la légende des siecles

Bivar, in Spanish Vivar, was the name of the ancestral home of the Cid. It is a castle
near Burgos, in which the Cid was born in 1040.
patio (Spanish), a court or open space in front of a house. The ti is pronounced as in
French question.
buenos dias=good day.
l 18. The full name of the Cid was Rodrigue Ruy Diaz de Bivar, or in Spanish Rodrigo
Diaz de Vivar.
campéador. The Spanish word campeador, derived from campear, to be eminent in the
field, signifies excellent, pre-eminent, and was the title given to their champion by the
Spaniards, The Moors called him the Cid, i.e. Seid, an Arabic word for chief.
pavois, an old word for a large shield, which protected the whole body, and on which
the Franks raised the king whom they had elected.
richomme, from the Spanish ricohombre, a title given to the Barons of Aragon.
servidumbre (Spanish), an establishment of servants. In Spanish the last syllable is
sounded.
EVIRADNUS.
As far as is known, the story is of Hugo's own invention. The epoch may be supposed to
be the later Middle Ages, the place anywhere in Teuton lands. The proper names are
mostly of Hugo's own invention; some are, however, echoes from German mediaeval
history. The poem and another called Le Petit Roi de Galice form a section of the
Légende called Les Chevaliers Errants.
l 1. There was a Ladislaus, King of Poland, in the fourteenth, and a Sigismund, Emperor
of Germany, in the fifteenth century. But the personages of the poem are in reality
wholly imaginary.
stryge (written also strige), a vampire or demon that wanders about at night. Derived
from Latin striga, a bird of night, or a witch.
lémure: Lémures (the singular is very rare) is the Latin lemures, the disembodied spirits
which haunted houses and caused terror to the living.
val, valley, The word is now little used and only in poetry, except in the phrase par
monts et par vaux.
preux. See note on AYMERILLOT, l 54.
munster (German), cathedral.