Hook
Have you ever heard a baby that can talk and walk after birth ? This is an epic story about the life of lam-ang.Lam-ang was an extraordinary being, manifesting in his early years when he started to speak, thus enabling him to choose his own name. His adventure began when his father, Don Juan, set out for a battle but never returned. At barely nine months, he went to search for Don Juan in the highlands where the latter was said to have gone. Aware that her child was a blessed, exceptional creature, his mother Namongan allowed him to go. Lam-ang then went off to search for his father, leaving his grieving mother behind.
When Lam-ang reached the area his father purportedly disappeared to, he was enraged upon seeing Don Juan's severed head atop of a bamboo pole that was planted in the ground; the scene came to him in a dream prior to reaching that place. Lam-ang then demanded to know the reason as to why that had happened to his father, but did not receive an answer from the locals. Instead, the chieftain of the village demanded that he leave under pain of suffering the same fate as his father. Lam-ang defied the caveat and bravely fought with the chieftain and his tribesmen. The hero emerged victorious from the battle with little effort, finally avenging his murdered father.
Author (origin of the story)
The Iloko Biag ni Lam-ang is the oldest recorded Philippine folk epic and the only complete epic to come down to us from the Christian Filipino groups. The earliest recording of the poem was given by Fr. Gerardo Blanco to Isabelo de los Reyes, who published it serially in El Ilocano from December 1889 to February 1890, with a Spanish translation in prose, and also reprinted it in his El Folklore Filipino, vol. 2 (Manila: Imprenta de Santa Cruz, 1890), under the title “Vida de Lam-ang (antiguo poema popular de Ilocos)”, with the Iloko text and prose translation in Spanish. Important subsequent editions of Lam-ang are those published by Canuto Medina in 1906; the one serialized in La Lucha from February 20, 1926 to June 5, 1926; the Parayno versiion of 1927; and the composite version of L.Y. Yabes of 1935. coming to the light as it did just when the awits and corridos (metrical romances) were becoming very popular, the story of Lam-ang inevitably came to be retold also in awit form.
chAs a matter of fact, it is the awit version of Lam-ang, published in 1927 by the Imprenta Parayno Hermanos (Calasiao, Pangasinan), which specialized in the printing of Iloko awits (or panagbiags), which became the most popular version of this folk epic. It carries the long title characteristics of awits, Historia a Pacasaritaan ti Panabiag ni Lam-ang iti Ili a Nalbuan nga Asaoa ni Dona Ines Cannoyan ili Ili a Calanotian, and opens with a religious invocation,also characteristic of awits.according to Manuel, Yabes relied mainly on this Parayno version when did the composite version of Lam-ang is by the way, the most widely known translation in the Philippines today.
The story dates its origin during the pre-Spanish period of the Philippines. It is one of the greatest Ilocano epic of the pre-colonial literature languages. This story is about Lam-Ang who is a very extra ordinary guy, and it is believed to be the work of many poets from various generation, and was first preserved in writing around 1640, by a blind Ilokano bard named Pedro Bucaneg.
