‘The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by the gods’, Georg Lukács famously writes in The Theory of the Novel. Lukács, and another great theorist of the modern novel, Mikhail Bakhtin, present a picture of the epic genre that has had a long afterlife in the study of both forms. For Bakhtin, the epic is set in the ‘absolute past’; its subject is based on tradition rather than personal experience, and ‘an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is, from the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives’.

The world of colonial conflicts into which the authors of this book have taken us is not, precisely, one abandoned by the gods. An isolated Marian apparition in the Araucanian assault on La Imperial in La Araucana, the demonic council and prophetic voices of Arauco domado, the prodigies and miracles which bring about the ‘era de la clemencia’ in Armas antárticas, all act as reminders of the ongoing intervention of Providence in human affairs. There are indications of a supernatural design in history, but, on the whole, the bards do not presume to inquire into it. If, for Oña, the divide between the forces of the devil and those of Christianity is stark, the cosmic schema nevertheless leaves the impression of a post-facto, somewhat decorative explanation for successes and failures already thoroughly explained by more ordinary means. For Ercilla and Miramontes, the slender threads connecting fortune, fate and Providence are largely imperceptible to the human observer. Rarely in these poems is the reader granted a ‘descent from heaven’, or a view from above, and when such a vision is granted, as on the dizzy heights over Saint-Quentin, it tends to raise more questions than answers.

The gaze of these works is, instead, consistently earth-bound, fixated far less on the relationship between man and God than on those between the diversity of human communities across a globe whose histories felt increasingly connected. Ethics, politics, and warfare are in the poems very human creations. This gives them an open-endedness, a radical contingency, which makes the mirror-images of history the most lucid way of exploring them.