«La perspectiva histórica del Poema de Fernán González'», Papeles de Son Armadans, no. 21 (April 1961), 9-18.

Christian Allegory in Early Hispanic Poetry, Studies in Romance Languages, IV (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), pp. 45-59.

Towards a History of Literary Composition in Medieval Spain, University of Toronto Romance Series, LIV (Toronto: University Press, 1986), pp. 84-90. Beverly West's promisingly-titled Epic, Folk, and Christian Traditions in the Poema de Fernán González' (Potomac, Maryland: Studia Humanitatis, 1983) -an abridgement of her University of North Carolina doctoral thesis «Poema de Fernán González: The Role of Tradition in the Growth of the Legend through Epic, Folklore and Christianity» (1982)- is disappointing, largely because she appears unfamiliar with some of the basic bibliography of the subject and misunderstands key terms like 'martyred' and 'resurrected' (pp. 111-12).

«Paganism in the Medieval Spanish Epic», paper read to the King's Epic Seminar, London, February 1987, I am grateful to Dr Hook for allowing me to consult the typescript of his paper.

For folkloric elements, see A. D. Deyermond and Margaret Chaplin, «Folk-Motifs in the Medieval Spanish Epic», PQ, LI (1972), 36-53.

I use the word 'allusion' in a much narrower sense than Northrop Frye, whose fascinating book The Great Code begins with the alarming statement that «Blake's line "O Earth, O Earth return" [...], though it contains only five words and only three different words, contains also about seven direct allusions to the Bible» (The Great Code: The Bible and Literature [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982], p. xii).

There is, of course, no such difficulty in the comparison of Fernán González with David (267cd) or Samson (414c): on such comparisons, which are found also in the Poema de Almería and other heroic verse in medieval Latin, see H. Salvador Martínez, El «Poema de Almería» y la épica románica (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), pp. 210-22 and 227-29. On Castile as Israel, see Nepaulsingh, pp. 86-87.

Vicios has here its normal thirteenth-century meaning of 'pleasures', not 'vices'.

I quote from Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam Clementinam, ed. Alberto Colunga & Laurencio Turrado, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, XIV (Madrid: Editorial Católica, 1977). The choice is to some extent arbitrary, since we do not know what text or texts of the Bible may have been available in San Pedro de Arlanza in addition to the Vulgate. The problem is common to all studies of the use of the Bible in medieval literature, as Peter Dronke shows in «The Song of Songs and Medieval Love-Lyric», in The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. W. Lourdaux & D. Verhelst, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia, Series I, Studia, VII (Louvain: University Press, 1979), pp. 236-62; repr. in his The Medieval Poet and his World, Storia e Letteratura, CLXIV (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), pp. 209-36, at pp. 209-10. The chief advantage of quoting the Vulgate is that it is in the language in which the Arlanza poet read the Bible; the disadvantage is that it may give a false impression of precision, and there is thus a good case for following Northrop Frye's example by quoting the Authorized Version (Frye gives his reasons, The Great Code, p. xiv).

Poema de Fernán González, edited & translated by Erminio Polidori (Roma: Giovanni Semerano, 1962); Poema de Fernán González, edited by Juan Victorio, Letras Hispánicas, CLI (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981). For the secondary meaning, cf. stanza 35b, quoted below.