill-walled-in Bohemia, the kettle-land of Germany (Ibid., p. 597).

Roman Spain was at no time a province, but included, from b.c. 205 to a.d. 325, many provinces, each with its own provincial capital. In the division of the Roman world by Constantine, Hispania first became an administrative unit as a diocese in the Prefecture of Gaul, with its capital at Hispalis or Seville, the residence of the Imperial Vicar (see Burke’s History of Spain, vol. i. pp. 31, 35, 36).

Borrow, in fact, followed almost exactly the line of the celebrated retreat of Sir John Moore, as may be seen by referring to the map. Moore, leaving the plain country, and provoked by the ignorant taunts of Frere to abandon his own plan of marching in safety south-west into Portugal, found himself on the 28th of December, 1808, at Benavente; on the 29th, at Astorga; on the 31st, at Villafranca del Vierzo; and thence, closely pressed day by day by the superior forces of Soult, he passed through Bembibre, Cacabelos, Herrerias, Nogales, to Lugo, whence, by way of Betanzos, he arrived on the 11th of January at Corunna. The horrors of that winter march over the frozen mountains will never fully be known; they are forgotten in the glorious, if bootless, victory on the sea-coast, and the heroic death of Moore. The most authoritative account of Sir John Moore’s retreat, and of the battle of Corunna, is to be found in the first volume of Napier’s Peninsular War; but the raciest is certainly that in the first edition of Murray’s Handbook of Spain, by Richard Ford.

Saint James, it was said, had certainly preached and taught in Spain during his lifetime. His body, after his martyrdom at Jerusalem in the year of Christ 42, had been placed by his disciples on board a ship, by which it was conveyed to the coast of his beloved Spain, miraculously landed in Galicia, and forgotten for eight hundred years, until the time was accomplished when it should be revealed to the devoted subjects of King Alfonso the Chaste. The date of the discovery of the precious remains is given by Ferreras as 808, by Morales as 835. But as it was Charlemagne who obtained from Leo III. the necessary permission or faculty to remove the Episcopal See of Iria Flavia to the new town of Compostella, the discovery or invention must have taken place at least before 814, the year of the death of the emperor. Whatever may have been the actual date of its first establishment; the mean church with mud walls soon gave place to a noble cathedral, which was finished by the year 874, consecrated in 899, and destroyed by the Arabs under Almanzor, nigh upon a hundred years afterwards, in 997. See also Murray’s Handbook of Spain, 1st edit., p. 660, Santiago.