Epics and Chronicles: A Reply to Armistead

Abstract

IN several recent publications, my admired friend Professor Samuel G. Armistead has launched, in terms strongly but courteously polemical, attacks on what he sees as weak points of modestly new approach which some of have been making to medieval Spanish epic. Some of us are to be identified by labels which others have pasted upon us-neo-individualist, the British school-even though such labelling suggests a collective and even programmatic attitude which certainly does not hold good. Professor Armistead's words have constituted an invitation, even a challenge, to reply. most trenchant of his studies, in this respect, is The Mocedades de Rodrigo and Neo-Individualist Theory.' Since I am named several times in this, after some hesitation I pick up Professor Armistead's vigorously thrown gauntlet while shaking-if mixture of metaphor be allowed-the hand that it enclosed, in sign of affectionate greeting. In Professor Armistead's brief pages, cogently reasoned and amply supported by references, there is much that stimulates thought and might produce response. Here I limit myself to one of his main themes: that successive versions of Spanish chronicles demonstrate (as Menendez Pidal held but as can now be seen more clearly thanks to work of Armistead and others) a dependence upon successive variations of epic poems which have gone on evolving, que han vivido en variantes, over very long periods. In his Appendix and for Mocedades only, Professor Armistead details seven major variations of Mocedades theme, adding (p. 320) that these seven are merely those we happen to know about, and that true number is very much larger, indeed vast. For