CSM Cantiga 10 Lyrics: Rósa das rósas e Fror das frores

I don't make a habit of commenting on translations of the Cantigas, but in this case I feel the urge to make an exception. I have encountered more than one English version that translates Sennor das sennores, quite preposterously, as "Lord of lords". One of these appears in the book "The Spanish Song Companion" by Jacqueline Cockburn and Richard Stokes (1992), who make several other blunders both in translation and in reproduction of the source text that only serve to highlight their incompetence with medieval Galician-Portuguese. Another comes from "Lyrics of the Middle Ages", ed. James J. Wilhelm (1990), and was translated by the editor himself. One can only assume that these translators were influenced by the fact that the words "senhor" and "señor" in modern Portuguese and Galician are masculine nouns which refer only to men, whilst the female equivalent is "senhora" / "señora". Whilst that is true now, however, it was not so in the medieval language: sennor has its origins in a comparative adjective (= "older" or "senior" in English), and had no separate feminine form in the early medieval period—something which is still the case for the modern Portuguese and Galician words "melhor" / "mellor", "pior" / "peor", "maior" and "menor" and their Castilian counterparts "mejor", "peor" etc. In any case, the connecting word das (< de as = "of the") is quite plainly feminine here, so the meaning has to be "Lady of ladies"; "Lord of lords" would be Sennor dos sennores.