However the hero refuses, in a common folkloric motif of postponement of an obligation through the pursuit a difficult and long-lasting mission, until he has won five battles.

Although the five battles had remained vague in earlier versions of the Mocedades de Rodrigo,[6] in this particular text, they can be considered to be the victory against the Moor Burgos de Ayllón, the victory against the champion of Aragon for the possession of Calahorra, the defense of Castile against the conspiracy of the treacherous counts, the battle against five allied Moors and the moving of the seat of the bishop of Palencia.

"[9] The fact that earlier versions of the poem do not allude at all to the diocese of Palencia suggests that the work was composed to publicise this ecclesiastical demarcation during a period of time spanning an economic and political crisis.

The Gesta differs from the Cantar now preserved in its more moderate tone, with a less rebellious hero, and in which there appear no mention of the history of the diocese of Palencia.

By this way, there are various plot nuclei: the historical and genealogical introduction in prose, the tale of the most prominent events of the life of the epic hero Fernán González, the episode of the death of the father of Jimena and the arrangement of weddings, the ups and downs on the peninsula, the bellicose feats against Moors (against the Moor Burgos de Ayallón) and Christians (confrontation with the dispatch rider of the king of Aragon).

In addition, the text accumulates ecclesiastic affairs of the local environment, how the crypt of Saint Antoninus was found or the relocation of the bishop Bernaldo to his Palentine see, along with military campaigns of universal importance, how the confrontation between Ferdinand and Rodrigo with all the extraparliamentary political powers of the time: king of France, emperor and pope.

Another possibility, supported by Deyermond, is that the ending is constituted by the homage to Bernaldo once restored to his episcopal see, an episode that goes well with the clerical and publicity character that the poem has according to the theories of the Anglo-Saxon Hispanist.

to prove how a genre like that of the epic poem was maintained, habitually considered to be of traditional gestures and oral diffusion in the early stages of formation of the villages, even in an age as late as the second half of the 14th century.

This is a date in which, for example, a Sir Juan Manuel, was fully aware of the literary art, and in which the transmission of news-worthy contents would have already been destined to the prose of chronicles, fundamentally.

Menéndez Pidal indicates to this respect which the public, by already knowing all too well the feats of maturity of the hero, now solicits new discoveries regarding his childhood adventures.

In the words of the famous erudite: Of any hero of primary interest are his most notable actions, those that brought an end during the plentitude [sic] of his strength; but later... this engenders a general curiosity to know a multitude of details that earlier were of no interest... To this curiosity the author of the Mocedades de Rodrigo tried to satisfy.More than the epic Spanish tradition, universal folkloric motifs contribute to the composition of the Mocedades, in the mode of those that appear in popular oral storytelling, and which have been studied in structuralism and narratology.

Among these could be cited that of the fleeing of the prisoner helped by a woman, or of the annual tribute of fifteen noble virgins that are requested of Ferdinand by the pope, emperor and king of France.

But Rodrigo distrusts: "Listen, sayth I, friends, relatives and vassals of my father: Guardeth thine Lord without deceit and without skill, If thou wish for the bailiff to apprehend him, for much would he want to kill him, How black a day findeth the king like the others that are there!

410-414In this characterization the novelistic (and not so much epic) will is probably influenced to attract the public with the surprise, the immoderation and the running wild of imagination, appropriate for the development of fiction in the 14th century.

Juan Victorio, in his prologue in the edition cited, thinks, nevertheless, there are precedents when the cliché of the rebelliousness of the hero in all Spanish epics, along the lines of the nature these show with respect to his king the most important episodes of the legend of Bernardo del Carpio or of Fernán González.

With merely placing the verses in two lines, one per hemistich, and taking into account the fragmentation and holes that the Mocedades contains, the nature of the Spanish romance is well explained, with assonance rhyming in the pairs of octosyllables, the beginning in medias res and ending interruptions, in addition to an elevated component of novelistic fiction in the recreation of historic events.