For details and analogues, see Epic Poetry and the Clergy, pp. 87-91.

The motif of someone killed or wounded with his own weapon (sometimes being vulnerable only to that weapon) is widely diffused in folklore and epic. A notable occurrence of the motif is found in Beowulf, where the hide of Grendel's dam can be pierced only by the ancestral sword hanging in her lair. Stith Thompson divides instances of this among several motif-numbers, but it may be useful to assemble some here. Most instances are in the section K1600 (Deceiver falls into own trap), which includes K1613.0.1 (Would-be poisoner forced to drink poisoned cup -as in CT), but others include D1381.3.1 (Garment proof against all but man's own sword) and U161 (Eagle killed with arrow made with his own feather -an exemplum used in the Libro de buen amor). In Sancho, the King gives his spear to the traitor Bellido Adolfo to hold, and the traitor kills him with it (cf. K818.1, Man killed with sword which he is tricked into passing to captured enemy, and K818.2, Giantess killed with spear she has herself given hero). The similarity between Sancho's murder and that of Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied is pointed out by Erich von Richthofen, Estudios épicos medievales (Madrid, 1954), p. 81. It may be that the admission of defeat by one of the Infantes de Carrión when he sees the Cid's sword Tizón about to be used against him (CMC 3643) is an example not only of D1400.1.4.1 (Magic sword conquers enemy), but also of the defeat-by-own-weapon motif, since the Cid had given Tizón and Colada to his sons-in-law, reclaimed them at the Toledo cort, and handed them to his champions in the duels against the Infantes.

Menéndez Pidal, PCG, p. clxx, and Carola Reig, El cantar de Sancho II y cerco de Zamora (Revista de filología española, 37, Madrid, 1947), p. 14, both believe that these episodes have an Arabic source, though Menéndez Pidal is more cautious than Reig. This view is not necessarily correct, and Antonio Ubieto Arteta may be right in claiming an epic source: Crónica Najerense, ed. Ubieto (Textos Medievales 15, Valencia, 1966), p. 19. Entwistle, «On the Carmen de morte Sanctii regis», BH, 30 (1928), 204-19, at p. 211, gives good reasons for excluding the episodes of Alfonso's stay in Toledo from the plot of the Latin literary epic on Sancho's murder, but the possibility remains that the chroniclers of PCG were not the first vernacular authors to blend the two elements.

See Gerald Bordman, Motif-Index of the English Metrical Romances (Folklore Fellows Communications 190, Helsinki, 1963); Georges Cirot, Sur le Fernán González, BH, 30 (1928), 113-46, at pp. 118-46 («Le thème de la femme qui délivre le prisonnier»); Charles A. Knudson, Le thème de la princesse sarrasine dans La Prise d'Orange, Romance Philology, 22 (1968-9), 449-62.

Cirot, pp. 125 and 144. For historical incidents of children born to a prisoner and his jailer's daughter, see P. E. Russell, The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II (Oxford, 1955), p. 164 n.

For a striking analogue in Norse heroic legend, see von Richthofen, Estudios épicos medievales, 174. Since the birth of the avenger follows from Ruy Velázquez's attempt to kill Gonzalo Gustioz by sending him to Córdoba with a letter of death, the chain of incidents constitutes a particularly elaborate and skilful example of motif K1612 (Message of death fatal to sender). For a simpler version of the motif, see Libro de los exenplos por A.B.C., ed. John E. Keller (Madrid, 1961), no. 8.

The element of deceitful disguise is much more explicit in Cr. 1344, p. 93. Cf. William W. Kibler, «The Fake-Pilgrim in Lion de Bourges», Romance Notes, 11 (1969-70), 407-13.

«...diziéndol que el cavallo travado nunqua bien podie fazer fijos» (421a1-2). Sancha's remarkable frankness links this episode to the begetting of an avenger in SIL, but the link is probably an unconscious one, since the birth of an avenging son would have been a serious danger to the King of León.

Keller, «Inversion of the Prison Episodes». For literary and historical analogues, see Entwistle, «Historical Account», pp. 363-64. This motif may be linked to that of the jailer's daughter in love with the prisoner, as in the version familiar to all British Hispanists from their earliest years: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (London, 1908, repr. 1966), pp. 182-86.

The connection with tales of ogres is pointed out by Entwistle, «Historical Account», p. 363. Ogre-motifs occupy a whole category, G, in Stith Thompson.