The work of Martínez and of Charles F. Fraker removes any justification for the doubts which I expressed (A Literary History of Spain: The Middle Ages [London: Ernest Benn: New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971], p. 45) about the existence of a twelfth-century Cantar de Sancho II and Najerense's use of it. Najerense drew both on the Latin Carmen and on the vernacular Cantar. Further reasons for doubting whether Najerense uses a vernacular Cantar are given by Geoffrey R. West, «History as Celebration: Castilian and Hispano-Latin Epics and Histories, 1080-1210 A. D.». (unpubl. diss., University of London [Westfield College], 1975), pp. 405-13. West is right hi urging the need for caution, but I find the evidence adduced by Martínez and Fraker convincing, even taking his reservations into account. He also reviews the question of Najerense's date of composition (pp. 388-89), concluding that it was completed after 1143 and before 1157. The thirteenth-century reworking of the Cantar (see pp. 294-296, below) does not seem to have changed the murder episode greatly.

The handing over of a «venablo pequenno dorado» to the murderer has ritual overtones. For similar implications in the scene of Siegfried's murder, see D. G. Mowatt and Hugh Sacker, The Nibelungenlied: An Interpretative Commentary (Toronto: Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 92-93. This book has not been very well received by some Germanic medievalists, but it seems to me to contain a number of useful insights.

Von Richthofen, writing originally in 1944, had to rely on an edition which used a MS of Najerense in which a vital phrase is missing. Had the MS later published by Ubieto Arteta been accessible to him, he might have come to a different conclusion. Another source is proposed by José Fradejas Lebrero, Estudios épicos: el Cerco de Zamora, Aula Magna, 5 (Ceuta: Instituto Nacional de Enseñanza Media, 1963), pp. 9-24. Fradejas accepts (a little too reluctantly) the resemblances pointed out by von Richthofen between the murders of Siegfried and Sancho, but argues that the unheroic detail of Sancho's need to relieve himself, which has no parallel in the Siegfried story, derives from the Biblical narrative of the assassination of Eglon, King of Moab (Judges, 3:15-27). Chalon (p. 320) remains unconvinced, but Fradejas may well be right.

«El fragmento de Roncesvalles y el planto de Gonzalo Gústioz», in Studi in onore di Angelo Monteverdi (Modena: Società Editrice Modenese, 1959), II, 623-28; revised in La leyenda del graal y temas épicos medievales, El Soto, 6 (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1968), pp. 205-13. I cite the latter version.

Deyermond, Epic Poetry and the Clergy: Studies on the Mocedades de Rodrigo (London: Tamesis, 1969), p. 91.

Entwistle, «Remarks Concerning the Historical Account», p. 359, n. 3, points out the influence of the folkloric number on the duels in Sancho II. For further discussion of this question, and other examples, see Epic Poetry and the Clergy, pp. 158-62.

Neotraditionalist doctrine is that short, historically accurate poems in the vernacular came first, but this belief does not depend on any evidence so far produced. On the contrary, the evidence of even the earliest chronicle versions of vernacular epics favours the view of Entwistle, that: «At some point of time, by some particular poet in some particular place, the Facts and Fables were combined to form the poems that we know and admire, having previously been unrelated» («Remarks Concerning the Historical Account», p. 376). It is ironical that this aspect of neotraditionalist theory seems more like a description (though still not a very close one) of such Latin literary epics as Carmen de morte Sanctii regis and Carmen Campidoctoris than of the poems for which it was designed.

«Il cantare degli Infanti di Salas». Studi Medievali, new series, 13 (1934), 113-50.

Menéndez Pidal (Historia y epopeya, p. 94) rejects the possibility that the vengeance of Mudarra and Sancha in Siete infantes derives from that in García, and he is almost certainly right: García's borrowing of the tablado episode, is much easier to understand if there were other and more important debts to Siete infantes.

«Remarks Concerning the Order of the Spanish Cantares de gesta», RPh, I (1947-48), 113-23, at p. 121.