The Song of the Cid

One of the finest of epic poems, and the only one to have survived from medieval Spain, The Song of the Cid recounts the adventures of the warlord and nobleman Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar both 'Mio Cid'. A forceful combination of heroic fiction and historical fact, the tale seethes with the restless, adventurous spirit of Castile, telling of the Cid's unjust banishment from the court of King Alfonso, his victorious campaigns in Valencia and the crowning of his daughters as queens of Aragon and Navarre the high point of his career as a warmonger. An epic that sings of universal human values, this is one of the greatest of all works of Spanish literature.

Burton Raffel has translated many of the major epics, including, from the Old Spanish, Don Quijote. His translation of Beowulf has sold more than a million copies.

Mar+¡a Rosa Menocal is Sterling Professor of the Humanities and the director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Y ale, and the bestselling author of The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain.