La Araucana
[2] It was considered the national epic of the Captaincy General of Chile and one of the most important works of the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro).
The poem shows Ercilla to be a master of the octava real (that is Italian ottava rima), the complicated stanza in which many other Renaissance epics in Castilian were written.
A difficult eight-line unit of 11-syllable verses that are linked by a tight rhyme scheme abababcc, the octava real was a challenge few poets met.
In the minds of the Chilean people La Araucana is a kind of Iliad that exalts the heroism, pride, and contempt of pain and death of the legendary Araucanian leaders and makes them national heroes today.
La Araucana’s successes—and weaknesses—as a poem stem from the uneasy coexistence of characters and situations drawn from Classical sources (primarily Virgil and Lucan, both translated into Spanish in the 16th century) and Italian Renaissance poets (Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso) with material derived from the actions of contemporary Spaniards and Araucanians.
The mixture of Classical and Araucanian motifs in La Araucana often strikes the modern reader as unusual, but Ercilla's turning native peoples into ancient Greeks, Romans, or Carthaginians was a common practice of his time.
But the Renaissance epic is not a genre that has, as a whole, endured well, and today Ercilla is little known and La Araucana is rarely read except by specialists and students of Spanish and Latin American literatures, and of course in Chile, where it is subject of special attention in the elementary schools education both in language and history.
La Araucana is one of the works which the men spare from the flames, as "one of the best examples of its genre", entirely Christian and honorable, and is proclaimed to be among the best poems in the heroic style ever written, good enough to compete with those of Ariosto and Tasso.
De Tounens gained the support of a few Mapuche leaders who proclaimed him king, but his kingship and kingdom was never recognized by Chile, Argentina or the European states.
Although Ercilla's purpose was to glorify Spanish arms, the figures of Araucanian chiefs, the strong Caupolicán, the brilliant Lautaro, the old and wise Colocolo and the proud Galvarino, have proved the most memorable.
Key events include the capture and execution of Pedro de Valdivia; the death of the hero Lautaro in the Battle of Mataquito, and the execution of Caupolicán the Toqui for leading the revolt of the Araucanians (thanks to betrayal by one of their own); the encounter with a sorcerer who takes the narrator for a flight above the earth to see events happening in Europe and the Middle East; and the encounter with an Indian woman (Glaura) searching for her husband amongst the dead after a battle.
