 As I mentioned in the last lecture, there's a lot going on between the various kingdoms within Al-Andalus, the Muslim area of Spain, as well as between the factions in the Christian kingdoms in Northern Spain. So we don't wanna over-generalize or oversimplify the number of divisions. We don't wanna just say, we don't wanna just conceive of Spain at this time as divided between Christian Spain and Muslim Spain. Although those are familiar categories, we can look at lots of different points in history and say, oh, look, the Christians are fighting the Muslims. We can look at the Crusades. We can look at sort of jihadist campaigns in the Middle East today and easily divide the world and it's a simple distinctions based on religious belief. But I mentioned that there were Christians and Jews in all over Al-Andalus, all over the Muslim territories who had rights to their own religions. They were likely to be promoted in government and that sort of thing. We also had alliances between Christians and Muslims within the Christian territories. We had alliances between individual Christian kingdoms with Muslim kingdoms against other Christian kingdoms and Muslim kingdom and Christian kingdoms against other Muslim kingdoms. And sometimes Muslims and Christians on one side versus Muslims and Christians on the other side. So we would miss all of that and we would completely not understand the role of either the historical Rodrigo Diaz or the narrative protagonist of El Cid if we simplify things into this kind of dichotomy. But it's for that reason that this text, this narrative helps us to examine our own tendencies to divide people into categories and sort of label them as category one or category two. But this is something that's not limited to religious divisions or certainly not limited to the Middle Ages. It's the kind of thing that we can see happening thousands of years before that and something that we see in our own way of thinking today. Just turn on the news and you'll see people described according to some sort of identity category. And that is very natural tendency as we'll see if we look at the medieval kingdom of Oklahoma. Okay, this is going back to the 1950s. Here in our neighbor to the north. There was a set of experiments conducted by psychologist Muzafar Sharif and his wife, Carolyn Wood Sharif, where they got these boys who were between the ages of 11 and 12 and they brought them to this camp called Robbers Cave State Park. And they ran it like a normal, like a Boy Scout camp or something like that, except they were looking to see how people bonded, especially young children bonded when they worked together as a group and then how they interacted with each other and with other groups once their group was in competition with yet another group. So they set up this camp to progress in three stages. First was the bonding stage. This is where they got groups of boys together and they had them carry out common goals where they would be building tents, they would be doing cooperative exercises that didn't have any competition. They weren't like games where one group was competing against another. They all had to work together. And the bonding stage was followed by the competition stage. It was at this point that each group, though they had been operating separate from each other, each group then became aware of the existence of the other group. One of the first things they did was each group came up with a name for itself. One group called itself the Eagles, another group called itself the Rattlers. And once they established these group identities, they then were put into competition in baseball games and tug of war and things like this. But this quickly got out of hand like a lot of experiments like this where the Eagles would go try to steal the Rattlers flag or the Rattlers try to steal the Eagles flag even though this wasn't actually part of a game at a certain point. They would break into each other's cabins and steal each other's stuff. And of course they would get into fistfights. This kind of thing happened at a much greater rate between groups than it ever happened within a group. Now you would expect young boys to end up fighting with each other, which they did but it was almost always an Eagle was beaten up by a Rattler or a vice versa. It was rarely an Eagle versus an Eagle or a Rattler versus a Rattler. This stage was interesting not only because they competed with each other but one thing that the psychologist discovered at this stage was not only did they sort of carry this competition beyond the athletic arena but they also started to think of each other as fundamentally different. The Eagles would describe the Rattlers as bullies or as cheaters or as liars, all these negative characteristics and they would describe themselves as virtuous, as playing fair, as only fighting if they were attacked first and this sort of thing. But of course the Rattlers said the exact opposites that they said they were the honest ones, they were the ones that played fair. It was the Eagles that cheated. And these weren't just immediate defenses of individual actions. They were often just, the psychologist would ask them what do you think of the Rattlers? And with nothing else to go on these boys would refer to each other. The other group is very negative and their own group is very positive. That stage was followed by the reduction of friction or reducing friction stage. In this stage they were required to do, each group was required to do things with the other group to cooperate. So one thing they had to do was fix a water tank that was supposedly broken. It wasn't actually broken but it was made to look that way so that they had to put their minds together to figure out how to fix it. When a delivery truck broke down or supposedly broke down, they had to instead of playing tug of war against each other, they had to unite because only the combined group of the Rattlers and the Eagles were gonna be able to move this heavy object in order to get the supplies to their camp. So once this happened, the infighting or the fighting between groups was reduced but also the stereotypes, the slandering, the accusing each other of being underhanded and deceptive and that sort of thing. Those things were reduced. So what Moussifar Sharif eventually wrote about in this article was this was an example he set out to see how groups interacted with each other but more importantly how they thought of each other in times when those groups are in competition with each other for limited resources but how that changes when those groups are combining their efforts for common resources. And so groups have an in-group bias that is they assign positive characteristics to their own group but they have an out-group hostility that is they're automatically hostile to people who are in a rival group even though they don't know those individuals. So once these groups identify these icons that unify them and the icons that unify their rivals they ignored the fact that these groups were created entirely arbitrarily. Each individual boy was assigned to one group or another based on no independent characteristics. It didn't matter what the individual was like before they were part of the group they were just completely randomly assigned. But when the boys were asked to describe individual members of their own group or individual members of the other group they wouldn't respond to those individuals as individuals they would respond to them as rattlers or as eagles as if it wasn't an external characteristic that they were part of this external group but as if being an eagle was an internal characteristic it determined who they were inside who they were as individuals. This is called essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that people of a particular group or each individual of a particular group is defined by natural internal characteristics that remain constant through different external situations. Essentialism presumes there's an essence to who you are that it's internal, it doesn't change it's more important than external characteristics like what group you're a part of or how you act in one situation. We essentialize people in different political groups different religious groups including ourselves we assume I am this way because I am a member of that group. To be an American is to be this to be a Christian is to be this rather than saying the opposite which is because I was raised as part of this group this group has had this influence on me as an individual. I tend to think that these characteristics aren't coming from outside they're coming from inside. We do this with religion we do this with politics we do this with different groups we also do this with gender and if I told you that either Moussa for Sherry for his wife Carolyn Wood Sherry if one of the two was good with children and one of the two was good with fixing things around the house you would probably assume that the husband was the one that was good at fixing things and the wife was the one that was good with children. We tend to assume that these are internal characteristics that women are just naturally one way men are just naturally another way. And of course there are statistical regularities where it might be more common for women to be one way and men to be another way but we also have the external pressure from our culture that pushes us as men to act a certain way and as women to act another way. And just like the Eagles and Rattlers tended to define each other based on their groups of course we have a millennia long tradition of defining people by their religious beliefs or even the religious beliefs of the groups that they're a part of. Rather than seeing them as members of a group where the individuals may or may not have something in common with the other individuals around them. Just because one person self identifies as Christian or self identifies as Muslim we presume we know certain things about them. Although as you probably noticed when we read the book of Genesis a lot of what we assume constitutes Christianity or Judaism doesn't actually come from the Bible and when you ask people who identify themselves as Christians about individual beliefs or doctrines you ask them if they're Nicene Christians what their belief is about the Trinity. Do they accept that Christ was of like substance with God or a similar substance with God? All of these were extremely fundamental debates in early Christianity but debates which modern Christians almost never know anything about. So are these defining characteristics? Are people actually being defined by their beliefs? Or are they defined by a group? And when asked what they believe do they then go look to that group to find out what they're supposed to believe? That is I'm asking you are you really as an individual characterized by this thing or do you just assume that you should be because you're part of this group? Just like we tend to fall into the essentialist type of thinking where we assume that people are determined by a certain essence we also tend to assume that the groups that we're part of have something in common beyond just the group membership itself. We tend to believe that people in our group all have a common essence that unites us even if we don't know those individual people. So imagine that you are here on campus and you see someone else wearing a Texas A&M Corpus Christi t-shirt it probably wouldn't strike you as very interesting but if you were in New Orleans and you saw someone wearing a TAMUCC t-shirt you might say oh there's a member of my community and this might be somebody you've never met before you've never seen before but you feel that oh this is someone I know or at least someone I have something in common with and imagine if you saw somebody with a University of Texas shirt on in London. You're in London you've got a TAMUCC shirt on they have a Texas University of Texas shirt on even though there's different universities this is someone you've never met before you feel like they're part of your community. So these are people that are not part of our face-to-face community people we don't actually know but we imagine that we have something in common because we have this group that we're a part of. This is what the philosopher and historian Benedict Anderson called an imagined community. So an imagined community is a group of individuals that identify with each other even if they don't personally know each other. They may define their community and themselves according to a common group. The group's name, the symbols of that group, the doctrines of that group even if they don't know all the doctrines of that group. The regions that they're from, the languages that they speak, the accents that they have. All sorts of other characteristics like this that don't actually tell us anything about that individual. So the difference between an imagined community and an actual community is in an actual community you know the people in your community. If you don't know them then they're not really part of your community. They're sort of a fuzzy boundary out there where there's the people that you know and then there's the people you know know and you may not know them. So they're sort of on the outside of your community. But an imagined community would just be the type of thing we're dealing with when we say that they're the Christian kingdoms of Spain and they're the Muslim kingdoms of Spain. As we see, El Cid is one of these people who doesn't really fit. I mean, he is ostensibly Christian and if you asked him whether he believed there was no God but Allah and Muhammad was a prophet he would probably say that's not a foundational belief of mine whereas that God so loved the world he sent his only begotten son that would be a foundational belief. But that doesn't really determine his community as we saw when he is exiled by Alfonso. Alfonso is a Christian, El Cid is a Christian but El Cid has to leave Castile and then he goes into the community of Zaragoza and fights on behalf of the Muslim kingdom of Zaragoza against the Christian kingdom of Barcelona. So he's one of these people who moves from one group to another even though his religion probably doesn't change it's just that that religion doesn't determine his community and that's something that is hard for a lot of people to understand when they read the song of the Cid or look at the historical El Cid. It seems maybe that he's betrayed his faith or something like that according to our terms but all he's really done is not fit our stereotype not fit our assumptions about what is supposed to characterize the individuals of that group. So what are we supposed to do if we can't just judge people or individuals by the groups that they're a part of? Well that leads us back to this necessity of theory of mind. Remember that theory of mind requires us to understand individual thinking at the individual level not just to say well if he's a Muslim he must think like this or if he's a Christian he must think like this. That's appealing to stereotypes. And the psychologist David Comer Kidd and Emmanuel Costano pointed out that literary fiction fiction that makes us distance ourselves from stereotypes, conventions, familiar schemata the way we expect things to go the scripts we're accustomed to literature that de-familiarizes these common expectations they force us to look at each individual character at the level of their thinking and their thinking about other people's thinking. So whereas many of our, they say whereas many of our mundane social experiences may be scripted by convention and informed by stereotypes those presented in literary fiction disrupt our expectations. They de-familiarize our approach to understanding the world and the people in it. Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretive resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters. That is they must engage in theory of mind processes. And that's what we have to do with El Cid. If we looked at El Cid, the summary of the Song of the Cid we could say that oh, here's this Christian fighting against Muslims. Okay, I know the basic conflict here. I know what drives El Cid. I know what he wants to accomplish. And by conquering the city of Valencia and making it his own kingdom. As a Christian he's conquered a Muslim kingdom and that's the protagonist being successful, VN. That's all there really is to know about the Song of the Cid. But if that's what you thought you would completely miss all of the conflicts that determine the action of the poem and the focus of the poem. If we divided all the characters up according to their religious affiliation we might assume that El Cid should protect his daughters against Abinga Bonn, the Moorish king of Molina. And that he could rely on somebody like Count Garcia Ordonez or Diego and Fernando Gonzales, the Infantes of Carrion. Although that would have him, these are precisely the people that he finds that he cannot trust. These are Christian nobles who are supposed to have certain individual characteristics derived from being Christians. They're supposed to be sexually virtuous. They're supposed to be honest. These are things that they're clearly not. They're abusive, they're deceitful, they just want to exploit El Cid. They want to marry his daughters only because they want El Cid's money. And the fact that they're nobles we might assume according to the conventional logic of the time the Carrion nobles themselves say that because we are noble that even though we've beaten and nearly killed these young women they're the daughters of a commoner. So they have actually been honored by our abuse because we're nobles and they're not. So when we beat them and leave them for dead in the woods that actually is an honor for them to even be acknowledged by us superior nobles. And so these identity categories that were taken for granted are being completely upended or turned on their head by the narrative of the poem itself. So we can't come to this poem assuming that our stereotypes are gonna be validated. Now there are certain stereotypes that we'll see play out the way we expect them to and sometimes disappointingly so. In particular there are the Jewish characters Raguel and Vidas who lend El Cid some money and El Cid deceives them and it's kind of hard to interpret how we're supposed to take this. We have them lend El Cid all this gold when he's going into exile. El Cid fills this safe full of sand so that it's heavy so that they think there's gold in there. They bury it and then later in book two or in canto two they come back to find El Cid and say look we're gonna be ruined unless you pay back our debt. Please, you know, please pay us back what we lent you now that El Cid has all of this money because of all these conquests he's made. And we're never told what happens to them and it seems that their case is just dismissed, that they don't deserve the sort of requital that they were promised. And so it's kind of hard for us to see this as anything other than sort of anti-Semitism and we're never really given anything more to use to interpret that. We see Christians acting the way we would expect Christians to act in an army or a Christian versus Muslim sort of crusades era events when we see Don Geronimo. His only goal seems to be fighting Moors. He wants to fight Muslims and convert new territories to Christianity. And that's all he does. That's all that drives him. That's the only conflict he runs into. And of course we have a lot of sort of Muslim characters who aren't really well described. They're only drive, their only goal seems to be fighting against Christians. And so King Yusuf of Morocco, who is based on the historical King of the Berbers, the Almoravid war leader who came to unite the Taifas and make them more radical and unified against the Christians. But in the narrative, he's just sort of a typical like Muslim that El Sidd fights because he's a Muslim. And that's the end of it. But we also have more complicated characters whose thinking we have, whose mental states, whose thinking processes get more attention from the narrator. One of those is Ibn Galboun on page 105, section or chapter 83. We find that he's the Muslim King of Molina and we're told, or El Sidd says, that I've made peace with him and I know he'll join you with another 100 men. So this is someone he's looking to, he says he's made peace with him. So at some point they must have had, that must have been opponents. But for whatever reason, now he knows that this Muslim King is gonna be very loyal to him. He trusts him to give safe passage to his men and his daughters. And the narrator tells us that Ibn Galboun did not blink an eye. Gladly he said that night he gave them a great feast. And then later in chapter 126 and 127, page 183, even when the Infantes of Qari'on go back the other direction and they're taking El Sidd's daughters whom they've married, Ibn Galboun comes out to give them safe passage and to welcome them. And the Qari'ons are planning to out loud, they're planning to kill him and take his wealth. They say that we know we'll soon be rid of these girls and if we can kill Ibn Galboun this more, everything he owns will be ours. And one of Ibn Galboun's men overhears this and goes and tells him and rather than immediately attacking them or imprisoning them or whatever, he just rides up to them and says, what have I done to you noblemen? I've gone out of my way and you're planning my death. Love for El Sidd is all that keeps me from doing things to you that would ring in the whole world's ears. So we clearly have this Moorish Muslim king shown to be much more noble, much more patient, much more upright and respectable than these Christian nobles. And he also shows them, he's much more gracious to them even though they've just been plotting to kill him. So we contrast him with the Christian nobles, the Qari'ons. We have this defamiliarization of type, of the type being not only Christian but also noble that is supposed to be somebody who's more honest than commoners, who's more successful on the battlefield, more successful in business and personal responsibility and all this, but in all of these things we see the Qari'ons consistently failing. They lose all the money that they take even the money that they take that they haven't earned. They're completely financially incompetent, they're self-indulgent and the only reason they want to marry Elsie's daughters is because they want his wealth because they think well to be noble we have to have money so let's take the money from a commoner but when they realize that marrying a commoner's daughters is an insult to them then they want to kill them and they even say that killing these girls would actually elevate our honor because we don't want to be associated with them. And so we're left to wonder what's going on in these guys' heads. The narrator's ideas of justice and of nobility and of noble character at least versus the conventional assumptions expressed by the Qari'ons are clearly at odds. We have to understand their thinking even as we reject it comparing it to another type of standard, another type of criteria for what makes a person good. So this is a theory of mind exercise as well. To disagree with somebody we have to understand two things. We have to understand how they think and we have to contrast it to something else. But when we see someone like Ibn Galban responding to their treachery by being open and sort of rejecting them but not stooping to their level we see his thinking compared to their thinking and we see his way of thinking about their thinking. We see why his character is opposed to their characters. But we also have to understand why they think the Qari'ons think that they're entitled to wealth even though they haven't earned it. Why they think they're entitled to abuse the daughters of El Cid. Why Garcia Ordonez thinks he's entitled to deface or to defame El Cid. And why they all seem to think that as El Cid becomes more successful and more popular their honor is diminished. They seem to think honor is a zero sum game or if somebody else has more then that means I have a less. Now there are other ways to see the world that are different than the way the Qari'ons and Garcia Ordonez see them. But we have to understand theirs is different than the way El Cid and Felix Muñez and Alvar Fáñez and Pedro Pimudez all see the world. But we also see the character of Alfonzo sort of caught between them. He's got to decide do I think the way Garcia Ordonez says or do I think the way El Cid does and we see him sort of going back and forth in his mental representation of what's happening. And not only is El Cid and Evangobon a good contrast to the way the Qari'ons seem to think but Pedro Pimudez is another great character that I think is sort of underrepresented in the song of the Cid. He doesn't get talked about that much. But notice he's the one who is referred to as Pedro Mudo, dumb Pedro or Pedro the mute, the one who never talks. There's nothing he can't talk, he just rarely does. And in chapter 142 and 143, this is on page 221, at the trial of the Qari'ons, Pedro is asked to speak and he sort of feels insulted by El Cid's description. And we're told he tried to talk but his tongue stopped him and would not let a word come out but once again, believe me, no one could stop him. Or once he began, believe me, no one could stop him. And then he says, Cid, that becomes a habit, especially at court you call me dumb Pedro. You know in fact I can talk better but nothing's ever missing from what I do. So he's not a very good speaker whereas the Qari'ons are very good speakers. He's not very good at articulating what the right thing to do is but he's good at doing the right thing. And in this, his characterization is diametrically opposed to the Qari'ons. We find out a lot about what he thinks not from what he says throughout the poem but what he does. Remember that back in chapter 115 on page 163 we have something missing from this fight where the Qari'ons were still accompanying El Cid in the battlefield. And there's a missing section. We're told there's a full page missing from the manuscript, perhaps 50 lines. We know from the chronicles that the first speaker below is one of the Qari'ons who had proposed to join the fight but turned and ran when Amor attacked him. Pedro Bermudez kills Amor and brings the man's horse to the Qari'on so he can claim to have won the battle. So Pedro helps this Qari'on fool the rest of the men so he can pretend that he has defeated someone in battle. Keep in mind they have never beaten anybody. They've never had any sort of success on the battlefield. But Pedro wants to help them deceive everybody else so that they appear brave and hoping that that will actually make them more honorable. Once they sort of maybe come to identify themselves as brave or when others identify them as brave, very similar to what Badavar Bjarke does for Hoth or Hjotli in Hroth Krakis saga. Let's take this coward out to the battlefield and then once everybody thinks that he's just won a victory, maybe he'll sort of grow into fit the part. That's what Pedro does but clearly the Qari'ons don't do that. But the reason we know what happens there is because Pedro then tells the whole story that's missing in that missing page. He tells that story in chapter 143. And so whether it's the Qari'ons trying to deceive everyone else or trying to state out loud the way they think or it's Ibn Gabon or Pedro Bermudez contrasting themselves to the Qari'ons and articulating one way or another the failure of character in the Qari'ons. We have in all these cases, people representing to themselves the way they think the world is and representing other people's representations in their minds and then contrasting those. And we see those second and third level theories of mind in conflict. And we have to understand this thinking in order to understand anything that happens. Because if we don't understand that the Qari'ons are the main threat, then we don't understand how their thinking leads to the conflict that is central to the narrator's description. If the Qari'ons were simply motivated by greed, we could understand that easily. If the Christians and Muslims were simply motivated by their religion, we could understand that easily. But we don't get it that easy in the Song of the Sid. We have to understand each individual's thinking to understand why they do what they do and why that requires a particular action from someone else. So in other words, in order to understand what happens, we have to understand how people think and how they think about other people thinking. That's how we understand the characters and that's how we understand where the conflict comes from. And you can't understand a narrative without understanding the conflict. Every narrative is gonna have some sort of conflict. So the literary theorist, David Herman, says that the conflicts that participants encounter in trying to actualize their plans, whether because of unpredicted obstacles, conflicting plans hatched by other participants or other difficulties, confer on sequences in the narrative the noteworthiness or tellability, distinguishing a story from a stereotype or a script. From this perspective, conflict is constitutive of narrative. It makes a narrative. Though it's source, the source of the conflict, the manifestations of the conflict and the relative pervasiveness of the conflict are going to vary from narrative to narrative. So we can distinguish two types of conflict, and I've mentioned this in the past when we talked about Gilgamesh. There's the proximate goal a character has. That is the immediate goal that the protagonist recognizes and tries to achieve. So think about Gilgamesh trying to achieve immortality. That's contrasted with the ultimate goal and that's what the protagonist ultimately gains. And it's almost always different than the proximate goal. So Gilgamesh goes in search of immortality. He doesn't get it, but he understands how to become a better king. Even though the historical El Cid is known for his conquest on the battlefield and even though these battles with Christian kings, like the Count of Barcelona, Muslim kings like King Yusef, these take up a lot of the text. Those individual battles are all proximate goals. They're something he has to do in the immediate present, but they're ways to a more ultimate goal. Namely, this is the way he's going to survive in exile and hope to show his loyalty to King Alfonso. So he's got two ultimate goals. All these individual battles are proximate goals. His two ultimate goals are, one, prove his loyalty to Alfonso. And he does this even when he's in exile by sending some of the spoils of war back to King Alfonso. He sends Alvar Fanyez back with horses and gold and swords that are taken from conquered Muslims. And he sends them, these back is signs of loyalty and he frequently says, I want to win back the trust of King Alfonso. And when King Alfonso finally does come out and they see each other face to face, El Cid gets down on his knees and sort of kisses the ground because he wants to show how loyal he is. But his other ultimate goal is to protect his family and in particular to eventually someday hoping to give his daughters away in marriage. When he has to leave his daughters and his wife with Don Sancho, the abbot, he holds his daughters up and he says, may it please God and his mother Mary that someday these hands will give them in marriage. These two goals are gonna come into conflict when the king decides that his daughter should be given in marriage to the Carrions. There we see him give up this thing that he initially said was one of his lifelong goals and that is to give his daughters in marriage away. He says, I can't do that. He doesn't trust the Carrions. And so he has, he tells the king, you have to give them away. You've made this choice. You give them away in marriage. And it's actually fortunate that he does because once he does that and the Carrions try to kill their wives and leave them for dead, they act as bad husbands, they haven't just insulted El Cid because the king has given El Cid's daughters away in marriage, they have defied the king. And so they've turned themselves against the king and that's what ultimately undoes them. But to understand why there's so much focus on the Carrions themselves and then the marriage with the Carrions and then what they do to the daughters and then the trial at the end, if we don't understand these goals coming to conflict with each other, then we don't understand why there's all this focus where we thought there would just be this constant battle between Christians and Muslims. So character goals lead to conflicts between characters. The conflict leads to the construction of the plot. But there's also cues that the narrator will leave for us to understand other thematic conflicts. And so we don't just have themes where a certain thing is symbolized or some abstract concept is represented. We have conflicting themes, we have themes in conflict like whether or not being born to the nobility makes you a better person or whether it's what you do, your actions that make you a more quote unquote noble. So the definition of the word nobility, that's a theme of two different interpretations that are constantly in conflict. How to respond to attacks, to insults, to violence. We see the Carrions respond to insults that were never even there. When they're afraid of this lion that belongs to El Cid and everyone laughs at them, they act as if someone had done something to them. This had all been a conspiracy against them to humiliate them when it actually it's their own actions that brought the laugh of other people and El Cid was very measured and he tells his men not to laugh at the Carrions for hiding from this lion. We contrast what they perceive as an insult and how they respond to it. They respond by trying to kill El Cid's daughters. We contrast that to the fact that when they tried to kill El Cid's daughters that was the worst kind of attack you can do to another person and yet El Cid has this very measured response. He's very patient and he wants to find a legal solution rather than just overpowering and killing these guys which he could easily have done. And with the swords, Tizon and Colada, we have these sort of markers that obviously they don't have minds. They can't express a particular point of view and then sort of see that point of view in conflict with another point of view. But they aren't necessarily symbols although you may argue that they are. So much as an objective correlative, this is a term which I'm not gonna ask you to learn but if you see an object that is consistently used to focus your attention on one issue or one sort of thread of the narrative then that's what T.S. Eliot and others have called an objective correlative. It's an object that correlates to something else happening in this narrative. And Tizon and Colada, remember, are one by El Cid on the battlefield. He takes them from these two kings, Youssef and the Count of Barcelona and then he doesn't, we're not told that he uses them for fighting but he gives them as wedding gifts first to the Carrions when they marry his daughters and then once they get caught trying to cheat him, they're the first things that he has taken away from them at this trial. And when he takes them away, he gives them to Pedro Bimutas and to Martin Nantelinas and then Pedro and Martin use them in single combat against the Carrions. So the Carrions, we see the swords as El Cid's accomplishments on the battlefield. He passes those accomplishments on to these two guys who don't have any accomplishments on the battlefield as a symbol of his own devotion to them as his new sons-in-law. They fail to live up to the honor represented by these swords and so those swords are taken away from them and then used against them in actual violent combat and then they are both described as seeing these swords about to strike them down during the combat and each of the Carrions begs for mercy when they look at either Tizon or Colada. They recognize that they are unworthy, that they are defeated by these weapons that they were once offered. And so if your goal as a reader in reading the Song of the Cid was to figure out what happens, as you read, you're probably thinking, okay, what do I need to know? And to figure out what I need to know, I need to know who are the most important characters? Which of these events is the most important? What do I need to be focusing on? Now that you've sort of seen what happens, when you first read this narrative or any other text, you don't really know what to focus on. You don't really know which of these things is gonna be important later on. Now that you've read it, you realize that the final battle, so to speak, the climax of the narrative, isn't what you may have expected. You may have been expecting it to be a confrontation between El Cid and Alfonso. You may have expected it to be a conflict between Christians and Muslims. But what you find is this sort of trial by combat, which is not just combat, it's also a trial. And it's not just the Karyons that are on trial, it is what they represent. These Christian nobles who don't live up to the characteristics that either of those identities are supposed to live up to. And instead we have these common men, like El Cid, like Pedro Vunes, like Martin Nantilines, are representing the virtues that the nobility were supposed to have. And we see that the honorable characteristics are not exclusively shared by Christians. They're also a product of Muslims, at least like Ebingobon. If we take this recognition of how the conflicts sort of come to a head, and we go back and reread the novel, these things start to make a lot more sense. You start to see the conflicts building up. You see them introduced, even though they weren't so obvious to us at the beginning. So to take for example, in the beginning, in Canto I, when El Cid leaves his daughters with Don Sancho, the abbot, and he says, I hope to one day give them a marriage. That line probably didn't seem that significant at the time. It was just one of 100 other things you're trying to process. As you're focusing on the fact that he's about to leave. You're focusing on where he's going now. But that line, going back, once you realize how this is gonna come into conflict later on, becomes much more important. And this is why you always benefit from a second reading. Conflicts never come out of nowhere, at least in good writing, they don't, in well thought out writing. But a lot of times they're introduced, and we don't notice them when they're introduced. A lot of times a character's disposition, a character's way of thinking is sort of introduced, and we just assume, oh, this says something about this character that may be more significant than what he's wearing. But if we see later on that that expression of a way of thinking actually leads to a conflict we didn't see coming, then we go back and read and we see, oh, okay, here's where this character's thinking is introduced. And now I see how that's going to lead to a conflict with another character who thinks in a different way. LC, just like everything else that we've read, really benefits from a second reading. And I strongly encourage you to go back and read this if you have time. And just even to skim over it, a lot of things are gonna become suddenly more obviously important that you may not have noticed before. And when you're trying to decide what do I need to remember, what do I need to pay attention to, focus on the conflict and the character psychologies that lead to that conflict.