ABSTRACT
The poem, divided into three cantares, is written for a later age. The poet not only celebrates Rodrigo’s skill as a knight and reluctant outlaw, but connects him eventually, through the fi ctitious marriages of his daughters to princes, to two royal dynasties. Earlier in the epic, though by far the better man, el Cid continues to serve his king Alfonso from exile, from where he sends suffi cient treasures and tokens of loyalty to be reconciled to him at the climax of the second cantar. The third cantar consolidates el Cid’s forthcoming royal status in a trial scene in which he gains legal redress for the repudiation and abuse of his daughters at the hands of their fi rst husbands, the low-life infantes ‘barons’ of Carrión, with their second marriages to the princes of Navarre and Aragon. Soon they become queens and the character of their father gains the status it deserves. The poem thus adumbrates el Cid’s fairness and sense of duty to royal institutions with confl icts that show how kings and other royals are often inferior people to their subjects.
