The Lay of the Cid

by Unknown

THE CID
Lashed in the saddle, the Cid thundered out
To his last onset. With a strange disdain
The dead man looked on victory. In vain
Emir and Dervish strive against the rout.
In vain Morocco and Biserta shout,
For still before the dead man fall the slain.
Death rides for Captain of the Men of Spain,
And their dead truth shall slay the living doubt.

The soul of the great epic, like the chief,
Conquers in aftertime on fields unknown.
Men hear today the horn of Roland blown
To match the thunder of the guns of France,
And nations with a heritage of grief
Follow their dead victorious in Romance.
______________________

INTRODUCTION

The importance of the Cid as Spain's bulwark against the Moors of
the eleventh century is exceeded by his importance to his modern
countrymen as the epitome of the noble and vigorous qualities that
made Spain great. Menéndez y Pelayo has called him the symbol of
Spanish nationality in virtue of the fact that in him there were
united sobriety of intention and expression, simplicity at once
noble and familiar, ingenuous and easy courtesy, imagination
rather solid than brilliant, piety that was more active than
contemplative, genuine and soberly restrained affections, deep
conjugal devotion, a clear sense of justice, loyalty to his
sovereign tempered by the courage to protest against injustice to
himself, a strange and appealing confusion of the spirit of
chivalry and plebeian rudeness, innate probity rich in vigorous
and stern sincerity, and finally a vaguely sensible delicacy of
affection that is the inheritance of strong men and clean blood.
[1]

[1] Cf. Menéndez y Pelayo, Tratado de los romances viejos, I, 315.

This is the epic Cid who in the last quarter of the eleventh
century was banished by Alphonso VI of Castile, fought his way to
the Mediterranean, stormed Valencia, married his two daughters to
the Heirs of Carrión and defended his fair name in parliament and
in battle.

The poet either from ignorance or choice has disregarded the
historical significance of the campaigns of the Cid. He fails to
mention his defeat of the threatening horde of Almoravides at the
very moment when their victory over Alphonso's Castilians at
Zalaca had opened to them Spain's richest provinces, and turns the
crowning achievement of the great warrior's life into the
preliminary to a domestic event which he considered of greater
importance. We are grateful to him for his lack of accuracy, for
it illustrates how men thought about their heroes in that time.
The twelfth century Castilians would have admitted that in battle
the Cid was of less avail than their patron James, the son of
Zebedee, but they would have added that after all the saint was a
Galilean and not a Spaniard.

In order then to make the Cid not merely heroic but a national
hero he must become the possessor of attributes of greatness
beyond mere courage. The poet therefore, probably assuming that
his hearers were well aware of the Cid's prowess in arms, devoted
himself to a theme of more intimate appeal. The Cid, an exile from
Castile and flouted by his enemies at home, must vindicate
himself. The discomfiture of the Moor is not an end in itself but
the means of vindication and, be it said, of support. When he is
restored to favor, the marriage of his daughters to the Heirs of
Carrión under Alphonso's auspices is the royal acknowledgment. The
treachery of the heirs is the pretext for the Parliament of Toledo
where the Cid shall appear in all the glory of triumphant
vindication. The interest in the hecatombs of Moors and even in
the fall of Valencia is a secondary one. What really matters is
that the Cid's fair name be cleared of all stain of disloyalty and
the doña Elvira and doña Sol wed worthy husbands.

This unity of plan is consistently preserved by a rearrangement of
the true chronology of events and by the introduction of purely
traditional episodes. The shifting of historical values may be due
to the fact that when the poem was composed, about 1150, the power
of the Moor had really been broken by the conquests of Ferdinand
I, Alphonso VI, Alphonso VII and Alphonso VIII of Castile and
alphonso I, the Battler, of Aragon. The menace was no longer felt
with the keenness of an hundred years before, until the end of the
tenth century the Moors had dominated the Peninsula. The growth of
the Christian states from the heroic nucleus in northern Asturias
was confined to the territory bordering the Bay of Biscay,
Asturias, Santander, part of the province of Burgos, León, and
Galicia. In the East other centers of resistance had sprung up in
Navarre, Aragon and the County of Barcelona. At the beginning of
the eleventh century the tide turned. The progress of the
reconquest was due as much to the disruption of Moorish unity as
to the greater aggressiveness and closer coöperation of the
Christian kingdoms. The end of the Caliphate of Cordova was the
signal for the rise of a great number of mutually independent
Moorish states. Sixty years later there were no less than twenty-three
of them. By the middle of the following century the
enthusiasm that had followed the first successful blows struck
against the Moor had waned, and with it the vividness of their
historical significance and order.

Let us look at the Cid for a moment as he was seen by a Latin
chronicler who confesses that the purpose of his modest narrative
was merely to preserve the memory of the Cid of history.