Once Again, on the Genre of the Poema de Alfonso Onceno: Historiography in Verse or Epic?

Abstract

Apart from the discussion about the existence of the genre “rhymed chronicles”, a doubt already pointed out by previous scholars, our purpose will be to demonstrate that the Poema de Alfonso Onceno, catalogued by some critics as one of the first expressions of this alleged genre, is but an epic poem, that repeats features of this genre and, like every literary work, includes novel elements that account for its originality, which by themselves would not be enough to postulate the existence of a new genre linked to historiography. With this objective we will discuss the concept of genre, the inherent characteristics of this new genre and some others that it shares with the epic, in order to evaluate the place that belongs to the Poema de Alfonso Onceno.