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Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an esthetic revolution awakened a new interest in traditional poetry, which was considered the depositary of the Volksgeist and the most faithful representation of the national character. This paper raises the possibility of using the concept of author function to prove the high coherence with which German Hispanism, and in particular Ferdinand Wolf, considered the people of Spain as the authorial subject of Spanish romances. To do so, I will review the increasing interest in folk poetry since the 1750s contextualizing it within the new processes of the creation of national identities and Europe's special attraction to the Spanish case. Secondly, I will connect this revival to both new esthetic sensibilities that revolutionized the concept of authorship, such as expressive theories, and the creation of a collective subject (das Volk) as the origin of romances. I will analyze this collective subject as a potential author function. Finally, I will compare this against Wolf's thesis on the Spanish Romancero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]