In the following excerpt, Duggan traces the action in this epic work and discusses differences between it and other Romance epics, concluding that the heroes of such epics, though they possess less than ideal lineage, attain nobility and legitimacy through their actions.

The Chanson de Roland and the Cantor de mio Cid are often compared, but usually for the wrong reasons. The Spanish poem has a documentary quality about it, and the single poetic version which has survived the Middle Ages, in a manuscript identified as the product of one Per Abbat, a scribe, was composed within a hundred and eight years of the hero's death The Cid is thus much closer in narrative type to, say, Garin le Loherain or to the Canso d'Antiocha than it is to the Roland, which in its earliest extant form is at least three hundred years removed from the historical...