31
Whiteness is not explicit in the PCG and Cr. 1344 texts, though the stress on the beauty of Garci Fernández's hands may be thought to imply it. It is mentioned in a ballad first printed in 1551: «las manos ha como nieve cuando del cielo caía»
(Menéndez Pidal, Romancero tradicional, II [Madrid, 1963], 271).
32
Historia y epopeya, p. 6. See, however, Carpenter, Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga: «How can such palpable make-believe, such reminiscences from the impossible world of fairy story, find place in an epic account of a great enterprise which purports to be history and attaches to the actual Greek world with its well-known towns, districts, and islands? It can do so for the very simple reason that such is the normal and natural way of oral epic»
(p. 22).
33
See the works by Bordman and Schwarzbaum, cited above, and John E. Keller, Motif-Index of Mediaeval Spanish Exempla (U. of Kentucky Press, 1949).
34
In the PCG version, the climax of CT is Sancha's burial at San Salvador de Oña, and the claim that the monastery's name derives from this event. As Menéndez Pidal notes (Historia y epopeya, p. 14), this is missing from the Crónica Najerense account; yet the Najerense also has a monastic burial as the climax of CT: Sancho «regem [the Moorish king] interfecit et Cordobam destruxit, et inde corpus patris sui comitis Garsia Ferrandiz transtulit Caradignam»
(ed. Ubieto, p. 90; III.4). Thus, instead of an emphatic link with an Oña tomb-cult in the PCG version, we have in the Najerense version an emphatic link with a tomb-cult of San Pedro de Cárdena.
35
Epic Poetry and the Clergy, pp. 86-91.
36
Von Richthofen, Estudios épicos medievales (Madrid, 1954), and Nuevos estudios épicos medievales (Madrid, 1970). On the dangers of assuming direct borrowing when folk-material, sometimes orally transmitted, is involved, see Kenneth H. Jackson, The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition (Cardiff, 1961), pp. 49-50 (a warning previously applied to another medieval Spanish situation by Ian Michael, «The Function of the Popular Tale in the Libro de buen amor», LBA Studies, ed. G. B. Gybbon-Monypenny [London, 1970], 177-218, at p. 178).