Oral Literature of the Hispanic World
Samuel G. Armistead, Faculty Research Lecture, 1998, University of California, Davis

The 700-Year Oral Tradition of the Pan-Hispanic Ballad: An Case Study

Starting perhaps around 1200--if not before--and certainly by 1300, a distinctive form of oral narrative poetry--brief songs that tell stories--begin to show up, sporadically and fragmentarily in manuscripts all over Europe: in Scandinavia, in England, in Germany, France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and also further east, in Greek, Slavic, Balkan, and Baltic countries. Ballads similar to those we can still hear today in Hispanic communities once were also sung in English-speaking countries and all over the length and breadth of Europe. They are an integral part of our shared heritage.

Artistic creativity is essential to the ongoing traditional life of ballads. These texts are memorized, but they are not learned by rote; the memorial process is, over time, dynamic and creative. The following two texts represent two different versions of a famous little ballad known as El prisionero (The Prisoner).

The first version, very short and very effective in its own way, is from an early collection of Spanish poetry, printed in Valencia, in 1511. I collected text 2 in a mountain village, in northwestern Spain, in 1963. Four hundred and fifty years separate these two versions. Over the centuries, a sequence of anonymous traditional singers--creative oral poets--have continuously experimented with this ballad. And they have been notably successful. Thanks to this collaborative, multi-secular poetic endeavor, the song now embodies some very effective poetic features, that were not present in the early version.

Central to the song's re-creation in the modern tradition, is its tripartite structure: There are three major segments: first, the joyous, vital, dynamic signs of Spring contrasting with the prisoner's deadly, dreadful, static, isolation; then, the singing birds, his only link with the outside world; and then, the senselessly cruel killing--we might almost say: the murder--of the swallow, the best singer of all and the prisoner's last hope of liberation. This three-part structure is echoed--and supported by--other trinary motifs throughout the poem. The recurrent tripartite pattern, typical of oral poetry, informs the song at various different levels. It is an essential part of its structure. It relates the poem's various segments to one another. Thus we have the three signs of Spring; the three aspects of the prisoner's deprivation; the three birds; and the three possible motivations of the cruel hunter. This last segment offers a finely conceived, gradual progression, from the merely materialistic killing of the bird for its flesh, through the priceless value of its plumage, to the intangible problem of the hunter's inexplicable cruelty, . . . which is surely deserving of God's retribution. This text, like so many others in the early and the modern traditions, attests the collaborative multi-secular artistic achievements of generations of traditional singers, whose names we will never know.