Legends & Romances of Spain Part 33

[39] Urganda, as Southey remarks, is a true fairy, resembling Morgan le Fay in her attributes, but, as Scott says, she has no connexion with the more cla.s.sic nymphidae. But is not this dea phantastica identical with Morgan, and her name merely a Hispanic rendering of the Celtic fairy's?

[40] Scott girds fiercely against Southey's interpolation of Anthony Munday's translation of these verses in his Amadis, and with justice. The above translation is only slightly more tolerable, but it is at least sense. Poor Tony was bitten by the absurdities of euphuism, and his lines are mere nonsense. But there is even less excuse for a modern translation to backslide into the style of the eighteenth century.

[41] She had previously visited Scotland and embarked there "for Great Britain," and while on this voyage was driven on the Poor Rock, which would seem to have been 'somewhere' in the Mediterranean! Strange that geography should have been so shaky at such a period and among a people who had done so much for discovery and navigation.

[42] 'Cildadan' I take to be Cuchullin (p.r.o.n. Coohoolin, or Coolin), the hero of the well-known Irish epic.

[43] It was Munday's translation of these verses from the French which chiefly aroused the scorn of Scott, and it is in dread of the memory of that scorn that I offer these lines, which partake much more of the nature of an adaptation than a translation, the original Spanish being much too stiff and artificial for rendition in English.

[44] I take this incident to be a reminiscence of the Minotaur story. Indeed the Firm Island appears to me, both from its geographical proximities and its whole phenomena, as a borrowing of Cretan or Minoan story. The "old covered way" from which the bull emerges is surely the Labyrinth. Is the wise old ape Daedalus?

[45] It is scarcely necessary to indicate to the reader that the name Nasciano is borrowed from that of Nasciens, the hermit king of Grail romance.

[46] Forbear.

[47] William Stewart Rose, Amadis de Gaul: A Poem in Three Books (London, 1803).

[48] For a brief account of this Toledan poet, who translated Ovid's Metamorphoses, see Antonio, Bib. Nov., t. ii, p. 44.

[49] Unless the Anseis de Carthage be excepted--a romance which attributes the downfall of Spain to a son of Charlemagne, who acts as does Don Roderick. The Anseis is in French.

[50] As enshrined in the Cronica Sarrazyna, of Pedro de Carrel, which founds on the Cronica General, the Chronicle of the Moor Rasis, and the Cronica Trayana, the ballads relating to Roderic are all later than this compilation.

[51] Besides the collection of romances alluded to, which may be said to represent the standard sources of the subject, collections were published at Antwerp and Saragossa, in the middle of the sixteenth century, by Martin Nucio and Esteban de Najera respectively. The reader may also consult the Primavera y Flor de Romance, by Wolf and Hofman, in the reprint published by Senor Menendez y Pelayo, the collection of Depping (two vols., Leipzig, 1844), and the English translations of Lockhart and Bowring.

[52] If Scott wrote this verse himself (as Lockhart admits), he wrote others.

[53] I take these two quatrains from two different versions.

[54] The witch-cult in Europe seems to me to have a connexion with the horse. Occasionally witches proceed to the sabbat on flying horses. One of the tests of a witch was to look in her eyes for the reflection of a horse. In Scotland even to-day a 'Horseman's Society'

exists which has a semi-occult initiation and strange rites.

[55] The reader who wishes to follow this phase of the subject further should consult Miss M. A. Murray's recent articles in Man.

[56] T. i, p. 543.