Woodpeckers in Andalusia

I’ve bumped into a number of Moorish poet-princes, but I’d never heard of poet-princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (994-1091). There’s a sensible, sourced account (in Spanish) here, and then there’s this. I had my doubts about Wijdan al shommari, and thought I’d be able to nail him/her on the basis of his/her (?) version of a pome Wallada wrote for her ex:

There are plenty of woodpeckers in these parts, but I didn’t think they were endemic to Andalusia. Wrong again. However, I wonder whether Wallada was thinking, not of a bird she’d heard, but of the Ovid fable of Picus, transformed into a woodpecker by a jealous Circe. The story turns up regularly in C15th Spain (see eg Alfonso Gómez de Zamora, Morales de Ovidio), but I’ve no idea whether it was known before.

(Neither do I understand the following proverb in Hernán Núñez’s collection, published a century later:

If it does indeed mean that the woodpecker betrays himself by his bill, what is the lesson for us? Is it sexual, or do I just need to get out more?)

Trevor @ 22 October 2005 11:33 PM

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1. kalebeul » The Queen of Iznatoraf
   3:03 PM on 24 May 2007

   [...] A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive to our socialist bishops we may miss some phenomenal scientific advances made by women in the same period. Take for example the king of Iznatoraf’s wife: In 964 in the nearby kingdom of Iznatoraf the Christians, under Muslim rule, venerated an image of Our Lady. The Moorish queen was discovered by her husband, King Alimenón, attempting to take instruction in the Christian faith. She was thrown out and, a few leagues from the city, her hands were cut off and her eyes put out and she was abandoned to a sad fate. In that moment the queen invoked the Lady of the Christians and heard the murmur of a spring. Driven from within by a voice, she plunged her mutilated arms into it and recovered her hands as well as her eyes, with which she saw the Virgin Mary. Before this double miracle, King Alimony converted and commanded the building of a sanctuary-fortress wherein was enthroned the image of Our Lady, since then of the Holy Spring. [...]

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