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?)
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