Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Colin Smith

Critical Essay by Colin Smith

SOURCE: Smith, Colin. “The Variant Version of the Start of the Poema de mio Cid.” La Corónica 20, no. 2 (spring 1992): 32-41.

In the following essay, Smith discusses the faulty internal logic of the twelve lines that have been suggested as a variant of the opening of the Cantar de mio Cid.

Professor Armistead drew attention in 1984 to the (in his view) fact that at one point “the Crónica de Castilla is prosifying—not even prosifying, but copying word for word—a traditional *Refundición del Cantar de Mio Cid”, supporting this with evidence about the traditionality of the material drawn from sixteenth-century ballads. Brian Powell, stimulated by Armistead's study, took the matter much further in 1988 with more extensive evidence from the same section of the chronicle, concluding that what was involved was not a reworking of the whole poem as Armistead (following Menéndez Pidal and others) had proposed, but...
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