Day 11---El Cid--a real Caballero!

Burgos is heavily associated with El Cid, who came from around here, and who was a swashbuckling type later made famous in the semi-legendary Song of the Cid, or Poem of the CId. It probably takes only about two hours to get through it, and I highly recommend it. It´s one of the great medieval epics, and it shows Cid (and the Spanish mentality!) as way ahead of their time. For example, as Cid rides off into exile--having left his wife and daughters at a monastery for safety, he keeps stopping and turning back, and the poem says that he kept looking back because leaving his loved ones behind pained him like the pain when a fingernail is torn off its finger.....Among the heroes of the story is a Muslim, Abengalbon, to whom, later in the story, Cid entrusts his family for safekeeping. And among the villains are two Christian princes (the infantes) who act in a cowardly fashion in a battle, and then take out their shame by abusing Cid´s daughters (typical--weak men vent rage on woman)....The poem was written at a time when the Christians were beginning to reconquer the Muslim parts of Spain, and in one respect Cid was meant to be a ´recruiting poster´for the reconquest, but he is a remarkably full character for the time, who doesn´t always think that Christians are right about everything, and who can befriend Muslims, and who has a keen sense of what is just, and who loves his family....We muslims, christinas, and jews have gotten ourselves into a terrible predicament at the dawn fo the 21st century. We can probably learn a thing or two from our medieval ancestors in Spain who had to navigate the same dilemmas, and, at their best, managed to understand that life is not always black and white, and we get in trouble when we try to make it so.