Notes on the "Poema del Cid". In Further Proof of Its Spanish Nationality

Abstract

rightly concerned to indicate the fallacy of the wholesale conclusions drawn by Damas-Hinard, who edited the Poema del Cid with a French translation in 1858. It is the delight of this French editor to point out in his copious notes the resemblance, or at times the absolute identity, which exists between certain passages of the Spanish poem and the Chanson de Roland. The day of international jealousies in literary disputes had not yet passed. Indeed, it is not difficult for one more versed than Damas-Hinard in the abundant epic texts which have been published in France since the latter's day, to approach the Poema del Cid with a marked prejudice in favor of French influence upon the Spanish poem. The fact that the literary intercourse between southern France and Castille via Catalonia was close makes it easy for one to go too far in crediting the Spanish joglars with no epic originality. MilA did not refuse, nor should we refuse, to admit that the currency of French epic poems dealing with Charlemagne should have inspired a similar composition in Castilian upon a Spanish heroic-popular subject. We can see no reason for holding that epic poetry as a genre developed in Spain independent of all French influence. The very scarceness of any epic poems preserved in Spanish from a period when a similarly constituted feudal society in France was celebrating its local heroes in heroic epic songs, seems to betray the absence of the epic tendency in Spain. But even this admission made, we are very far from holding that the Poema del Cid is a base imitation of a French chanson de geste. The Poema del Cid in spirit is as