Garcilasso describes them as resembling the Spanish compositions called redondillas.[1] They had many other metres for these songs, and for the elegies recited by their Harahuicus or Trouvères. The Ynca poets also treated of the secondary causes, by means of which God acts in the region of the air to cause lightning, rain, and snow. Blas Valera preserved some verses of this kind, which he calls spondaics, and which are certainly of undoubted antiquity.[2]
These verses, and four lines of a love-song in Garcilasso,[3] are the only fragments of ancient Ynca literature that were preserved in the writings of early Spanish authors. Garcilasso also mentions a class of songs called haylli, in which the deeds of valiant warriors, and the hopes and fears of lovers, were celebrated. The word haylli, or "triumph," was used as a refrain or chorus; and the songs were chanted by the people when engaged in ploughing, and other field labours.[4]
The means of preserving ancient songs and dramas were rude, but not altogether ineffectual. They consisted of oral transmission, the same means by which, as Max Müller believes, the whole Vedic literature was preserved for centuries; and the system of quipus or knots. In his own account of the quipus, Garcilasso nowhere says that songs and traditions were preserved by their means alone. He merely states that the Amautas put the narratives of the
