Acclaimed troughout Europe soon after its publication in 1886, "Mount Canigó" is set in eleventh-century Catalonia, mostly on the French side in what is today the region of Rosselló, during the Christian reconquest of the Spanish March, today Catalonia. The waging of war between Christians and Saracens is interlaced with an intracultural clash between a folk mythology rooted in the natural geography, where the Pyrenean faeries reign supreme, and the broadly institutionalized hegemony of early medieval Christendom. Catalonia's towering Romantic poet and rebel priest, Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902), delves deep into the Catalan imaginary in his foundational long poem "Mount Canigó", recounting the historical and legendary mix, both tragic and triumphant, of the medieval origins of modern Catalonia. The collision between duty and love is mirrored by the symbolic conflict between, on the one hand, a powerful folk mythology rooted in the natural geography and, on the other, the widely institutionalized universalism of Christianity concomitant to the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. Rich in lyrical and thematic correspondence with long poems ranging from "La chanson de Roland", Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" and Spenser's "Faerie Queene" to Milton's "Paradise Lost", Longfellow's "Evangeline" and Tennyson's "Idylls of the King", Verdaguer's masterful verse rivals all the legendary magic and wonder ot the mountains themselves.
