MANY HOMERS BEFORE HOMER. Thus does a colleague characterize the origins of the legends of Mediterranean antiquity. Thus, also, with the Serenity Prayer.

For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity's most towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.

The pastor well might have written one version down, but there's an older oral tradition.

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotes are from civic leaders all over the United States — a YWCA leader in Syracuse, N.Y., a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Some of them refer to the prayer as if it were a proverb, while others appear to claim it as their own poetry. None of them attribute the prayer to a particular source. And they never mention Reinhold Niebuhr.

An article about the mystery of the prayer, by Fred R. Shapiro, associate library director and lecturer at Yale Law School, who edited "The Yale Book of Quotations," will be published next week in the Yale Alumni Magazine, an independent bimonthly publication. It will be followed by a rebuttal from [Rev^d Niebuhr's daughter Elisabeth] Sifton.

The prayer is part of Alcoholics Anonymous work. Their site includes a history alluding to the existence of those other Homers.