Cantar de Mio Cid
The Cantar de mio Cid ( German song from my Cid ) is an epic by an unknown author, which - inspired by the life of the Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar , known as El Cid - tells the life and deeds of an exemplary knight. The epic is one of the earliest works in Spanish literature .
The Cantar de mio Cid is written in medieval Castilian ( Old Spanish ), an early form of modern Spanish , and - according to the currently most widely recognized theory - probably originated between 1195 and 1207. An original title has not survived. In verses 1.085 and 2.276 the work is characterized by the terms gesta ("deeds") and cantar ("song"). The name El Cid is from Arabic السيّد as- sayyid , the Lord 'or vernacular Arabic سيدي sīdī derived from 'my lord'.
The cantar is the only almost completely preserved work of the Spanish heroic epic. (Further, only fragmentarily preserved works of this period are the Mocedades de Rodrigo , around 1360, 1700 verses; the Cantar de Roncesvalles around 1270, a fragment of more than 100 verses, as well as a short inscription that was placed in a Romanesque church around 1400 and which is known as Epitafio épico del Cid .) In the manuscript of the Cantar de mio Cid the first sheet and two other sheets are missing, the content of which can be deduced from chronicles, in particular from the Crónica de veinte reyes (Chronicle of the 20 Kings).
abstract
The Cantar de mio Cid begins with the following verses:
De los sos oios tan fuertemientre llorando,
Tornava la cabeça e estavalos catando;
Vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados,
alcandaras vazias, sin pielles e sin mantos
e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados.
Sospiro Mio Cid, ca mucho avie grandes cuidados.
Fablo mio Cid bien e tan mesurado:
‹grado a ti, Señor, Padre que estas en alto!
Esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos. ›
Alli piensan de aguiiar, alli sueltan las rriendas;
a la exida de Bivar ovieron la corneia diestra
e entrando a Burgos ovieronla siniestra.
Meçio Mio Cid los ombros e engrameo la tiesta:
‹¡Albricia, Albar Fañez, ca echados somos de tierra!
Mas a grand ondra torneremos a Castiella. ›
Dating
There is a single manuscript, recently dated very precisely to the year 1235, which is kept in the National Library in Madrid . According to the opinion prevailing today, which has now been confirmed by Spanish researchers, it is a copy of a manuscript that has not survived from the year 1207. The copyist or author of this model is called Per Abbat in the colophon . Per Abbat gives May 1245 as the date, although (like practically all Christian-medieval sources on the Iberian Peninsula) he refers to the calendar of the Spanish era . This corresponds to the year 1207 of the Gregorian calendar .
«Quien escrivio este libro de Dios paraiso, amen
Per Abbat le escrivio en el mes de mayo en era de mil e. CC XLV años. »
Some researchers, especially the Spanish philologist and historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968), suspected the oral or written origins of poetry as early as the first half of the 12th century. However, no reliable evidence can be found for this long-held hypothesis, which is why it is only sporadically supported today.
Content, internal structure
The theme of the Cantar de mio Cid is the hero's honor. It is first lost, regained and increased, only to be damaged again and finally to be regained one last time and increased again.
The plot begins with the hero being charged with theft of royal property and exile. This loss of honor goes hand in hand with the withdrawal of his headquarters and his goods.
Rodrigo was able to prove his bravery and dedication through a campaign against the Moors occupied Valencia and won back the favor of the king, who gave him Valencia as a new fiefdom and returned the old ancestral seat. In order to confirm his regained position, marriages are arranged for the daughters of the Cid with the infants of the house of Carrión.
This marriage, which actually means an increase in status, leads to another dishonor of the hero when the Infante mistreat their wives and leave them defenseless in a forest.
According to medieval law, women are thus outraged and Rodrigo has the annulment of his daughters' marriages in a process chaired by the king. The infants of Carrión are publicly exposed and deprived of their privileges as part of the royal retinue. The daughters of the Cid, on the other hand, are married in royal houses and thus achieve the highest possible social advancement.
The internal structure follows a movement of getting, losing, regaining, losing, restoring the hero's honor. The starting point not mentioned in the preserved text is the position of the Cid as a good knight and vassal, honorable and with an ancestral home in Vivar near Burgos . The first arc of the story begins with exile, leads through struggle and royal forgiveness to the arranged weddings. The second and larger story arc ranges from the dishonoring of the daughters to the process to the new weddings.
External structure
Since the 1913 edition by Ramón Menéndez Pidal , the text has been subdivided into three chants ( cantares ), which could correspond to an original division, which is suggested by structuring notes in the text itself:
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«Aquís conpieça la gesta de mio Çid el de Bivar»
"Here begins the epic of my cid, the one from Bivar"
and later:
"Las coplas deste cantar aquís van acabando"
"The verses of this chant end here"
- Canto First: Song of the Expulsion (verses 1–1.086)
The cid has to leave Castile and leave behind his wife and daughters. He organized a campaign with his followers in areas occupied by the Moorish. After every victory he sends gifts to the king to regain his favor.
- Canto Two: Canto of the Weddings (verses 1.087-2.277)
The Cid moves to the Moorish occupied Valencia and conquers the city. He sends his friend and confidante Álvar Fáñez with gifts to the Castilian court to ask that his family be allowed to come to Valencia. The king complies with the cid's request, forgives him and lifts the penalties imposed. The success of the cid makes the infants of Carrión ask for the hands of his daughters Doña Elvira and Doña Sol. The king supports these proposals and Rodrigo also agrees and, although he is by no means convinced of the virtues of his sons-in-law, arranges great weddings.
- Canto Three: Song of the Shame at Corpes (verses 2.278-3.730)
The infants turn out to be cowards. They flee from a lion and fail in the fight against the Moors. Humiliated, they seek revenge: on a trip to Carrión, they overpower their wives in the forest of Corpes and leave them abused and without clothes. The cid is once again offended in his honor and demands justice from the king. The summoned court decides on a duel in which the infants are defeated. The chant ends with the marriage of the Cid's daughters to the Infantes of Navarre and Aragón .
Themes and characteristics
The Cantar de Mio Cid has many similarities with the old French chanson de geste , but it differs from it in several features. The hero is characterized by his measured behavior, his deeds are not excessively exaggerated, and there are no supernatural appearances.
The theme of social advancement through military service against the Moors is very pronounced. The hero, who came from the lower nobility, succeeds in standing out among the nobility through glorious actions and through his humble demeanor. He thus acquires an ancestral seat (Valencia), which is not simply a fiefdom given by royal hands.
The real theme of the cantar, however, is the honor of the hero, who ultimately becomes a liege lord himself, establishes a noble house and in the end is almost on a par with the royal family. The (Christian) rule over Valencia and the associated areas was a novelty in the 13th century and could easily be compared with the rule in the other Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, although the cid in the poem never leaves any doubt that it is regarded as a vassal of the Castilian king. In any case, the line of the Cid connects in the Cantar with that of the Aragonese and Navarre kings, so that not only is his house related by marriage to the kings, but they also benefit from the prestige of the Cid:
"Hoy los reyes de España sus parientes son
a todos alcanza honra por el que en buen hora nació."
"Today the kings are his relatives
All achieved the honor of him who was born in the right hour"
Metric
In its preserved form, the epic consists of 3,735 irregular long verses of various lengths, of which verses with 14 to 16 syllables are 60 percent predominant. The long verses of the Cantar de mio Cid are by break in between four and 13 syllables long hemistichs ( Kola subdivided). There is no division into stanzas.
This verse form essentially corresponds to the old French epic. However, while in the French epics of regular, in the center divided by caesura Ten Silver prevails vary in Cantar de mio Cid both the number of syllables in the long verses as well as in the two half verses of a line considerably. This irregular shape is known as anisosyllabism or heterometrics .
The rhymes are mostly assonant , sometimes verses with identical rhymes are grouped together . There are eleven different rhyme forms. Verse groups count between three and 90 verses and each form a unit of content.
The handwriting
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The manuscript is kept in the Spanish National Library in Madrid and can be consulted in the digital library of the Instituto Cervantes . It consists of a band of 74 sheets of coarse parchment. Three sheets are missing: at the beginning, one between the existing sheets 47 and 48 and between sheets 69 and 70. Two sheets are protective pages. Many pages have dark brown stains as a result of improper chemical treatment of the handwriting, used as reagents to reveal faded text. Nevertheless, the number of illegible text passages is low. The gaps can be filled with the paleographic edition by Menéndez Pidal and a copy from the 16th century by Ruiz de Ulibarri.
The typeface in the manuscript is continuous and does not reveal any separation into individual chants, and there is no space between the verses. Each verse begins with a capital letter , sometimes there are initials . The latest research confirms that the script corresponds to the scripts from the middle of the 14th century . Alfons XI. (1312–1350) issued documents used. The double-stroke capital letters are characteristic of the period around the end of the 13th and the entire 14th century. The use of Y instead of I ( myo [mio = my], rey [king], yr [ir = to go]), the use of the "V" instead of "U" as an initial in words like "valer" (to be worth) and “Vno” (one) and the spellings “Gonçalo” and “Gonçalez” instead of “Gonçalvo” and “Gonçalvez” are unusual in documents from the first half of the 13th century, but very common in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The handwriting consists of eleven layers. The missing leaves belonged to the first, seventh and tenth layers. The manuscript was bound in the 15th century. The cover is made of wood covered with sheepskin with embossed decorations.
In the 16th century the manuscript was kept in Vivar's municipal archive (Archivo del Concejo de Vivar), after which it was in the same place in a women's convent. In 1596 Ruiz de Ulibarri copied the manuscript, in 1779 it was collected for publication by Don Eugenio Llaguno y Amírola, Secretary of the Consejo de Estado (Council of State). This was done by medievalist and publisher Tomás Antonio Sánchez. After completion of the edition, Llaguno received the manuscript back; after his death it went to his heirs. The next owner was Pascual de Gayangos. Around this time (until around 1858) Jean Joseph Damas-Hinard, Hispanist and translator of the Cantar into French, saw the manuscript. Then she was sent to Boston , where the American scholar George Ticknor studied her. In 1863 the first Marqués de Pidal acquired the manuscript and left it to the Spanish historian and Hispanic Florencio Janer to study. The manuscript then passed into the possession of Alejandro Pidal, in whose house it was used by the philologists Karl Vollmöller , Gottfried Baist , Archer Milton Huntington and Ramón Menéndez Pidal - the most important cid researcher of the 20th century. On December 20, 1960, it was donated to the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid by the Juan March Foundation, which it had previously acquired for 10 million pesetas .
Author and date of origin
The society depicted in the Cantar is shaped by the “espíritu de frontera”, a mentality shaped by the ongoing military conflict with the Moors, as it existed in the 12th century on the borders of Aragon and Castile. The border location gave the descendants of noble families the opportunity of military probation and enabled rapid social advancement and relative independence. Historically, this situation existed at the latest with the conquest of Teruel in 1171. At the same time, news about "peaceful Moors" (moros en paz), Muslims under Christian rule - so-called Mudéjares - appeared for the first time .
Also with regard to the legal details, only the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th century comes into question: The process demanded by Rodrigo Diaz, presided over by the king, is called "Riepto", a legal dispute that is decided by a judicial duel has been. This form of legal dispute was influenced by Roman law and was introduced on the Iberian Peninsula towards the end of the 12th century. The reference points are the Fueros of Teruel and Cuenca , so that the earliest possible date would be the years from 1170 onwards. Since Medinaceli belonged to Aragón in 1140, but appears in the cantar as Castilian, historical geography also points to a date from the second half of the 12th century.
Another chronological Note offers the Sigillography : The in verses 42 and 43 mentioned royal seal (the "carta ... fuertemientre Sellada" verses 42-43) is only since the reign of Alfonso VIII. Occupied, that is from the 1175th
Ramón Menéndez Pidal brought up 1307 as the completion date of the book and believed that there was a third, erased ' C ' in the year in the manuscript. However, this third C could not be detected even with the most modern examination methods. The irregular style of the letters of the year in the manuscript can also be explained differently. Perhaps the copyist hesitated while writing, so that there was a greater gap when starting again than in the previous digits. It is also possible that two small incisions, such as those made when erasing with a knife (cultellum), are the basis of Pidal's theory. These cuts are straight cuts and not scraped etchings that leave a rough surface. The copyist could have skipped them so that the ink would not run into the incisions and thus mark them in color. Pidal himself finally comes to the conclusion that the third C did not exist because, in his final opinion, the roughening of the parchment must have existed before writing.
Various analyzes show that the author was well educated and very familiar with the law in force at the end of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th century. He must have known the region around Burgos very well. The language also presupposes an educated author who is likely to have assumed a position that requires knowledge of legal and administrative language such as the notary of a nobleman or a monastery must have. The author must also have been familiar with the old French epic , as the formal and linguistic adaptations show.
In the course of the authorship discussion, a number of names have been mentioned that are more or less likely to be considered authors. The English Hispanist Colin Smith proposed that Per Abbat was the author of the epic. It is devalued by the fact that the word “write” in the Middle Ages only meant “copy”. In order to mark authorship according to today's understanding, a medieval author would have put “compuso” (write, compose, compile) or “fizo” (produce, make) under the text.
Per Abbat was the copyist of a text from 1140 for Menéndez Pidal. But the genealogy of the Cid speaks against him, which was not intertwined with the Christian royal dynasties of the Iberian Peninsula before 1201. It is also based on the Latin Poema de Almería , which mentions the cid. This poem, however, has an uncertain date and relates primarily to the heroic deeds of the cid, which were well known at the time, but not to the cantar.
Regarding the author, Pidal first speaks of an author from Medinaceli who knew San Esteban de Gormaz and the surrounding area; later he opted for two versions of the work: a first, short and simple version by a poet from San Esteban, later revision by another from Medinaceli.
Pidal continues to cite archaisms , words that are no longer used in everyday language. Rusell and others, for example, show the same archaisms in the Mocedades de Rodrigo from the 14th century and conclude from this that there was an "artificial language" in the area of medieval heroic songs, the vocabulary and formal language of which remained the same.
The literary historian and philologist Antonio Ubieto showed that the author of the Cantar did not know the local geography in the area of San Esteban de Gormaz, while on the other hand he had an exact knowledge of the place names in the Valle del Jalón (Cella, Montalbán, Huesa del Común) in the today's province of Teruel must have decreed. Ubieto only identifies vocabulary used in Arágon that a Castilian author may have known. In addition, the cantar reflects the situation of the Mudéjares (examples are Abengalbón, Fariz, Galve), some of whom were very loyal to the cid and were absolutely needed for the repopulation of the areas conquered from Arágon. These Moorish subjects were very present in South Aragonese society, another circumstance that the author cannot have encountered in and around Burgos. For these reasons the author - so Ubieto - must come from one of the places mentioned. However, Medinaceli was a contested city at that time and was temporarily under Aragonese rule.
Colin Smith considers Per Abbat to be the author of the text. He assumes that the manuscript available in the Biblioteca Nacional is a copy of a manuscript by Per Abbat and that the year 1207 is actually the year the work was created. For him, Per Abbat is a notary of the same name of the time who has an excellent knowledge of the old French epic and who founded the Spanish epic with the cantar. Smith sees the form and metrics of the Cantar taken from French models.
Although the old French epic undoubtedly influenced Spanish literature - as evidenced by the appearance of Roldán / Roland , Durendal or the legend about Bertha with the big foot - the significant differences between the Cantar de mio Cid are often - and especially from Spanish scholars - cited to prove the independence of the Spanish national epic.
See also
German editions
- The romances of Cid. Translated by Karl Eitner . Around 1920. archive.org
- The cid. The old Spanish hero song. Translated by Fred Eggarter. Reclam, Stuttgart 1985, ISBN 3-15-000759-3 .
literature
- Alberto Montaner Frutos (Ed.): Cantar de Mio Cid. Crítica, Barcelona 2000, ISBN 84-8432-121-5 .
- Alan Deyermond: El "Cantar de mio Cid" y la épica medieval española. Sirmio, Barcelona 1987, ISBN 84-7769-004-9 .
- Alan Deyermond: Historia de la literatura española. I: La Edad Media. Ariel, Barcelona 1994, ISBN 84-344-8305-X .
- Diccionario de literatura española e hispanoamericana. (dir. Ricardo Gullón). Alianza, Madrid 1993, ISBN 84-206-5292-X .
- María Eugenia Lacarra: El "Poema del Mio Cid". Realidad histórica e ideología . Porrúa Turanzas, Madrid 1980.
- La Corónica. 33.2, primavera de 2005.
- Ramón Menéndez Pidal: En torno al "Poema del Cid". EDHASA, Barcelona 1963.
- Colin Smith: La creación del "Poema del Mio Cid". Crítica, Barcelona 1985, ISBN 84-7423-264-3 .
Web links
- Digitized manuscript of the Cantar in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
- Portal of the Cantar de mio Cid in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes
- Edición digital de la Universidad de Texas. Paleographic and modernized versions and reading with medieval pronunciation
- Cantar de mío Cid in Spanish as EPUB / PDF
proof
- ↑ Study by Riaño Rodríguez and Gutiérrez Aja , 2003 (PDF)
- ↑ Dies., 2006 (PDF; 387 kB)
- ↑ The manuscript in the Biblioteca Digital Cervantes Virtual ( Memento of October 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ See the detailed article in the Spanish daily ABC of December 21, 1960 on the ceremony on the occasion of the donation the day before: p. 85 (PDF; 356 kB) p. 86 (PDF; 356 kB) and p. 87 (PDF; 356 kB)