Even on the basis of those few poems considered in the previous chapter, epic, evidently, is not so much a story as a narrative that is made up of a number of stories. Indeed such ‘tales within the tale’ are often referred to as episodes or incidents. These designations are not merely a convenient term for locating specific events within the poem; they also indicate how these episodes were subject to isolation and extraction, the most important consequence of which was the creation of a further poetic form: the ballad or, to use the Spanish term, the romance. As Colin Smith has pointed out: ‘Many of the early ballads in a number of countries are of a semi-epic kind, drawn either from historical epics or based upon new events and real persons.’

The relationship of the Spanish ballad to the epic is undoubted but complex. The many ballads on Fernán González, a tenth-century count who secured the independence of Castile from the kings of Asturias-Leon, derive from a fourteenth-century chronicle which itself drew on a lost epic poem. Rather than the independence of Castile, however, it is Fernán González's disputes with the kings of Leon and Navarre with which these poems are concerned. In similar fashion, many of the ballads on the Cid owe little to the thirteenth-century epic poem.