Wamba, king of the Visigoths

Statue of Wamba by Alejandro Carnicero (1693 - 1756) in  the Royal Palace of Madrid (one of a sequence of statues of the Kings of Spain).

[Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wamba_01.jpg . Photograph by Zaqarbal.]


*

..... Pero una noche, después de largas ausencias, llegó Feijoo al café, y sentándose los dos aparte, le dijo:


«Hombre, he visto a Jacinto Villalonga; he hablado largamente con él. Ya sabe usted que es de la situación y muy amigo mío. Por supuesto, no acepta la Dirección que se le ha ofrecido, porque prefiere andar suelto. Es uña y carne de Romero Robledo. Y voy a lo que iba... Le he hablado de usted...».

-¡De mí!

-Sí; es preciso colocarse. Usted no puede continuar así.

-Mire usted, amigo Feijoo -dijo Rubín masticando las palabras para salir de aquel atolladero-. Yo no puedo admitir... ¿Y el decoro de los hombres? ¡Yo he profesado toda mi vida...!

-Música, música.

-Yo no soy de esos que hablan mal de una situación, y luego van a quitarles motas al que antes desollaron.

-Música, música.

-En fin, que yo agradezco... pero no puede ser... Me ofendería, sí señor, me ofendería.

-De modo -exclamó Feijoo en voz alta, abriendo los brazos y tomando un tono que no se podría decir si era de indignación o de burla-, de modo que ya no hay patriotismo.

-¡Otra!... Patriotismo sí hay; pero yo...

-Usted hará lo que yo le mande, y tendremos credencial.

Rubín siguió toda la noche afectando mal humor, una severidad torva, el malestar de la persona a quien ponen un puñal al pecho para que consume un acto contrario a sus convicciones. Al retirarse a casa, se comparaba con Wamba y decía para su sayo: «Cómo ha de ser... paciencia. Tengo que ser alfonsino... a la fuerza. ¡Vaya un compromiso... Re-Dios, qué compromiso...!».

(Fortunata y Jacinta Volume 3, I, 6, by Benito Pérez Galdós. Online text: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/fortunata-y-jacinta-dos-historias-de-casadas--0/html/ff34d4e6-82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_11.html)


*

[Image source: https://www.todocoleccion.net/libros-antiguos/fortunata-jacinta-b-perez-galdos-1887-4-vol-completa-exlibris~x101070087]

......But one night, after long absences, Feijóo came to the café, and when the two were seated together alone, Feijóo said to him:

"I've seen Jacinto Villalonga and spoken to him at length. As you know, he's involved in politics and he's a very good friend of mine. Naturally he won't accept the directorship they've offered him, because he prefers to be on his own. He's close with the minister, Romero Robledo. And this brings me to what I wanted to tell you: I mentioned your name to him --"

"You did!"

"Yes. You've got to get a job. You can't go on like this."

"Look, my friend," said Rubín, chewing his words in an attempt to get out of that spot. "I can't accept . . . What about a man's integrity? All my life I've maintained --"

"It's just words."

"Well, anyway, I appreciate . . . but it can't be. I'd be offended; I would."

"So," exclaimed Feijóo in a loud voice, extending his arms and adopting a tone that was either indignant or sarcastic (it was hard to say which), "so there's no patriotism left."

"Yes, there is, but I . . ."

"Do what I say and we'll get a spot for you."

Rubín continued to feign a bad mood all night, wearing a troubled, angry face and looking like a person who's had a dagger held at his throat to carry out an act that runs against his convictions. As he left to go home, he compared himself to the Visigoth, King Wamba, and grumbled to himself: "If that's the way it has to be . . . patience. I'll have to support the prince; I'll be forced to. What a bind! Good God, what a bind I'll be in!"

(from Fortunata and Jacinta, Volume 3, I, 6, by Benito Pérez Galdós, translated by Agnes Moncy Gullón.)

[Image source: http://bookcents.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/fortunata-and-jacinta-summary.html]

*

The legend about Wamba, well-known in Spain, concerns the representatives of the realm coming to his country estate and offering him the crown, which he refused to accept, saying there was no nobler work than farming. But he was induced to change his mind by the miracle of a dry stick suddenly shooting forth greenery. In some versions of this story he was an old man, in others a youth.


(The story depends on the widely-accepted view that Gothic rulers were chosen, not born.)

Actually not that much is known for certain about Wamba. He was king of the Visigoths, ruling the whole of the Iberian peninsula, and part of southern Gaul, from 672 - 680 CE.  Three birthplaces have been claimed for him: Egitânia (now Idanha-a-Velha) in central Portugal, Santa María de Dozón in Galicia, and Pujerra, a mountain village in Andalucia.


Wright's Gothic Glossary confirms that "wamba" meant "belly" in Gothic, and some people speculate that the historical king's name may have been a nickname.

[Image source: https://bibliotecadigital.jcyl.es/es/consulta/registro.cmd?id=2361]



The romantic nationalist dramatist José Zorrilla wrote a three-act play about Wamba, El Rey Loco, some time in the early 1840s.


Online text: https://archive.org/details/elreylocodramae00zorrgoog


Zorrilla chooses the "Idánia la Vieja" location for Act I, which ends with the offer of the crown to Wamba. Zorrilla spices up the story a bit. After a long wrangle, Paulo (the people's representative) threatens Wamba with death if he continues to refuse: "Reign or die!" Wamba disdainfully displays his naked chest to the swords pointed at him. The people vacillate, Wamba lashes them with his tongue, but he does take the crown that is forced on him.

*

Rubín comparing himself to King Wamba is a delicious conclusion to the chapter. Juan Pablo Rubín is a thorough idler, a café addict and an argumentative bully, nursing his inner sense of failure with pretensions to knowing about politics and modern thinking. (Hmm, one can't help but identify with him...) Galdós´s Madrid comedy in these scenes looks as much forwards as backwards. In fact I´m thinking even more of Joyce than of Balzac here. But did Joyce ever read Galdós? They were temperamentally miles apart. Galdós never worried about the mot juste, but he had a daily writing process from which marvels of style flowed constantly. Agnes Gullón laments having to give most of it up, but she does some amazing things of her own. I  intend to learn something from the superb punctuation of the passage I've quoted.  (She did eye-skip a couple of lines of dialogue, though.)



*






"Wamba" was, of course, more familiar to me as the name of Cedric's fool in Ivanhoe. Nor was this the only name Scott borrowed from early Germanic languages. Michael Alexander commented:


The names Wamba, Cedric, Gurth and Ulrica are early Germanic, or 'Gothic'. None would have been common in the England of the 1190s. Scott, however, was not so historically uninformed as to confuse the twelfth century with the sixth.The anachronism of the names he gives his English characters is so uniform as to make a point. It tells us that Scott believed that the Germanic -- or Gothic -- settler tribes who formed the English people preserved ancestral attitudes about the way political things should be arranged. These social and political attitudes made them constitutionally different from their French rulers. Scott presents this cultural difference as essential, making it almost as strong in 1190 as it had been in 1066. So Scott's most glaring 'mistake', his portrayal of Saxons and Normans as still at enmity after several generations of cohabitation, was deliberate. Scott was a lawyer and knew how to make a case seem natural and self-evident. Although Ivanhoe ends with the English accepting Richard as their rightful king, one of the book's morals is that the 'Gothic' tradition of participatory democracy is fundamental to the English character. In 1819 this tradition was held to be the key difference between Georgian Britain and an imperious France, whose twenty-year attempt to dominate Europe had ended in 1815, in the most recent of many battles on the border between Latin-speaking and German-speaking Europe.  ....


(Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (2007))




I came across this on Google Books and could only read an extract. Alexander's "'Gothic' tradition of participatory democracy" presumably alludes to the "Gothic polity" or "Gothic balance" of Captain Edmund Hall,  James Harrington on Gianotti, Algernon Sidney, Joseph Addison, etc.: A notion that belief in the liberties of the subject originated in the forests of Tacitean Germany, and that this led eventually to Britain's "mixed monarchy", with power shared between king and gentry (and even, somewhat more reluctantly, the commons).




http://www.humanitiesweb.org/spa/slc/ID/1842/o/blank




At any rate, the use of "Gothic" in this political sense became widespread, and came to refer to the mixed constitution of monarch, lords and commons that Westminster still exemplifies today.  So according to Michael Alexander, Ivanhoe supplies a myth for the British Constitution of Scott's own day. There's no doubt that Scott (lawyer, Tory and laird) profoundly revered it.




All the same, I think he would have used appropriate Anglo-Saxon names in Ivanhoe if they had occurred to him. But I imagine that the names that surivived in his memory (Alfred, Ethelred, Edmund), being intrinsically noble, were unsuitable for his swineherd and jester. So he had to get a bit creative.




["Cedric" is Scott's mistake for "Cerdic", a historical name for one of the sixth century incomers which probably betrays a British (not Saxon) origin. As came up recently for me in connection with Peter Philpott's Wound Scar Memories:


http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/in-and-around-peter-philpotts-wound.html .]

Wamba refuses the crown, painting by Juan Antonio Ribera (1779 - 1860)

[Image source: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/wamba-king-of-the-visigoths-refuses-the-crown-juan-antonio-ribera.html]