With the exception of María Eugenia Lacarra's important analysis of the political antagonism between Castile and Navarre (1979), the politics of El poema de Fernán González have been discussed only on the most general level. That this epic promotes a nationalist agenda is accepted by all: Castile is the true inheritor of the Visigothic legacy, and as such leads the way in the fight against Islam. This reading, while broadly accurate, needs to be fleshed out by more detailed textual analysis and a wider frame of reference. For in the process of promoting Castilian hegemony, the poem reveals much more. As we shall now see, its representation of nationhood rests upon a particular, and ultimately rather anxious, vision of the political and economic organization of the feudal state and its relationship to violence.

Structures of freedom

Since its conclusion has not survived, Alfonso X's historians will have to speak for the clerical author of El poema de Fernán González at the climactic moment of the first count's life. And in their words, it was thanks to his leadership and cunning that ‘salieron los castellanos de premia et de servidumbre et del poder de León et de los leoneses’ (Alfonso X 1977: II, 422). The Poema is one direct textual source for much of the chronicle, but there is no need to speculate upon the precise wording of its lost conclusion. In general terms, both epic and chronicle have as their basic narrative framework a foundational legend based upon the struggle for political emancipation. It is, however, an emancipation structured in domination: Castilian freedom is predicated upon being subject to a particular set of ideological constraints. This process is crucial to the way the poem represents a formative period in Spanish history, when Castile acquired an identity and a mission, to become the ‘cabeza de España’. In this respect, the key term, in both chronicle and epic, is premia.

Certainly, premia and its cognate forms occur only eight times in the surviving fragment of El poema; but it appears at critical junctures in the narrative of emancipation.2 It connotes not so much a state of oppression — though the struggle for autonomy is certainly the plot that drives and structures the poem — as an ideological process.