Galician is a Romance language spoken to this day in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula.
The Romans came to the Iberian peninsula following the Second Punic War, and their first contacts with the northwestern part of the land, inhabited mainly by Celts, date back to the second century BCE. Half a millennium later, during the gradual downfall of the Western Roman Empire, the area was settled by Germanic tribes of Visigoths and Suebi, but their presence left only limited traces in the language. The same is true of Arabic after the North African Moors occupied most of the peninsula in the eighth century CE. The territory of present-day Galicia was occupied only partially and temporarily and served rather as a starting point for the Christian “reconquest” of the peninsula.
In the Middle Ages, a common language was spoken in the territories of Galicia and Portugal, referred to as “Medieval Galician” or, more precisely, “Galician-Portuguese.” Limited cultural communication between the two territories in the early modern era ultimately shaped two distinct languages. It is worth noting that the Latin adjective gallaecum (or the vernacular gallego) began to refer to the language, and not just the people or the land, only around 1300.
The old shared language stemmed from the regional variant of Vulgar Latin at the end of the first millennium CE and flourished particularly between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, notably as a language of lyric poetry in the noble courts of León, Castile (of which Galicia was a part), and the nascent kingdom of Portugal. Until the end of the twelfth century, written Latin was the sole language of administration and literature in the Iberian north-west. Then, especially from 1250 onwards, Galician-Portuguese achieved official status and was written quite frequently, until the first decades of the sixteenth century, when it was sidelined from political and social life along with other vernaculars of the unified Castilian-Aragonese monarchy, with the exception of Castilian. South of the River Minho, the language developed into modern Portuguese.
Medieval Galician’s Latin script is roughly the same as that of other Romance languages. Digraphs were used to write sounds that had no clear Latin equivalent, the most common being LH or LL, pronounced as a soft L (ʎ), and NH or NN, pronounced as Ñ in modern Castilian (ɲ). The letter Ç originated from the Visigothic writing of the letter Z and is usually pronounced as the harder TS. The most frequent abbreviation in manuscripts and editions of Medieval Galician texts is a small wave (tilde) that denotes nasalization.
During the High Middle Ages, Galician-Portuguese became the preferred language for lyrical poems—cantigas or songs—throughout the lands of the Castilian Crown. The composition of the poem Ora faz ost’ o senhor de Navarra, usually said to be the oldest extant cantiga, is dated between 1166 and 1213. Around the year 1199, the Occitan troubadour Raimbaut de Vaqueiras composed a multilingual poem, Descort, whose fifth stanza sounds somewhat Galician, suggesting that from the very beginning of the thirteenth century, Galician-Portuguese participated in the poetic universe of Romance languages.
The body of cantigas is preserved in three songbooks (cancioneiros): the Cancioneiro de Ajuda, compiled around 1300, and two manuscripts compiled in Rome around 1525, the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional and the Cancioneiro da Vaticana. Apart from these three, there are some fragments and loose parchment sheets, the most famous of which is the Pergaminho Vindel, containing poems by the troubadour Martín Codax. Additionally, there is the massive corpus of religious lyric and narrative songs composed in praise of the Virgin Mary at the court of the Castilian monarch Alfonso X el Sabio (the Learned) in the second half of the thirteenth century, preserved in four manuscripts and known as the Cantigas de Santa Maria.
Within the tradition of Galician-Portuguese lyric poetry, three primary genres stand out: cantigas de amor (songs of love), cantigas de amigo (songs of the beloved), and cantigas de escarnio e maldizer (songs of scorn and insult). The cantigas de amor are characterized by their focus on the perspective of a male speaker, who often addresses an idealized and unattainable beloved using the language of courtly love, reminiscent of the Occitan canso. In contrast, the cantigas de amigo adopt the voice of a female speaker, frequently lamenting the absence of her lover or reflecting on themes of longing and nature. These poems are particularly notable for their use of repetition and refrains, which impart a musical and cyclical quality. Finally, the cantigas de escarnio e maldizer reflect the satirical and critical spirit of the tradition, employing humour, and irony to ridicule individuals or societal norms. Complementing these three secular genres, the religious repertoire of the Cantigas de Santa Maria introduces two additional genres: the cantigas de loor (songs of praise), which exalt a saintly figure, and the epic cantigas de miragre (miracle songs), which recount divine interventions in the world.
In comparison with lyrical poetry, there is relatively little medieval literary prose in Galician, and it appeared later, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These prose works addressed subjects of interest to medieval Europe, such as the Breton cycle of stories about King Arthur and narratives recounting the story and destruction of Troy.
The cultural and historical centre of medieval Galician-Portuguese speaking area was Santiago de Compostela, where the relics of Saint James the Apostle are enshrined. From approximately the late eighth century onward, pilgrims from across Europe journeyed to this site. However, this influx of pilgrims had little influence on the impact of Galician-Portuguese vernacular on other European literatures, as the culture surrounding Compostela was predominantly Latin, closely tied to the bishop’s, and later archbishop’s, court. Consequently, the most significant contribution of medieval Galician and its literature lies in its role as the foundation from which the global Portuguese literary tradition emerged. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century, memory of the Galician-Portuguese poetic tradition served as a pillar for the revival of Galician culture in the north-west of Spain.
Iberian Galicia has nothing to do with Galicia (Halych) in north-west of Ukraine, whose name probably stems from the East-Slavic word halka – jackdaw.
Although the cantigas de amigo adopt the voice of a female speaker, they were, as far as we know, authored by male poets.
Medieval Galician-Portuguese most probably sounded “harder” than modern Portuguese, with less soft sibilants. Modern interpreters of medieval songs often ignore this fact.
Corpus of Galician-Portuguese secular poetry: https://cantigas.fcsh.unl.pt/
Texts of Cantigas de Santa Maria with many useful resources for musical performace: http://www.cantigasdesantamaria.com/
Centre for the Study of Cantigas de Santa Maria of Oxford University: https://csm.mml.ox.ac.uk/
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