The Custodians of Tradition: The Problem of “Authenticity” in the Compilation of Spanish Folk Ballads

Abstract

The Canon of What “Folk” is: A Paradigmatic Text It should come as no surprise that a people such as this one, devoted to its old customs and free from the influence of the new trends⎯as though the waves of modern civilization and the invading torrents of strangers were stopped by and crashed against granite walls built by nature⎯; it should come as no surprise, I say, that such a people preserves in its memory many of the old ballads, distant echoes from other eras, the unhappy voice of the Middle Ages coming from the ruins of convents, boroughs and castles that moans over the centuries, complaining against the extinction of the national spirit and chivalric virtues! [...] The reader must accept, without a doubt, the authenticity of this compilation. In turning oral tradition into a written one, I kept very much in mind the necessity that the romances published here had to be documents, which any scholar could rely on for research; and so, here they are, plain and unabridged, just as ordinary people keep them . . . (J. Menéndez Pidal ix-xii)