A brief survey of Iloko literature from the beginnings to its present development, with a bibliography of works pertaining to the Iloko people and their language, by Leopoldo Y. Yabes.

CHAPTER III
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
"Then began a new era for the Filipinos. They gradually lost their
ancient traditions, their recollections-they forgot their writings, their
songs, their poetry, their laws, in order to learn by heart other doctrines
which they did not understand, other ethics, other tastes which were different from those inspired in their race by the climate and their way of
thinking.-Jose Rizal.l
Man being fundamentally a religious creature, his first ef2 forts at literary expression concern themes of a religious, rather
I than of a secular, nature. The beginnings of literature are; religious, not literary. Thus the Ilokos of pre-Spanish times
related stories about the creation of the world, chanted invoca-! tions and prayers to the different spirits which they worshipped,
and in song and dance performed religious ceremonies in honor
of their gods.
When the Spaniards came over, bringing with them the
Christian religion, the first thing they did was to make the
natives forget their pagan customs, tradition, and worship, and
then convert them to the new religion. To facilitate their
evangelization work, they destroyed manuscripts written in the
old characters,2 and in place of these they wrote and circulated
Christian religious works among the people.
j Almost the whole written literature produced in Iloko in
| the seventeenth century is of a religious character. The present: stage of the study on Iloko literature has been able to bring
out only a few works of a non-religious theme. Even the few
linguistic works produced during the century contain considerable religious matter. The poetry was on the whole religious,
and even the Iloko popular poem, the Biag ni Lam-ang (Life of
Lam-ang), believed to be of pre-Spanish date,' was Christianized, as it were, to lighten the work of the missionaries.
A. RELIGIOUS LITERATURE
Shortly after the conquest of the Ilokos, effected by Juan de
Salcedo in 1572 and 1573, the Spanish missionaries went to
the region. The missionary work in the region was assigned
to the friars of the Order of Saint Augustine and as early as
1575, the Augustinian missionaries established a convent in
1-"The Philippines A Century Hence", in Quirino and Hilario, Thinking for Ourselves, p. 217.
2-See Chirino's Relacion de las Islas Filipinas and Morga's Sucesos
de las Islas Filipinas in Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands,
Cleveland, Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904, vols. XIII and XVI.
3-In a personal statement to the writer, Prof. H. Otley Beyer of the
University of the Philippines said the poem is unquestionably preSpanish but that when written down during the Spanish regime it was
sort of "Christianized".