Cantar de Mio Cid by de Alberto Montaner (review)

The Real Academia Española has launched a new Biblioteca Clásica series of 111 authoritative editions starting with the Cantar de Mio Cid. Alberto Montaner, surely the greatest living expert on Spain’s national epic, has established himself as the Ramón Menéndez Pidal of his generation, and this edition proves that Montaner’s encyclopedic mastery of history, literature, and philology matches Pidal’s and with perhaps even greater discernment.

It is a big book, and big books can be worrisome for two reasons: their encyclopedic weight may dampen fresh inquiry, and there’s always the risk that authors simply seize the chance to publish everything they have that’s even remotely pertinent. But for all its heft, Montaner’s massive volume is chaste in its selection (the end bibliography alone could have been five times its size), measured in its judgments, helpful in demonstrating new directions for research, and judicious in weighing and incorporating the torrent of critical commentary done before him.

Montaner has long since established himself as an authority in Semitic studies, his actual doctoral field, and brought his knowledge to bear in highly original contributions to the epic of the Cid, as in his masterful Guerra de Šarq Al’andalus: Las batallas cidianas de Morella (1084) y Cuarte (1094) (with Alfonso Boix Jovaní, 2005). His expertise in medieval Latin documents has produced the nearly definitive edition and study of the Carmen Campidoctoris (with Ángel Escobar, 2001). He has also written exhaustive historical studies, publications on medieval codicology, and even Iberian heraldry, Montaner being the driving force behind the weighty journal Emblemata: Revista Aragonesa de Emblemática.

This RAE edition is a natural successor to the one Montaner and editor Francisco Rico produced for the Crítica series (first issued Barcelona, 1993). The heart of the volume is prefaced by a modest presentation of the work for the new reader followed by a meticulous edition with textual clarifications and perceptive interpretative notes, both vast and precise (1–218). Rico’s subtle and eloquent appreciation of the Cantar de Mio Cid as a literary and historical masterpiece (221–55) is reproduced from twenty years ago, while Montaner’s notes and extensive complementary essays (257–560) are scrupulously updated to account for the latest assessments of “La composición del Cantar de Mio Cid,” “El poema épico y su contexto,” “Constitución interna del Cantar,” and so on, while yet another set of critical apparatus spans an even longer section (561–1035). Modern line drawings to explain clothing and artifacts, maps, bibliography and indices complete the volume (1037–79).

One example of Montaner’s care and good judgment may be found on the sections discussing the final verses of the sole surviving copy, lines 3731–35, an essay which has almost doubled in length since he framed the Crítica edition. This passage of the Cantar de Mio Cid, which contains the only internal statement on the date of composition, apparently 1207 of the Common Era: “En era de mill et ·C·C· x·L·v· años” (or 1245 of the Spanish Era, which adds 38 years of Roman rule in Iberia), has generated over a century of heated theories and contradictory scenarios. Menéndez Pidal preferred to read a dappled space close to the extant characters as revealing the ghost of an additional “C” rendering the date as 1307, closer to the style of handwriting the manuscript in fact displays, but which makes many other internal features and references, such as the relative novelty of pendant seals and an economy based on minted currency, deliberate archaisms on the part of the poet. Montaner thoughtfully addresses diplomatic issues and the physical qualities of the Vivar codex starting with a dispassionate report on how the manuscript was mistreated with damaging reactive baths to help a nineteenth-century editor better read faded traces of ink. But in the sixteenth century...