  The leading chiral contributions to the quark and gluon components of the
proton spin are calculated using heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory.
Similar calculations are done for the moments of the generalized parton
distributions relevant to the quark and gluon angular momentum densities. These
results provide useful insight about the role of pions in the spin structure of
the nucleon, and can serve as a guidance for extrapolating lattice QCD
calculations at large quark masses to the chiral limit.
