Cheese news

A writing in the Romance language that appeared near León and dated between the years 974 and 980. It is one of the oldest texts that can be considered in the evolution of the Iberian Romance languages, although José Ramón Morala Rodríguez notes that, limited to exclusively Leonese archives, there are around a thousand linguistic testimonies older than the Nodicia de Kesos, whose value as a testimony of the language that originated the romance is similar or superior. Strictly speaking, it cannot yet be considered Asturian, but rather a stage of Latin that begins to be distinguished from Vulgar Latin and fragment into various proto-Romances, in this case in Leonese.

The document was already known, as it is one of the texts that Ramón Menéndez Pidal used in his work Origines of Spanish in 1926 to give an account of the state of peninsular romances in the 10th century.

The text itself is a simple note of a functional nature: it is the inventory of cheeses made by the monk butcher in the Monastery of Saints Justo y Pastor, in the town of La Rozuela, very close to León. It is written on the back of a donation document dated 956. If it is a reused parchment, it should have ceased to have legal value; With this reasoning, Ramón Menéndez Pidal proposed the year 980 as a possible date for the Nodicia. More recent studies by J.M. Fernández Catón and others propose a slightly earlier dating, around the years 974-975, due to a historical reference contained in the text itself, specifically the mention of a visit by King Ramiro III.

The greatest importance of the Nodicia de Kesos lies in the fact that it is an entry in a very primitive romance, and also outside the constricted legal language of the time, which was full of Latin formulas that were repeated.; Here, the butcher had to rehearse writing in Romance without starting from a model, writing in a completely free and spontaneous way, so he brings us closer to the language that would actually be spoken at that time.

The original is preserved in the cathedral archive of León, with the signature Manuscript 852v.

The text

According to the recent edition by Fernández Catón et al., 2003:

(1st column)

(Christus) News of / kesos que / 3 espisit frater / Semeno: In Labore / of fratres In ilo ba- / 6 celare / from cirka Sancte Ius- / te, kesos U; In ilo / 9 year of apate, / II kesos; in which[e] / they put ogano, / 12 kesos IIII; In ilo / of Kastrelo, I; / In Ila uinia maIore, / 15 II;

(2nd column)

/ which they took in a ditch, / II, ad ila tore; / 18 who baroned Cegia, / II, when the talia- / rum Ila table; II that / 21 lebaron LeIone; II /...s...en / u...re... / 24...what.... /...c... /...e...u... / 27...alius (?)... /... /... / g...Uane Ece; alio ke le- / 30 ba of Gomi's nephew / from do... to...; IIII what espi- / they were when I cried / 33 uenit ad Jukebox; / I qua Salbatore Ibi /uenit.

A current Spanish version of the Nodicia could be:

Relation of the cheeses that Brother Jimeno spent: In the work of the friars, in the vineyard near San Justo, five cheeses. In the other abbot, two cheeses. They put four cheeses this year. In Castrillo's, one. In the larger vineyard, two [...] they carried in a pit to the tower, two. They took Cea when they cut the table, two. Two who brought to Leon [...] another who carries the nephew of Gomi [...] four who spent when the king came to Rozuela. One when Salvador came here.