Traditional Lyric and Spanish Ballads: Forms and Transmission

The Traditional Lyric

It is passed down orally among the people. These songs originated with villagers (inhabitants of the villages), who sang during breaks, holidays, and religious services. They were also associated with labor, such as farming or reaping, and with children's singing games. The earliest known examples are the Jarchas in Mozarabic, dating back to the 10th century.

Key Forms and Similarities

Similar forms include the Jarcha, the *Cantar* (Lay/Song), ballads, and carols. Some cultured authors later wrote refined versions of these popular forms.

Major Themes in Traditional Lyric

• Theme of Love

  Often features a woman complaining to a female confidante about beauty, or being a girl in love. Another common issue is the married woman against her will (*malmaridada*).

• Planto (Funeral Song)

  A funeral song dedicated to someone's death (a lament).

• Maya (May Song)

  A song celebrating the month of May, spring, and love.

• Albas (Dawn Songs)

  Songs depicting a couple parting at dawn after spending the night together.

• Work and Celebration Songs

  Used to support daily labor or mark festive occasions.

• Comic Songs

  Used for distraction and derision.

Formal Features

Traditional lyric poetry uses many repetitive devices, such as parallelism, and primarily employs the expressive function. It frequently references moments of nature connected with the theme of love.

The Ballad (Romance)

A ballad is an epic-lyric poem consisting of an indeterminate number of octosyllabic verses, rhyming in assonance on the even lines (-a-a-a...).

Types of Ballads

1. Old Ballads (*Romances Viejos*)

   These are anonymous. The earliest examples date to the 15th century. They sometimes feature alternate forms, such as 8 and 9 syllables, and may include rhyme and a refrain. The final, standardized form became the octosyllabic assonant verse. In the 16th century, collections like the Songbooks of Romances and later the *Romanceros* were published.

2. New Ballads (*Romances Nuevos*)

   These were written texts produced from the middle of the 16th century by cultured authors (e.g., Góngora) in imitation of the old traditional forms.

Origin and Transmission Theories

Traditional Theory

Holds that ballads originated from epic poems. The octosyllabic ballad verse is believed to derive from the division of the longer epic verse into two parts.

Individualistic Theory

Suggests that ballads were written by anonymous individual authors. Support for this theory lies in the fact that the oldest ballads are not necessarily epic in nature.

Oral Transmission Feature: Truncation

Even the ballads that were initially written down were often transmitted orally. Truncation is a key feature: the beginning and the outcome of the stories often disappear. The audience knows the full narrative but prefers these fragmented parts.