Epic
The Epic of the Cid
Cantar de mio Cid
Anonymous · 1207
Synopsis
Wrongly accused of having kept a share of the tributes he had gone to collect in Seville, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, is banished from Castile by King Alfonso VI. A few loyal men follow him, among them Álvar Fáñez and Martín Antolínez, who obtains for him a loan from two moneylenders of Burgos. The Cid entrusts his wife Jimena and his two daughters to the abbot of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña, then campaigns in Moorish land, takes Castejón and Alcocer, and sends the king a share of each booty to win back his favour.
Context
Composed around 1200 according to most critics, the poem is known only through a fourteenth-century manuscript, a copy of a copy that a certain Per Abbat dated to 1207; its first leaf and two others are missing. Kept at Vivar, the manuscript was taken from there in 1779 for the edition by Tomás Antonio Sánchez, passed from hand to hand, then was acquired in 1960 by the Juan March Foundation, which gave it to the State; it is now in the National Library of Spain. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who divided it into three cantares in 1913, founded modern Spanish philology on his study of it.
Who it is for
An epic poem of more than three thousand seven hundred lines of varying length, to be read in a bilingual edition.
Prizes and reception
The only Castilian epic poem to survive almost in full, it is regarded as the national epic of Spain.