The Spanish ballad of Helen of Troy in the 16th century

The Spanish ballad of Helen of Troy has been transmitted in five chapbooks of the 16th century. An analysis shows that all of them derive from an already faulty common ascendant, presumably a lost chapbook. A critical edition of the poem is presented, and a study follows. This ballad uses imagery first introduced in Spanish vernacular literature by devotional poetry, namely Fray Íñigo de Mendoza’s Coplas “De vita Christi”, the date of which is pinpointed to 1474, and Diego de San Pedro’s La Passión trobada, also composed in the 1470s. A study of the sources for this ballad shows that it is mainly based either on the Corónica troyana (a Castilian translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae ascribed here to Pero López de Ayala’s initiative, fragmentarily preserved) or on the Crónica troyana first printed in 1490 (a text combining the 14th-century Sumas de historia troyana attributed to Leomarte and the above-mentioned Corónica troyana). Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, the most likely explanation is that there was a first fashion of Trojan ballads ca. 1491 inspired by the incunabular Crónica troyana. The ballad on the Abduction of Helen, as well as the contemporary one on the Judgment of Paris, were composed at that time, becoming quickly popular and entering Sephardic oral tradition. Keywords: ballads, matter of Troy, chapbooks, textual criticism.