El Cid | Author Biography
Intense scholarly debate has raged over the question of the identity of the Cid's author. Critics are divided into two camps, the "traditionalists" and the "individualists." The former group, led by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, believes that the poem was composed as an oral composition soon after the historical Cid's death, and was written in a manuscript only later, thus negating the importance of the idea of a single author for the poem. The "individualists," on the other hand, (championed most recently by Colin Smith) insist that a single, brilliant author wrote the poem in 1207....
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