Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Marvin A.
Hodges, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
Translated from the Spanish
Robert Southey's "Chronicle of the Cid" is all translation from theSpanish, but is not translation from a single book. Its groundwork isthat part of the Crónica General de España, the most ancient of theProse Chronicles of Spain, in which adventures of the Cid are fullytold. This old Chronicle was compiled in the reign of Alfonso the Wise,who was learned in the exact science of his time, and also atroubadour. Alfonso reigned between the years 1252 and 1284, and theChronicle was written by the King himself, or under his immediatedirection. It is in four parts. The first part extends from theCreation of the World to the occupation of Spain by the Visigoths, andis dull; the second part tells of the Goths in Spain and of theconquest of Spain by the Moors, and is less dull; the third part bringsdown the story of the nation to the reign of Ferdinand the Great, earlyin the eleventh century; and the fourth part continues it to the dateof the accession of Alfonso himself in the year 1252. These latterparts are full of interest. Though in prose, they are based by a poeton heroic songs and national traditions of the struggle with the Moors,and the fourth part opens with an elaborate setting forth of thehistory of the great hero of mediaeval Spain, the Cid Campeador. TheCid is the King Arthur, or the Roland, of the Spaniards, less mythical,but not less interesting, with incidents of a real life seen throughthe warm haze of Southern imagination. King Alfonso, in his Chronicle,transformed ballads and fables of the Cid into a prose digest that waslooked upon as history. Robert Southey translated this very distinctsection of the Chronicle, not from the Crónica General itself, butfrom the Chronica del Cid, which, with small variation, was extractedfrom it, being one in substance with the history of the Cid in thefourth part of the General Chronicle, and he has enriched it. This hehas done by going himself also to the Poem of the Cid and to theBallads of the Cid, for incidents, descriptions, and turns of thought,to weave into the texture of the old prose Chronicle, brightening itstints, and adding new life to its scenes of Spanish chivalry.
"The Poem of the Cid," the earliest and best of the heroic songs ofSpain, is a romance of history in more than three thousand lines,celebrating the achievements of the hero little more than fifty yearsafter his death. Ruy Diaz, or Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar, was born at Burgosabout the year 1040, and died in the year 1099. He was called theCid, because five Moorish Kings acknowledged him in one battle astheir Seid, or Lord and Conqueror, and he was Campeador or Championof his countrymen against the Moors. Thus he was styled The LordChampion—El Cid Campeador. The Cid died at the end of the eleventhcentury, and "The Poem of the Cid" was composed before the end of thetwelfth. It was written after the year 1135, but before the year 1200.
The Cid is also the foremost hero of the ancient Spanish Ballads. Theballads invent or record more incidents of his life than are to befound in the Poem and the Chronicle; and of these Southey, in thetranslation here reprinted, has made frequent and skilful use.