ABSTRACT
Diego Catalán published in 1959 an article with this same title, dedicated to the Portuguese ballad tradition, in which he brought out the importance of that tradition for the knowledge of certain romances which because of their rarity were overlooked or lived in fragmented form in the oral life of other Hispanic traditions. The traditional romancero continues to be a source of frequent surprises such as the appearance of a still unpublished romance or others only known in fragmentary or contaminated versions which are insufficient for a true knowledge of the romance in question. It is of much greater interest to collect a single version of Lanzarote y el ciervo del pie bianco since it is a very rare romance, and still more interesting to be able to determine that a ballad like Rio Verde has survived until today in oral tradition after more than four centuries of anonymity.
