Anonymous (Spanish ballads)

The romances, or Spanish ballads, are short narrative poems in assonanced, mostly eight-syllable lines that were sung and recited in Castile from the fourteenth century onward and were gathered into printed songbooks, the Cancioneros and Romanceros, in the sixteenth. They are anonymous: none of the ballads in this selection can be assigned to a named author. Their subjects are the history and legend of Spain — the fall of the Gothic kingdom under King Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, the Cid, Pedro the Cruel — together with the frontier ballads of the Moors of Granada and romances of chivalry.

These English versions are by John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), the Scottish writer and biographer of Walter Scott, who published them as Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1823). By his own account most were made from pieces in the collection of Christoph Friedrich Depping (Leipzig, 1817). Lockhart arranged them in three groups, the historical, the Moorish and the romantic ballads, and rendered them in English ballad measures, in places omitting stanzas of the Spanish. The Spanish ballad texts are anonymous and centuries old; the translations are Lockhart's own.