The Song of the Cid (3 page)

The peculiarities of the mutilated manuscript have, from the outset, seemed to invite persistent and divisive disputes: on one hand, the first folio—and with it probably some fifty verses—is missing; on the other, at the end of the nearly four thousand verses, there is explicit mention of someone called Per Abbat and the specific date—1207, once the calculation is made from the Hispanic to the Julian calendar—he tells us he recorded the poem in his manuscript: “Per Abbat le escrivió en el mes de mayo . . .” Most scholars agree that the Old Castilian
escrivir
here does not refer to authorship but rather indicates that Per Abbat copied the manuscript, and most also believe that this would be perfectly congruent with a great deal of what is known about the anonymity of many medieval texts and the vicissitudes of their translation from the universe of oral culture to that of the written word. All of this leaves wide open the question of authorship and, closely related, that of dating—problems not unique but in their general parameters shared by other famous premodern epics, not least the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. At the same time, the lacuna at the beginning of the poem—vital, among other reasons, because we tend to assume it would have told us more about the roots and causes of the Cid's exile—provoked a far-reaching practice of filling in the poem's story from other sources, as if the poem itself were merely a fragment of a larger story, rather than an autonomous artistic composition related to but distinguishable from the history that emerges from other sources.

Other sources do certainly abound. Long before the discovery and publication of this masterly poem, materials about the life of the Cid were plentiful, and some of these were roughly contemporary, going back to his own lifetime in the eleventh century, or the century or two immediately thereafter. These include purportedly historical as well as openly legendary and literary material, although unambiguous distinctions between the two are sometimes difficult to make, and not only when we are dealing with medieval material. Rodrigo Díaz was a charismatic and well-known figure in his lifetime, as attested to in fairly simple historical documents known as “diplomas” (or charters) that speak to his participation in events at various courts of the Castilian monarchy. Beyond these there are also two important Latin works, one a history,
Historia Roderici
(1140-47), and the other a historical poem, the
Carmen Campidoctoris
(
The Song of the Warrior
), which was long believed to be contemporary with the Cid's life but is now thought to be from as much as a century later. Material about the Cid's life proliferates in later histories composed at the court of the prolific scholar-king Alfonso X, from the mid-thirteenth century on, especially in the massive
Estoria de España
(
History of Spain
). These written histories themselves incorporate extensive popular and orally derived materials about the Cid, much of it clearly bound up with the vigorous ballad tradition, the
Romancero
, which overflowed with popular songs about the Cid, and was itself closely linked to a broader epic tradition that, with the exception of the
Cantar de Mio Cid
, has survived only in these indirect attestations. All of these often entangled sources further beg the question of history versus mythology, or literature, and of the relationship between the oral and the written at a period when the latter was beginning to supplant the former. But in all of this what remains indisputable is the great popularity of all manner of stories about this warrior, a popularity that has long transcended national preoccupations and reached as far as the theater of seventeenth-century Paris, where Corneille's innovative 1636
Le Cid
proved an immediate success.

In very broad terms, these intertwined problems constitute the principal and still starkly contested grounds of questioning and belief about this singular text: Who, if anyone, composed this masterpiece? Should we understand it not as authored in the modern sense but as part of the oral tradition, an oral tradition that in Spain especially has long been concerned with historical events, and long been believed to carry authentic historical information? Just what is the poem's relationship to the history and historical characters it sings about, and what is the Cid's relationship to the historical figure who actually lived and fought in late eleventh-century Spain? And what does any of it matter to a reader many centuries removed, whether that reader is a Spaniard or an American, a nineteenth-century gentleman or a twenty-first-century student?

In the early twentieth century the towering Spanish scholar Ramón Menéndez Pidal published two works—his edition of the
Poema de Mio Cid
, which came out between 1908 and 1911, and, in 1929, his monumental
La España del Cid
—that powerfully staked out the ground for one set of answers to these questions, and shaped the vision of the poem and its meaning for generations, even to this day. For Menéndez Pidal the
Cantar
—for this is what he invariably calls it (despite the use of the word
poema
in his title), with its strong connotation of being sung rather than written—is unambiguously the product of the oral tradition. An anonymous composition that closely reflects the historical events and milieu of Castile during its formative years, from which the poem, which he dates to circa 1140, is scarcely far removed, Menéndez Pidal's
Cid
is a work of profound and direct historical veracity, revealing to us the Cid's authentic private and civic persona. To make this argument his book begins with a long and impassioned rebuttal of the work of one of the legendary Arabists of the time, a distinguished and prolific specialist in the Hispano-Arabic world named Reinhardt Dozy, whose writings on the Cid were based on, among other things, Arabic documents dating back to the time of the Cid.

Several historical texts do exist in Arabic: A native of Valencia named Ibn ‘Alqama, who lived through the Cid's capture of his city, wrote an account long lost in its original form but largely transcribed into a later historical work; another contemporary, Ibn Bassam, profiled notable Andalusians in an important biographical dictionary discovered by Dozy. But Dozy's late-nineteenth-century debunking of the romanticized literary Cid threatened to undermine the Campeador's already well-established hagiography, which made him a paragon of medieval Christian values; indeed, Dozy's work even included the observation that the Cid had qualities far beyond his Arabic name that made him seem more Muslim than Catholic. Menéndez Pidal, however, unembarrassedly argued that our hero's virtues—his loyalty to an unworthy king, which is really to the nation; his open devotion to his family; his generosity to all—needed to be remembered as foundationally Castilian, and thus Spanish, and to be emulated in the difficult present. That present, of course, was the stage-setting for Spain's devastating civil war, and Menéndez Pidal's views not only won the day among most scholars, and among the Spanish intelligentsia, but were also eventually appropriated explicitly by the Franco regime, despite the fact that Menéndez Pidal himself did not share the regime's ideology. As the great historian of medieval Spain Peter Linehan points out, the painful questions about exile and loyalty that bitterly divided Spain's intellectual classes after the triumph of the Nationalists strongly echo the questions at the heart of the poem, and many interpretations of the Cid, and of medieval Spain in general, are indissolubly tied to the dramatic events in Spain's history in the twentieth century.

In 2007 even an innocent traveler to Spain might well have become aware that the year marked the eight hundredth anniversary of the
Cantar de Mio Cid
. The milestone was celebrated in ways both potentially meaningful—a rare public display, one evening, of the precious manuscript at the National Library—and overtly camp—a label, with charging knight and all, on bottles of the sparkling mineral water called Vichy Catalan. And when the Prado, Madrid's extraordinary art museum, opened its new wing to international acclaim, the commemorative exhibition of nineteenth-century history paintings in the new spaces revealed to visitors the once great popularity for painters of the scene of the Cid's daughters, beaten and abandoned in the imaginary Corpes woods. Most remarkable, perhaps, and certainly most unplanned, was the scandal that erupted over the sword long displayed at the Military Museum as the Cid's Tizón, which, along with his other sword, Colada, plays a prominent role in the events of the poem. The sword was sold for a considerable sum to the region of Castile-León, so that it might be displayed in the cathedral at Burgos, where the tombs of the Cid and of his wife, Jimena, are centerpieces of tourist interest. But the Ministry of Culture decided to have the authenticity of the sword scrutinized, and eventually announced that the sword could not possibly have belonged to the Cid, having been made in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. The anniversary display in the cathedral went on just the same.

Despite this kind of attention—or perhaps because of it—the poem is indeed, as Javier Marías noted, scarcely read in our own century, even by educated Spaniards, and almost never approached outside of loathsome required-reading school lists, nor without a series of largely negative preconceptions. In a post-Franco Spain, justifiably proud of its social and economic modernization and of its increasingly prominent role as one of the leaders of the European community, of an open and ethnically diverse society, it is perhaps not surprising that there is little real interest in this so-called national epic, assumed to be openly anti-Muslim and a glorification of a bigoted Christian worldview, a work held up for so long as emblematic of the Franco era's repressive values. But these preconceptions are largely unjust and, at times, deeply ironic, given the centrality of the question of Christian-Muslim relations not just in Spain but also throughout the world in the twenty-first century.

The poem itself reveals a far more complex world than most imagine, a universe within which, among many other things, the Christian hero's most trusted ally can be a Muslim, and where the most odious villains are important members of the Castilian aristocracy. As readers of Burton Raffel's vigorous new translation will immediately discover, the reality of the poem is very different from the mythology, and its preoccupations are enduring ones. Although few readers of either the glorious Old Spanish or this brisk and instantly captivating new English version will sympathize with all of its values—and when is that ever the case with a work of fiction?—most will find themselves transported to a world sometimes unexpectedly familiar. Raffel's rendition serves to remind readers of the straightaway power of oral narratives—hence the choice of the title
The Song of the Cid
—and captures much of the genius of the poem, especially its frontierlike directness and its unashamed expression of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition: the seduction of wealth, the grief of exile from a homeland, the unspeakable love of one's children, the anger provoked by betrayals, the difficult contemplation of how to achieve justice. And all of this plays out on a stage where warfare is a fact of life, and yet where there is a visible and central struggle to replace raw violence with the rule of law as the ultimate arbiter of justice. Here we have an epic narrative that vividly conjures up a world at once removed and yet far from remote from us.

 

MARÍA ROSA MENOCAL

Suggestions for Further Reading

A vast library of scholarship and commentary on
The Song of the Cid
exists. Mentioned here are a very small selection of essential works in the history of the poem's interpretation as well as recommendations for further exploration by the general reader. Many of the works cited contain extensive bibliographical guidance.

The most influential early works of scholarship on the Cid are Menéndez Pidal's edition of the
Poema de Mio Cid
and his study
La España del Cid
, which exists in an English translation from 1934,
The Cid and His Spain
, by Harold Sunderland (London: J. Murray); both remain of considerable value and interest, and enduring influence. It is more than a curiosity to note that Menéndez Pidal served as an advisor to the 1961 Hollywood production of
El Cid
and that the story told in the film is based only in small part on the events of the poem itself but principally on Menéndez Pidal's version of the history, as reconstructed from other texts. A number of recent Spanish editions of the poem provide useful commentary on textual and historical problems, extended bibliographies, as well as fundamental readings of the poem that can differ dramatically from those of Menéndez Pidal. Among these see especially Eukene Lacarra Lanz,
Poema de Mio Cid
(Barcelona: Area, 2002), and Alberto Montaner and Francisco Rico,
Cantar de Mio Cid
(Barcelona: Crítica, first published in 1993 but republished in an anniversary edition in 2007). Lacarra Lanz was herself the author of a landmark study of the poem in 1980,
Poema de Mio Cid: Realidad histórica e ideología
(Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas), which argued, against Menéndez Pidal, that the poem is the written work of a learned man, deeply versed in the law, and concerned with the early-thirteenth-century struggles among the different classes of the nobility, and their relations with royalty.

The arguments in favor of a learned single author were expanded a few years later by Colin Smith in
The Making of the Poema de mio Cid
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Smith breaks even more radically, and controversially, with the notion that the poem is the product of the oral tradition, suggesting that it is instead “a wholly new work of the early thirteenth century, by a single learned author who was not dependent either on an existing epic tradition in Castilian or on earlier vernacular poems about the Cid.” Smith's own edition of the poem was published by Oxford University Press in 1972 and in many quarters—among both those who agree with his vision of the poem's authorship and those who do not—has since replaced that of Menéndez Pidal. The most comprehensive countervision to Smith's is thoroughly laid out by Joseph Duggan in
The Cantar de mio Cid: Poetic Creation in Its Economic and Social Contexts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). This landmark study for the first time brought detailed attention to the vast gift economy of the poem, and to the ways in which the acquisition and distribution of wealth are intimately tied to other thematic concerns, especially the preoccupations with social morality and nobility. Duggan's book also provides a spirited defense of the hypothesis that the work was orally composed, arguing at the same time that the poetic achievements of anonymous works from the oral tradition are not primitive or inferior literary forms. Although completely at odds with Lacarra Lanz and Smith on the question of authorship, Duggan's book, like theirs, places considerable emphasis on the gestalt at the time of the composition of the literary work, and provides an excellent history of the late-twelfth-century political and social issues that inform the poem recorded by Per Abbat in 1207.