Medieval Iberian Lyric Poetry: Forms and Evolution
Lyric Poetry of the 13th Century
Lyric poetry of the 13th century encompasses two main forms:
- Traditional Lyric: Characterized by anonymous, oral transmission.
- Cultured Courtly Lyric: Attributed to known authors and transmitted in writing.
Traditional poetry is generally simpler than its cultured counterpart.
Characteristics of Traditional Lyric
This genre consists of a limited set of songs transmitted orally, primarily focusing on the theme of love. These compositions were sung to accompany farm work, festivities, weddings, and other communal events. The original authors often had no interest in individual recognition; rather, the community appropriated and transmitted these songs to later generations, considering them a collective heritage. During this process of oral transmission, variations commonly occurred due to forgotten fragments or adaptations to new circumstances.
In the Iberian Peninsula, three distinct forms are recognized:
- Jarchas: A manifestation of Mozarabic or Andalusian lyric, representing the oldest sample of traditional Hispanic lyric.
- Cantigas de Amigo: Representative of Galician-Portuguese lyric.
- Villancicos: A form of traditional Castilian lyric.
Much of this lyric has been lost due to its oral nature and the low regard some educated poets held for folk songs. The earliest manifestations of traditional lyric appear to date from the 10th or 11th century.
Structure of Traditional Lyric
Traditional lyric primarily uses parallelism and refrains, along with a rhythmic structure. This is because the lyric was not only sung but also danced.
Themes in Traditional Lyric
The main theme is love, expressed as joy or pain, often represented by absence, longing, or dismissal. Frequent laments include those of unhappily married women and complaints from girls forced to become nuns. Often, a girl’s love is confided to her mother, sisters, or nature, with brief allusions to the landscape.
Style of Traditional Lyric
The style is simple and condensed. Poems are brief, intense, and emotional. Subjectivity and emotion are conveyed through exclamations, questions, and diminutives.
Metrics of Traditional Lyric
Short lines predominate, with various meters, assonance, and rhyme.
Jarchas (Mozarabic Lyric)
Jarchas are short compositions (typically 2, 3, or 4 verses) written in Mozarabic, the Romance language spoken in Muslim lands during the occupation. These compositions form the concluding verses of longer Arabic and Hebrew cultured poems called moaxajas. They usually have a love theme and are put into the mouth of a girl who laments the absence of her beloved or longs for his early return. Key features include an abundance of exclamatory sentences, questions, and affective vocabulary. They are typically quatrains (compositions of 4 lines, or 8 lines in some interpretations) rhyming in pairs only. The rhyme is often consonant, though imperfections may lean towards assonance. The oldest preserved jarcha dates from 1042, demonstrating the coexistence of the three cultures (Christian, Arab, Jewish) in the Iberian Peninsula.
Cantigas de Amigo (Galician-Portuguese Lyric)
These are short compositions, spoken by a girl who turns to her mother, a friend, or nature to lament her absent beloved. They adopt a parallel structure that lends the theme a special, slow musicality. To intensify the emotion and aid memorization, the second verse often repeats the first with a slight variation. They date from the 12th century and were often recreated by cultured authors in songbooks.
Segrel: A type of minstrel specializing in singing these songs.
Villancicos (Castilian Lyric)
Villancicos are distinctive verses belonging to popular lyric that developed in Castile. The author is not always known. The main theme is love. Their style is simple, dominated by verbs of motion, and often features diminutives, repetitions, and parallelisms. They usually have two distinct parts:
- An initial short song called the head (or cabeza).
- An extension of that short song, known as the glosses (or glosas).
Zejel
The Zejel is a poetic form of Andalusian Arabic origin. It typically begins with a refrain, followed by stanzas (or mudanzas), then a turn (or vuelta), and concludes by returning to the initial chorus.