The oral tradition of <em>Lady Alda’s dream</em>: complete edition of the corpus of versions of the Menéndez Pidal- Goyri Archive

Abstract

The Spanish traditional ballad of Lady Alda’s Dream has been largely studied due to its important role for understanding Medieval epic poetry. However, the complete corpus of versions has not been available for scholars because of the lack of a critical edition. Apart from the well-known text printed in Martín Nucio’s Cancionero de Romances (Antwerp, 1550), Menéndez Pidal - Goyri Archive holds thirty-seven versions from the modern oral tradition of the Sephardic Jews. This paper aims to make public this cultural heritage by providing a philological edition of these texts with some notes regarding their transmission, the contamination phenomenon and those passages of greatest interest or difficult.