Women of the Romancero: A Voice of Reconciliation

Abstract

full of colour, power, ambitions and decisions which make for poetry, they also feared that power and held its abuses up to a harsh light. Kings, be it noted, come off badly in ballads. Most of them, as C. C. Smith has observed, at best irresolute and quick-tempered, at worst positively evil. Indeed popular lament of Cantar de Mio Cid, iDios, que buen vasallo si oviesse buen seflore!, finds an echoing resonance in Romancero as many a resolute local hero lessons a king in valor and honor while asserting his own rights and personality. Standing up to unjust or overweening rulers is, it seems, very stuff of which heroes are made. Still, while ballads challenge particular excesses or failings of individual kings they never question legitimacy of royal power; they never become revolutionary songs of protest, for in popular view the world and social hierarchy were both divinely ordained. Rather, ballads served to give reminders to establishment that it should behave itself, remember that it is mortal . . . and remember that even in this life fall from power to misery is not unknown.' That ballads did so function is, of course, by now well documented.2 What remains to be acknowledged is that women as well as men do reminding, albeit in somewhat different ways. Whereas such male protagonists as Bernardo del Carpio, Fernin Gonzalez, or Cid of ballads derived from late epic Mocedades del Cid may raise their mailed fist against a monarch's presumptuous or encroaching ways, women raise their voices, denouncing or circumscribing actions of unjust rulers and goading feckless ones to action, in persistent advocacy of compassion, justice and simple good sense in human affairs. Removed from field of

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