Romantic Poets and the Legend of the Haunted Cave of Hercules

Abstract

This essay analyzes several versions of the legend of Don Rodrigo and the fall of Spain, as it was understood by some Spanish and European Romantic writers (poets, novelists and playwrights). Our attention is focused on the treatment that these writers made of the spaces contained in the legend and of the trajectory and movements of the characters, from which a symbolic and political interpretation and ethical reflection can be derived. The legend of Don Rodrigo, well-known throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, is an example of an etiologic myth of “decadence”. Its objective is to explain the end of the first age of Christianity in Spain and the rapid Muslim conquest. There would be two alternative accepted explanations. The loss of Spain is a consequence of the loss of Christian virtues on the part of the rulers, to whom God grants authority to serve and lead his subjects to the kingdom of heaven; or else, it was God’s will that Spain should be lost and nothing could have prevented it.