The Moorish ballads which appear in this volume are selected from a unique
department of European literature. They are found in the Spanish language,
but their character is oriental; their inspiration comes from the Mahometan
conquerors of northern Africa, and while they exhibit a blending of Spanish
earnestness and chivalry with the wild and dashing spirit of the Arab, they
present a type of literature which is quite unparalleled in the Latin and
Teutonic countries of the Mediterranean basin.
Spain is especially rich in ballad literature, infinitely richer than any
other civilized nation. These ballads take various forms. By Cervantes and
his countrymen they are styled romances, and the romance generally consists
in a poem which describes the character, sufferings, or exploits of a
single individual. The language is simple; the versification, often artless
though melodious, is seldom elaborated into complexity of rhyme. But the
heroic Moor is set before us in the most vivid colors. The hues and
material of his cloak, his housings, his caftan, and his plumes are given,
and quite a vocabulary is exhausted in depicting the color, sex, and breed
of his war-horse. His weapons, lance, scimitar, and corslet of steel are
dwelt upon with enthusiasm. He is as brave as Mars, and as comely as
Adonis. Sometimes he dashes into a bull-ring and slays wild creatures in
the sight of fair ladies and envious men. He throws his lance of cane,
which is filled with sand, so high that it vanishes in the clouds. He is
ready to strike down, in his own house, the Christian who has taken from
him and wedded the lady of his choice. He is almost always in love with
some lady who is unkind and cold, and for her he wanders at times in dark
array, expressing his sombre mood in the device and motto which he paints
upon his shield. Some of the ballads picture love more fortunate in the
most charming manner, and the dark tortures of jealousy are powerfully
described in others. The devotion of the Moor to his lady is scarcely
caricatured in the mocking language of Cervantes, and is not exceeded by
anything to be found in the history of French chivalry. But the god of
these ballads is Allah, and they sometimes reveal a trace of ferocity which
seems to be derived from religious fanaticism. Nor can the reader fail to
be struck by the profound pathos which many of them express so well. The
dirges are supremely beautiful, their language simple and direct, but
perfect in descriptive touches and in the cadence of the reiterated burden.
Beside the ballads of warlike and amorous adventures, there are sea-songs,
songs of captivity, and songs of the galley slave. The Spanish Moor is
seized by some African pirate and carried away to toil in the mill of his
master on some foreign shore, or he is chained to the rowing-bench of the
Berber galley, thence to be taken and sold when the voyage is over to some
master who leaves him to weep in solitary toil in the farm or garden.
Sometimes he wins the love of his mistress, who releases him and flies in
his company.
All these ballads have vivid descriptions of scenery. The towers of Baeza,
the walls of Granada, the green _vegas_ that spread outside every
city, the valley of the Guadalquivir, and the rushing waters of the Tagus,
the high cliffs of Cadiz, the Pillars of Hercules, and the blue waves of
the Mediterranean make a life-like background to every incident. In the
cities the ladies throng the balconies of curling iron-work or crowd the
plaza where the joust or bull-fight is to be witnessed, or steal at
nightfall to the edge of the _vega_ to meet a lover, and sometimes to
die in his arms at the hands of bandits.
There is a dramatic power in these ballads which is one of their most
remarkable features. They are sometimes mere sketches, but oftener the
story is told with consummate art, with strict economy of word and phrase,
and the _dénouement_ comes with a point and power which show that the
Moorish minstrel was an artist of no mean skill and address.
The authors of the Moorish romances, songs, and ballads are unknown. They
have probably assumed their present literary form after being part of the
_répertoire_ of successive minstrels, and some of the incidents appear
in more than one version. The most ancient of them are often the shortest,
but they belong to the period when southern Spain under Mahometan rule was
at the height of its prosperity, and Arabian learning, art, and literature
made her rank among the first countries in Europe. The peninsula was
conquered by the Moors in the caliphate of Walid I, 705-715 A.D., and the
independent dynasty of the Ommiades was founded by Abderrhaman at Granada
in 755 A.D. It was from this latter date that the Spanish Moors began to
assume that special character in language, manners, and chivalric
enthusiasm which is represented in the present ballads; the spirit of
Christian knighthood is here seen blended with Arabian passion,
impetuosity, and impulsiveness, and the Spanish language has supplanted,
even among Mahometan poets, the oriental idiom. We may roughly estimate the
period in which the Moorish romance flourished as comprised in the years
between 1100 and 1600 A.D.
The term Moorish is somewhat indefinite, and is used in Spanish history as
a synonym of Saracen or Mahometan. It cannot be called a national
appellation, though originally in the Augustan age it was applied to the
dwellers in Mauretania, with whom the Romans had first come in contact when
the war with Hannibal was transferred from Italy and Spain to Africa. In
the present day, it may be applied to all the races of northwestern Africa
who have accepted Mahometanism; in which case it would include the
aborigines of that region, who live not on the coast and in towns, but in
the Atlas Mountain and the Sahara Desert. While these races, all Berbers
under different local names, are Mussulmans in profession, they are not so
highly civilized as their co-religionists who people the coast of the
Mediterranean. They live a tribal life, and are blood-thirsty and
predatory. They are of course mixed in race with the Arabians, but they are
separate in their life and institutions, and they possess no written
literature. Their oral literature is, however, abundant, though it is only
within quite recent years that it has become known to America and Europe.
The present collection of tales and fables is the first which has hitherto
been made in the English language. The learned men who collected the tales
of the Berbers and Kabyles (who are identical in ethnical origin) underwent
many hardships in gathering from half-savage lips the material for their
volume. They were forced to live among the wild tribesmen, join their nomad
life, sit at their feasts, and watch with them round their camp-fire, while
it was with difficulty they transferred to writing the syllables of a
barbarous tongue. The memory of the Berber story-teller seems to be
incredibly capacious and retentive, and the tales were recited over and
over again without a variation. As is to be expected these tales are very
varied, and many of them are of a didactic, if not ethical, cast. They are
instructive as revealing the social life and character of these mountain
and desert tribes.
We find the spirit of the vendetta pervading these tales with more than
Corsican bitterness and unreasoning cruelty, every man being allowed to
revenge himself by taking the life or property of another. This private and
personal warfare has done more than anything else to check the advance in
civilization of these tribesmen. The Berbers and Kabyles are fanatical
Mahometans and look upon Christians and Jews as dogs and outcasts. It is
considered honorable to cheat, rob, or deceive by lies one who does not
worship Allah. The tales illustrate, moreover, the degraded position of
women. A wife is literally a chattel, not only to be bought, but to be sold
also, and to be treated in every respect as man's inferior--a mere slave or
beast of burden. Yet the tribesmen are profoundly superstitious, and hold
in great dread the evil spirits who they think surround them and to whom
they attribute bodily and mental ills. An idiot is one who is possessed by
a wicked demon, and is to be feared accordingly.
There are found current among them a vast number of fairy tales, such as
equal in wildness and horror the strangest inventions of oriental
imagination. Their tales of ogres and ogresses are unsoftened by any of
that playfulness and bonhomie which give such undying charm to the
"Thousand and One Nights." The element of the miraculous takes many
original forms in their popular tales, and they have more than their share
of the folk-lore legends and traditions such as Herodotus loved to collect.
It was said of old that something new was always coming out of Africa, and
certainly the contribution which the Berbers and Kabyles have made to the
fund of wonder-stories in the world may be looked upon as new, in more than
one sense. It is new, not only because it is novel and unexpected, but
because it is fresh, original and highly interesting.
The fables of these tribes are very abundant and very curious. The great
hero of the animal fable in Europe has always been the fox, whose cunning,
greed, and duplicity are immortalized in the finest fable the world's
literature possesses. The fables of northwest Africa employ the jackal
instead of Reynard, whose place the sycophant of the lion not inaptly
fills.
There are a number of men among the Kabyles and other Berber tribes who
make a profession of reciting poems, tales, and proverbs, and travel from
one village or encampment to another in search of an audience. They know
the national traditions, the heroic legends, and warlike adventures that
pertain to each community, and are honored and welcomed wherever they go.
It was from these men that the various narratives contained in this
collection were obtained, and the translation of them has engaged the
talents and labors of some of the world's foremost oriental scholars.
[Illustration (Facsimile Signature): Epiphanius Wilson]