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  • Heroes and Anti-Heroes: A Celebration of the Cid ed. by Anthony J. Cárdenas-Rotunno
  • Elizabeth Moore Willingham
Cárdenas-Rotunno, Anthony J., ed. Heroes and Anti-Heroes: A Celebration of the Cid. Spanish Series 151. New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2013. xx+ 186pp. ISBN 978-1-56954-146-3.

Anthony J. Cárdenas-Rotunno’s edited volume, Heroes and Anti-heroes: A Celebration of the Cid, is a collection of five conference papers and one of the two plenary addresses presented in 2008 at the University of New Mexico’s fifteenth annual conference on Ibero-American Culture and Society, along with two additional papers on the Poema de mio Cid (Poema, hereinafter), one originally scheduled for the New Mexico conference and the other read at the Medieval Association of the Pacific meeting in 2009. Editor Cárdenas-Rotunno, professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New Mexico and organizer of the conference that took as its rationale the eight-hundredth anniversary of the Poema de mio Cid, provides the thorough and thoughtful introduction to the book.

A perennial question in the study of the Spanish epic addresses supposed textual “loss”, oral transmission, and recovery. Cárdenas-Rotunno remarks that “three main Castilian epic texts survive”–the Poema, the Mocedades de Rodrigo, and the Roncesvalles, each showing losses–and that the Infantes de Lara exists as “a fourth” only in “extremely prosified chronicle passages” (ii). The matter of characterizing the epic and measuring its vernacular production in Spain is further complicated by the contesting claims and trajectories of “traditionalist” and “individualist” approaches, along which lines the essays are, to some extent, divided. Serving as bookends around the collection are essays by two respected scholars, the late Samuel G. Armistead and Mercedes Vaquero. Armistead’s scan of the potential size and scope of Spain’s body of epic poetry and Vaquero’s interrogation of the tension between literary invention and history as sources for events and actors in the Poema demonstrate the continuing indebtedness of Cidian and epic studies to Ramón Menéndez Pidal and to the Parry-Lord hypothesis of oral narrative traditions. Ramón Menéndez Pidal–Historicismo’s Spanish father and the Cid’s “paladin” (ii)–argued for Spain’s having an expansive canon of lost vernacular epic and for the Poema working primarily to represent historical events and persons. Contributing materially to a search for “lost” epics, Milman Parry’s and Albert Lord’s work on Classical epic and [End Page 177] medieval folktales, published from the 1930s forward, directed attention to oral transmission as the modus operandi of preserving and disseminating those narratives.

Armistead suggests that Spain’s epic corpus might be expanded using a “mediation” of historical methods and literary sensibility, and he asserts the fruitfulness of his trans-border search for epic residues in orally transmitted ballads. By these means, Armistead affirms, he has gotten at answers that lie between the poles of critical opinion on Spanish epic: one asserting that known survivals fully represent the genre and Armistead’s position that vestiges of epic poetry, developed and transmitted orally, yet survive in other materials. Using three examples, Armistead demonstrates how epic traces appear in ballad redactions–as “balladic survivals” of epics or “epic-based ballads”–that cross multiple national, chronological, and language boundaries, and he suggests these as portents of future discoveries and reconstructions by informed and diligent researchers.

Vaquero, too, finds cause for optimism in locating historical sources behind elements of the Poema, and she theorizes the role of orality in supplying certain details. Considering the Poema as “la biografía épica de Rodrigo Díaz”, Vaquero seeks the rationale for enmity between the Cid and the Infantes de Carrión, asking whether the construction arises from poetic invention or from traditional histories and genealogies–perhaps some of them oral. Vaquero proposes that the Infantes’ being “almost inseparable” from the banda of García el Crespo (Crespo de Grañón, etc.), the Cid’s “arch-enemy,” suggests underlying historical sources. She cites the Crónica geral de Espanha (1344) attributed to Pedro de Barcelos for pertinent genealogies, the Crónica particular del Cid as...

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