Song Personified: The Tornadas of Raimon de Miraval

Abstract

Raimon, who composed in the second half of the twelfth century and into the beginning of the thirteenth century, sends the song as his messenger to the king of Aragon. Raimon thereby imbues his song with speech, mobility, and agency, human characteristics that transform the song from what seems like an outward expression of Raimon’s inner feelings to a personified entity in itself. Through the enactment of its tornada (a half-stanza that occurs at the end of troubadour songs) the song moves out of Raimon’s body via his singing voice toward a second figure (that of his patron). Much scholarship exists on the troubadour lyric corpus, thanks to its status as the earliest such corpus in a Romance language; it provides insight into the roles men and women played in Occitan courtly society, and marks the beginning of a tradition of romantic secular lyric poetry that continues in later contexts. Scholars in musicology and comparative literature alike have produced