Rocinante

Rocinante on the ground, behind the adventure of windmills. Illustration of Gustave Doré.

Rocinante is the name of Don Quixote's horse in the famous book by Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote de la Mancha, "four days are They kept imagining what name he would give him... and so after many names he formed, erased and removed, added, undid and redid in his memory and imagination, he finally came to call him Rocinante, a loud, sonorous and significant name in his opinion of what he had been when he was a horse, before what he was now, which was before and first of all the horse horses of the world".

So, before what it was now, skin and bones, it was a nag that Don Quixote still continued to see as "better mount than the famous Babieca del Cid and Bucephalus of Alexander the Great".

Etymology

Rocín in Spanish means a work horse or a horse of low quality, but it can also mean an illiterate or rough man. There are similar words in English (rouncey), French (roussin or roncin; rosse), Catalan (rossí), Portuguese (rocim ) and Italian (ronzino). The etymology is uncertain.

The name is a complex pun. In Spanish, ante has several meanings and can function as an independent word and as a suffix. One meaning is "before" or "previously". Another is "before". As a suffix, -ante in Spanish is adverbial; rocinante refers to functioning as, or being, a horse. "Rocinante", then, follows the pattern of Cervantes using ambiguous and multivalent words, which is common throughout the novel.

Rocinante's name, then, signifies his change in status from the "old bummer" from before to the "most prominent" steed. As Cervantes describes the choice of the name of Don Quixote: a name in his opinion loud, sonorous and significant of what he had been when he was a horse, before what he was now, what he was before and first of all the nags in the world - "a name, for his thought, elevated, sonorous and significant of his condition before becoming what he now was, the first and most important of all the horses of the world world".

In Chapter 1, Cervantes describes Don Quixote's careful naming of his steed:

They spent four days thinking what name to give him, because (as he told himself) it was not correct that a horse belonging to such a famous knight, and one with so many merits of his own, did not have a distinctive name, and he strived to adapt it to indicate what had been before belonging to a walking knight, and what was then "

Accommodations

• Rocinante is the name of the motorhome used by author John Steinbeck on his road trip through 1960, which is shown in his 1962 travel book Trips with Charley.
• The Rush progressive rock band sings over the boat Rocinante both in "Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage" and in "Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres" in albums A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres respectively.
• Rocinante is the name of Monsignor Quijote's car in Graham Greenes' 1982 novel Monseñor Quijote
• In the series of novels The Expanse and its adaptation of the television series Rocinante is the new name given to a Martian combat ship that becomes the main stage of much of the series.
• In the television series Once Upon A Time which is based on the counts of literary classics, Rocinante is the name of the horse that belongs to a young Regina / Evil Queen.
• Finnish actor Jukka Leisti created a TV program for children around his character as a gentleman Tuttiritari (The Pacifier Knight). Tuttiritari rides a horse called Rusinante. The name of the horse is a word game (a combination of words or an acronym), a combination of Rosinante (Rocinante) and the Finnish word for raisins Rusina.