Anonymous (Poem of the Cid)

The medieval Spanish accounts of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, "El Cid" (c. 1043–1099), the Castilian warlord who became Spain’s national hero, were composed and compiled by unknown authors in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The great narrative poem on his exploits, the Cantar de Mio Cid, survives in a single incomplete manuscript and is itself anonymous.

This archive presents Robert Southey’s 1808 "Chronicle of the Cid," an English translation and compilation drawn chiefly from the medieval Crónica General de España together with other early chronicle and ballad material about the Cid — the fullest and best-known public-domain English account of the legend, though it is a prose chronicle rather than a verse rendering of the Cantar itself.