Cantar de Mio Cid

Cantar de Mio Cid, known in English as The Poem of the Cid, is an anonymous Old Spanish epic poem composed sometime between 1140 and 1207, making it the oldest preserved Castilian epic and one of the foundational texts of Spanish literature. Based loosely on the life of the eleventh-century Castilian knight Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called El Cid, the poem follows his unjust exile from the court of King Alfonso VI on false charges, his subsequent military campaigns against Moorish-held territory in eastern Spain culminating in the conquest of Valencia, and the restoration of his honor and wealth. A second major strand of the poem concerns the marriage of the Cid's daughters to the noblemen of Carrion, who abandon and brutally beat their wives out of cowardice and wounded pride after being humiliated in battle; the Cid seeks justice through a formal court process and trial by combat, and the poem ends with his daughters remarried to the princes of Navarre and Aragon, a resolution that gestures toward the later unification of Spain's Christian kingdoms. Unlike many of its European epic contemporaries, the poem is notable for its comparatively realistic, unembellished style, largely free of the magical or supernatural elements common in works such as The Song of Roland, and it remains Spain's national epic.