The Poema de mio Cid and the Mocedades de Rodrigo are the only extant epic texts in the cycle of the Cid. Ramon Menendez Pidal characterized the semantic relationship between these two works as that of text to gloss. By these terms he referred to the supposedly historical faithfulness of the Cid (the text), originated by events, and the anti-historical orientation of the Rodrigo (the gloss), brought about by a declining epic tradition. I first consider Menendez Pidal's definitions of text and gloss, and his views on the traditional text as a variable and open composition. I then propose to analyze these poems retaining the pidalista notion of the fluidity of the traditional text, but opposing the deprecatory judgements contained in gloss. In Chapters Two and Three, semantic continuities and discontinuities are examined--within each poem and between them. I define the underlying semantic structures of both poems as consisting in the interaction between two units of meaning: the force and the sacred. In the Cid, the protagonist's banishment splits these values into the terms of an opposition between contraries. The Cid's gradual rise in power is seen as a reenactment of the pre-narrative harmony in which force and the sacred had been joined as a complex unity: the Cid and his king had been bound by juridical relationships and soldiering. The Cid's military feats culminate with his lordship of Valencia, which actualizes the exile's impulse to regain the harmony of values. His Valencia is called both heredad (a possession) and ganancia (acquired by conquest). The lexical choice rictad also conveys the twofold unity that the hero, his followers, and even his enemies try to obtain. The Cid's definition of rictad retains the duality of its etymon: the "power" of juridical authority and the "wealth" implied in defeating the enemy. Examined in light of these patterns, the "Afrenta de Corpes" shows the Infantes de Carrion willfully negating the twofold harmony that they had also desired. The Infantes' sadistic torture of their wives, or delight in cruelty, is a necessary stage of return to Carrion, the place the Infantes habitually invoke as synonymous to sacred univalence. The dualistic unity of the older poem is conceived of in the Rodrigo as that which unifies the narrative and ends it. The young warrior's oath not to wed Ximena nor to kiss the king's hand in vassalage until his return from five military victories decrees the articulation of force (the self-imposed ordeals) and the sacred (the delayed rituals). Military performance is equated with the internal referential level described in ritual. Force is thus to be represented in a sacred context. This is the dominant pattern of the Rodrigo that the miraculous epiphany comments on by reversing it. The protagonist's exaggerated bellicosity and his outrageous behavior are justified. They turn into the heroic signified and project the sacred onto the closing action of the Rodrigo. This union is analogous to the poem's own insertion into a poetic cycle. The text is predicated on the knowledge of the Cid's mythification by the epic and ballad traditions which it glosses. The concluding chapter weighs the Avengalvon-Burgos de Ayllon parallel as a point of contact between the poems and one that glosses both texts. The chief devices which bridge semantic breaks and modifying narrative patterns are consistent with the compositional flexibilities of the traditional text.