ABSTRACT
As an epic hero the Cid stands in a class by himself. History has little or nothing to say about the protagonists of the Greek, Germanic or French epics. From the ruins revealed by learned excavators we know that the Trojan War was an event that actually took place at Troy, so that the excavations confirm and illustrate the veracity of Homeric poetry. But we shall never know anything about Achilles, nor, for that matter, about Siegfried, whom we can only suspect to have been an historic personage, as Günther, the King of Burgundy, at whose Court Kriemhild’s husband loved and died, undoubtedly was. The historians of Charlemagne assure us that Roland, Count of Brittany, really existed; but beyond this fact all we know of him is his disastrous end. Those heroic lives will for ever remain purely in the region of poetry and intangible for the purpose of historical analysis. The Cid, however, is a hero of a very different type. From the height of his idealism he descends with a firm step on to the stage of history to face unflinchingly a greater danger than had ever beset him in life, that of having his history written by the very people on whom he had so often waged war and by modern scholars who as a rule show even less understanding than the enemies he humiliated.
