Excerpt from Main Currents of Spanish LiteratureA Land in which the ages have witnessed the warfare, long-continued and intermittent, of tribe upon tribe, nation upon nation, and race upon race, must be supposed to have celebrated in song the exploits of victorious hosts and of the great champions that headed them. Hence Spain, the home from prehistoric times of the Iberian and the Celt, and the scene of successive conquests by the Carthaginians, the Romans, Germanic tribes, and the Moslems, might well be believed to have produced in this or in that period heroic traditions commemorating the strife that raged between the conflicting forces on her soil.Of what the Iberians and the Celts may have sung, recounting their feats of arms in battle with one another and with the invading warriors of Carthage and of Rome, we have the merest record. Of the existence of a popular poetry among them, - a fact which we should be willing to assume, - evidence is given in ancient Greek and Latin works. Strabo informs us that the natives of Turdetania in southern Iberia had verse compositions already six thousands years old.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. - from Amzon