An Epic of Aggressive Identity Formation

An appreciation of the symbolic capital which plunder represented helps to better understand an epic which has always seemed anomalous in its concern with money and quantification – The Poem of the Cid. This epic, which dates from the end of the twelfth century, is a classic story of the rise of an individual through the construction of de facto social power, as opposed to inherited, juridical or public power and authority, in a fluid social context which left large openings for performative success. The epic is rife with precise accounts of the capture and distribution of money and other material forms of wealth, especially war horses – accounts which are comparatively absent from many other European epics. Thus it appears strikingly bourgeois and commercial to many critics, and even anti-noble. Yet the apparent anomaly is in fact simply a more explicit rendering of the same ethos which dominates all early medieval epics, that of symbolic giving and taking.

The Cid can be summarized as follows: the Cid is a lower-level noble, who despite great military success has been punished and ordered into exile by his king, apparently for withholding gift tributes owed the king from his own takings; he begins his adventures as an outsider whose only status lies in the minimum qualification of blood nobility which is necessary to enter the context of giving and taking. The Cid's nobility is emphasized throughout, even if that noble status is not especially elevated.