SOME years ago, Hispanic scholars began to notice and to isolate various epic sequences which seemed to be drawing upon the lives of the saints. 1 Under the most normal conditions that our knowledge would permit us to imagine, the process of such transfer would have been facile, especially if th epic poem was given its known form by a clergyman familiar with hagiologi narrative and was to be delivered to an audience responsive to the motifs of hagiologic legends. Indeed, such borrowings from the lives of popular saint would have been the most legitimate means for inserting numinous, refulgen dignity in certain consecrated moments of secular history. Most of the studies on epic borrowings such as those found in the Poema de Ferndn Gonzdlez and the Mocedades de Rodrigo, of course, have dealt wi relatively late embellishments where precise motives-chiefly, local rivalries difficulties that needed an attested miracle to bolster local claims-could b found. 2 We wonder, however, whether a case might not be made for a simi process of transfer or confluence in the earliest known epics, though the process would be rather less conscious and with the precise motives not at all sharply visible. If the first epics were being assembled when the Hispanic or Mozarab liturgy was in full practice, or, in the case of the Poema de Mio Cid, soon enough after its replacement or modification that its emphasis would have persiste then a reasonable cause for this convergence of imaginative motifs would ha been present. One cannot fail to notice that in the Mozarabic liturgical cycl

1 See, for example, JP Keller's account of how the legend of St. Eustace was applied in an epic context (" The Hunt and Prophecy Episode of the Poema de Ferndn Gonzdlez," HR, XXIII [1955], 251-8). However, AD Deyermond (Epic Poetry and th Clergy: Studies on the" Mocedades de Rodrigo"[London, 1968; Coleccidn Times series A, io. 5], pp. 88-92) shows that the" hunt and prophecy" portion of the PFG, well as other Hispanic episodes drawn along the same lines, may be indebted to far more subtle and distant blendings of folk and hagiographic motifs. 2 Keller, op. cit., 252-5. Deyermond, Epic Poetry..., pp. 114-5, also discusses the episode of Rodrigo and the leper in Mocedades, showing that similar acts of virtue toward lepers were attributed to saints (Francis of Assisi, Hugh of Lincoln, etc.) and concludes:" Thus Rodrigo's legendary action puts him in a tradition of heroic virtue, and carries implications of sanctity which are curious in the context of the real Rodrigo's life, and utterly incongruous in the context of MR."