Asturian literature
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Asturian literature is the writings in the Asturian language of the northwest Iberian Peninsula. The earliest documents date back to the 10th century, but the peak period of literary output was in the 18th century, with a late 20th century revival.
Documents written in the Asturian language exist from as early as the 10th century, containing clear linguistic features of the language. However, significant numbers of documents in Asturian came into being only from the 13th century: writing by notaries, contracts, wills and the like. The importance of the Asturian language in the Middle Ages is revealed, for example, in the Fuero de Avilés (1085) (considered to be the first document written in Romanic) and the Fuero de Oviedo, in the Asturian version of the Fuero Juzgo as well.
All of these 13th century documents were legal in nature and contained laws for towns and cities or for the population at large. However, by the second half of the 16th century, documents were clearly coming to be written in the Castilian language, backed deliberately by the Trastámara Dynasty making the civil and ecclesiastical service of the Principality of Castilian origin. As a result, the Asturian language disappeared from written texts ('sieglos escuros' or Dark centuries) but continued to survive through oral transmission from generation to generation. The only reference to Asturian during this period is a work of Hernán Núñez (1555) about Proverbs and adages, "[...] ...in a large copy of rare languages, as Portuguese, Galician, Asturian, Catalan, Valencian, French, Tuscan..."[1]
Modernization
Modern Asturian literature was born in the 17th century with the works of clergyman Antón González Reguera. It continued through the 18th century, when it produced, according to Ruiz de la Peña, a literature that could stand up to the best written in the same period in the Castilian language from Asturias.[citation needed]
In the 18th century, the intellectual Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos was conscious of the historical and cultural value of what he termed "our language" and expressed the urgency for the compilation of a dictionary and a grammar, and for the creation of a language academy. It took more than a century for the efforts of Asturian politicians to turn this into a reality.
The first Asturian narrative work printed independently was the 1875 novel Viaxe del tío Pacho el Sordo a Uviedo by Enriqueta González Rubín.[2][3][4]