Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gift-Giving Diplomacy: The Role of the Horse in the <i>Cantar de mio Cid</i>

2008; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cor.0.0011

1947-4261

Francisco LaRubia-Prado,

Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia

Gift-Giving Diplomacy: The Role of the Horse in the Cantar de mio Cid Francisco LaRubia-Prado Without horses and the practice of gift-giving, it is hard to imagine the medieval world as we know it. Horses had a crucial role in communications, including travel, transportation of goods and ideas, and postal services, as well as in agriculture, leisure, hunting, tournaments, and war. They also loomed large in the medieval imagination as the partners of knights in the sacred mission to protect virtue and the values that were at the very root of medieval society.1 The Cantar de mio Cid reflects the great importance of horses in medieval life, not only through its abundance of horses and equine vocabulary, but also through the horse’s significance in the poem’s narrative development, symbolic structure and denouement. Gift-giving was an integral practice for medieval structures of power, culture, social relations and the economy. Giftgiving is also vital to the Cantar and its resolution. The merging of these two different but crucial elements of medieval life and culture –horses are the gift [End Page 275] par excellence in a text where gift-giving is essential– weaves the Cantar’s very fabric and makes it distinctive among medieval epic poems.2 Although literary critics, historians and linguists have examined countless facets of the Cantar, the pairing of horses with the activity of gift-giving can be argued as the basis for a deeper understanding of the poem. As a further refinement of the problem, I suggest that the poem’s meaning and aesthetic power reach a new level when emphasis is placed not on the economic value and functions of horses and gift-giving, 3 but on their symbolic and spiritual importance. I first examine the role of horses in the cultural and spiritual discourse of the Middle Ages –as envisioned mainly by Ramon Llull– and in the Cantar. As a result, it will become clear that horses and honor were invested with similar symbolic power and, indeed, were equivalent articles to be exchanged. This fact is fundamental to explain why the Cid chooses horses (and their tack) over money and other objects as gifts for King Alfonso. Second, I shall analyze the private journey of the Cid as the poem’s hero, a journey where he accomplishes the restoration of his honor owing to both his military victories and the gift-giving diplomacy in which he engages the king. I study the meaning of the Cid’s diplomacy from the perspective of the significance of gift-giving in premodern societies as developed by Marcel Mauss. In connection with these societies, Mauss shows that a gift could [End Page 276] only be reciprocated with the same gift or a gift of the same value (43), which demonstrates that the exchanges of horses for honor in the Cantar are not accidental. Although money, swords and even clothing are also exchanged, the overwhelming majority of gifts given in the text are horses, while the countergifts are connected with the granting of honor.4 In addition, in premodern societies people believed that there was a spiritual force inside the gift that made it [the gift] want to return to the giver (Mauss 43). This belief helps to explain, from the moment the king accepted the first gift from the Cid, the increasingly powerful bond between them. Finally, I shall explore how the archetypal, symbolic value of one horse, Babieca, leads the private journey of the Cid to merge seamlessly with the communal dimension of the poem. While this synthesis of private and communal journeys finds its expression in an alliance between the Cid and King Alfonso, its purpose is the expansion of King Alfonso’s realm at the expense of its non-Christian enemies. The Spiritual Mission of Knight and Horse It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the horse in both medieval society and in the Cantar de mio Cid. Beyond its everyday uses, the privileged place of the horse in God’s creation and the horse’s essential contribution to the spiritual dimension of knighthood were an intrinsic part of medieval culture. One of the most important thinkers and mystics...