SOURCE: Webber, Ruth H. “The Cantar de mio Cid: Problems of Interpretation.” In Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context, edited by John Miles Foley, pp. 65-88. Columbia, Ms.: University of Missouri Press, 1986.

In the following essay, Webber considers whether the Cantar de mio Cid is part of the oral tradition or whether it was composed as a written text, surveying the main trends in scholarship on this and other related questions of composition and interpretation.

What follows is an attempt to demonstrate what can happen to the interpretation of a work when there is a division of opinion among critics as to whether it is of oral traditional origin or composed in writing by a learned poet. The work in question is the Cantar de Mio Cid, Spain's only medieval epic that has come down to us in more or less complete form.

This is not meant...