‘It is an honourable and satisfying duty to reflect once again about the origins of our Spanish language (which in its beginnings was evidently Castilian) and to do so precisely in this illustrious Monastery of Silos, which restored the holy monk of Cañas when, in about 1040, fleeing from the wrathful King García of Nájera, he left the priory of San Millán and, as Berceo wrote,

He drank but cold, cold water, as on his staff he leant;

To King Fernando’s court his weary way he went.

From this monastery in La Rioja, as it appears, came, in the time of Santo Domingo, the codex that was kept here and that contains the document known as the Glosas Silenses. These annotations, together with the Glosas Emilianenses in another codex from La Cogolla, now in the Academia de la Historia, are the first clear written manifestations of Spanish Romance, if we discount the Nodicia de Kesos written in the Monastery of Rozuela, by the River Esla in León, on the back of a donation of the tenth century.’

                                                                                                            Emilio Alarcos Llorach, unpublished translation