Mocedades de Rodrigo - Valuation

Valuation

Traditionally, Las Mocedades have come to be considered as a hardly relevant text considering its strictly literary value. However, from a point of view of the history of literature, it is an extraordinarily interesting text.

To start with this is because, as mentioned earlier, it is regarding the latest realization of the medieval Spanish epic, and so, this constitutes that the archaic style of the epic endured up to the closing of the 14th century, and its linguistic stereotypes should be valued very carefully in terms of the dating of these works.

On the other hand, it is regarding a text that generates the tradition of romances about the youth of El Cid, and one of its episodes, such as the death of the father of Jimena at the hands of the hero, gave origins by way of the Spanish romances to the work from Guillén de Castro, Las Mocedades del Cid and this, in turn, to the drama from Corneille, Le Cid.

It is important to note that Las Mocedades is the last surviving example of Spanish chanson de gesta. From its breakdown were born, according to all indications, the romances. This text is close to those works in its novelistic and imaginative nature and in the majority amount of octosyllabic hemistiches of which the poem is formed. With merely placing the verses in two lines, one per hemistich, and taking into account the fragmentation and holes that the Mocedades contains, the nature of the Spanish romance is well explained, with assonance rhyming in the pairs of octosyllables, the beginning in medias res and ending interruptions, in addition to an elevated component of novelistic fiction in the recreation of historic events.