Lenda de Gaia

The Lenda de Gaia concerns the tenth-century king Ramiro II of León and the origins of the Maia family.

[1] The Lenda de Gaia is generally seen as part of a literary tradition common to the Iberian peninsula, France and Germany inspired by the Biblical story of the marriage King Solomon and the pharaoh's daughter.

It has many tropes common to folk tales, including the adulterous wife who hides her husband to meet her lover, the king who goes undercover as a beggar and the summoning of help by means of a hunting horn.

Like similar legends in Castilian and Aragonese literature, the deaths of the illicit lovers result in a positive military outcome for the Christians.

Thereafter the two accounts are essentially the same, but with the Livro de Linhagens do Conde having Ramiro marry not a rescued lady-in-waiting, but the already converted Artiga.

[3] The English romantic poet Robert Southey made the version in the Livro de Linhagens do Conde the basis for his poem "King Ramiro" (1802).

The Portuguese romantic João Baptista de Almeida Garrett composed a romance on the theme titled Miragaia (1844).

[3] According to the German scholar Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, a popular ballad based on the legend was still being sung as late as 1881, when she heard two lines of it.