Arms and Letters between Cervantes and Avellaneda: the Case of Garcilaso de la Vega and Tarfe the Moor

Abstract

This article studies the topic of arms and letters in Avellaneda's Quijote, focusing not on the proportion of arms and letters in the work, but on which arms and letters the author of the apocryphon proposes. Specifically, we examine how Avellaneda presents Garcilaso de la Vega el de la Guerra de Granada, a figure that allows us to weigh the literary preferences of the continuator and their ideological consequences. To do so, we first review the various implicit and explicit appearances of the topic of arms and letters in the Quijote of 1614, highlighting the abundant presence of the latter, particularly represented by the romancero. Next, we examine the critical references to the romancero in Avellaneda, highlighting that these analyses lack a text that Avellaneda must have known and that concerns one of the protagonists of this work: the romance of Garcilaso de la Vega and the Moor Tarfe, «Cercada está Santa Fe». This poem completes the panorama of romances in the apocryphal Quijote, which includes a series of texts of clear interest in patriotic and even patriotic history, as evidenced by the weight that the book gives to the romances of the cycle of Bernardo del Carpio and the War of Granada, some of which we use to analyze the text in some detail. In this way, we contrast the respective preferences of Cervantes and Avellaneda, showing what it means that the author of the apocryphal Quijote never mentions the poet Garcilaso.