Gigantes y patagones como relato épico retórico en el libro XX de la <i>Historia general y natural de las Indias</i> de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés

Abstract

This essay explores the invention of the giants or patagones who inhabited the southern limits of the western world in the Book XX of the Historia General y Natural de las Indias by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés. In so doing he resorted to an epic, figurative or rhetoric narratio through which the chronicler amplified the Spaniards‘ deeds as the people chosen by God. Oviedo‘s eloquent praise of the universalistic ideals of Charles V‘s empire took him to extol the behavior of those modern "Argonauts", such as Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián del Cano, including multiple allegorical and imaginative levels that belonged to a literary textual level. It did not contradict Oviedo‘s project to write a "true history". Rather the contrary, the inclusion of fictional characters, such as the gigantic patagones, was useful to shape heroic archetypes well defined by their firmness and their straightforwardness and loyalty to the King.