The Song of Roland E-Book

anonymous

• Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

This is the classical epic, glorifying the heroism of Charlemagne in the 778 battle between the Franks and the Moors. Penned by an anonymous poet, it describes in detail the betrayal and slaughter of Charlemagne's army under Roland at Renceavaux and Charlemagne's bitter revenge. Nowhere in literature is the medieval code of chivalry more perfectly expressed than in his masterly and exciting poem!

Leseprobe

The Song of Roland 

by Anonymous. Translated by Dorothy L. Sayers.

First published in 1957

This edition published by Reading Essentials

Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany

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THE SONG OF ROLAND 

 by Anonymous 

 (translated by Dorothy Sayers)

The roundel on the jacket forms part of a stained-glass window (probably thirteenth-century) in Chartres Cathedral, devoted to the Legend of Charlemagne. It shows Roland (right) blowing the Olifant, and (left) trying to break his sword Durendal on the “marble stone” beneath the “fair tree tall”. Dismembered Saracens strew the foreground. The hand of God is reaching down from heaven to accept Roland’s “token”.

INTRODUCTION

1. THE POEM

In the year 777, a deputation of Saracen princes from Spain came to the Emperor Charlemagne to request his assistance against certain enemies of theirs, also of the Moslem faith. Charlemagne, who was already engaged in a war against the Saxons, nevertheless accepted their invitation, and, after placing garrisons to fortify his frontiers, marched into Spain with all his available forces. He divided his army into two parts, one of which crossed the eastern Pyrenees in the direction of Gerona; the other, under his own command, crossed the Basque Pyrenees and was directed upon Pampeluna. Both cities fell, and the two armies joined forces before Saragossa, which they besieged without success. A fresh outbreak of hostilities by the Saxons obliged Charlemagne to abandon the Spanish expedition. As he was repassing the Pyrenees, the rear-guard of his army was set upon by a treacherous party of Basques, who had disposed an ambuscade along the high wooded sides of the ravine which forms the pass. Taking advantage of the lie of the land and of the lightness of their armour, they fell upon the rear-guard, slaughtered them to a man, pillaged the baggage-train, and dispersed under cover of the falling night. The chronicler Eginhardt, who recounts this sober piece of history in his Vita Caroli, written about 830, concludes: “In the action were killed Eggihard the king’s seneschal, Anselm count of the palace, and Roland duke of the Marches of Brittany, together with a great many more.” Another manuscript of the ninth century contains an epitaph in Latin verse upon the seneschal Eggihard, which furnishes us with the date of the battle, 15 August 778. The episode is mentioned again in 840 by another chronicler, who, after briefly summarising the account given in the Vita Caroli, adds that, since the names of the fallen are already on record, he need not repeat them in his account.

[8]

After this, the tale of Roncevaux appears to go underground for some two hundred years. When it again comes to the surface, it has undergone a transformation which might astonish us if we had not seen much the same thing happen to the tale of the wars of King Arthur. The magic of legend has been at work, and the small historic event has swollen to a vast epic of heroic proportions and strong ideological significance. Charlemagne, who was 38 at the time of his expedition into Spain, has become a great hieratic figure, 200 years old, the snowy-bearded king, the sacred Emperor, the Champion of Christendom against the Saracens, the war-lord whose conquests extend throughout the civilised world. The expedition itself has become a major episode in the great conflict between Cross and Crescent, and the marauding Basques have been changed and magnified into an enormous army of many thousand Saracens. The names of Eggihardt and Anselm have disappeared from the rear-guard; Roland remains; he is now the Emperor’s nephew, the “right hand of his body”, the greatest warrior in the world, possessed of supernatural strength and powers and hero of innumerable marvellous exploits; and he is accompanied by his close companion Oliver, and by the other Ten Peers, a chosen band of superlatively valorous knights, the flower of French chivalry. The ambuscade which delivers them up to massacre is still the result of treachery on the Frankish side; but it now derives from a deep-laid plot between the Saracen king Marsilion and Count Ganelon, a noble of France, Roland’s own stepfather; and the whole object of the conspiracy is the destruction of Roland himself and the Peers. The establishment of this conspiracy is explained by Ganelon’s furious jealousy of his stepson, worked out with a sense of drama, a sense of character, and a psychological plausibility which, in its own kind, may sustain a comparison with the twisted malignancy of Iago. In short, beginning with a historical military disaster of a familiar kind and comparatively small importance, we have somehow in the course of two centuries achieved a masterpiece of epic drama—we have arrived at the Song of Roland.

The poem itself as we know it would appear to have achieved its final shape towards the end of the eleventh century. It is not difficult to see why the legend should have taken the form it did, nor why [9] it should have been popular about that time. The Saracen menace to Christendom became formidable about the end of the tenth century, and led to a number of expeditions against the Moors in Spain with a definitely religious motive. At the same time, a whole series of heroic legends and poems were coming into circulation along the various great trade-routes and pilgrim-routes of Europe—legends attached to the names of local heroes, and associated with the important towns and monasteries along each route. The pilgrim-road to the important shrine of St James of Compostella led through the very pass in which Charlemagne’s rear-guard had made its disastrous last stand: what more natural than that the travellers should be entertained with a glorified version of the local tragedy? It was also the tenth century that saw the full flowering of the feudal system and the development of the code of chivalry which bound the liegeman in bonds of religious service to his lord and loyalty to his fellow-vassal. And finally, the preaching of the First Crusade set all Christendom on fire with enthusiasm for the Holy War against the followers of Mohammed.

We have little external evidence about the Song of Roland. Such as it is, it seems to agree with the internal evidence (of language, feudal customs, arms and accoutrements, names of historical personages anachronistically annexed to the Charlemagne-legend, and scraps of what looks like authentic knowledge of Saracen territories and peoples) in placing the Chanson de Roland, as we have it, shortly after the First Crusade. I say, the Chanson as we have it—for the legend of Roland must have begun much earlier. Our poet, in beginning his story, takes it for granted that his audience know all about Charlemagne and his Peers, about the friendship of Roland and Oliver, and about Ganelon: like Homer, he is telling a tale which is already in men’s hearts and memories. What no scholar has yet succeeded in tracing is the stages by which history transformed itself into legend and legend into epic. Roland, duke of the Marches of Brittany, must have been an important man; but no further historical allusion to him has as yet been traced—why should he have been chosen for this part of epic hero to the exclusion of others who fought and fell with him? How was the story transmitted, and in what form? Ballads? Earlier improvisations of a [10] primitive epic kind? We do not know.[1] We can only fall back on the vague but useful phrase “oral tradition”, and refer, if we like, to Sir Maurice Bowra’s monumental work, Heroic Poetry, which reveals how quickly and how strangely, even at this time in parts of Central Europe, the history of to-day may become the recited epic of to-morrow. One thing is certain—the extant Chanson de Roland is not a chance assembly of popular tales: it is a deliberate and masterly work of art, with a single shaping and constructive brain behind it, marshalling its episodes and its characterisation into an orderly and beautifully balanced whole.

Happily, we may leave scholars to argue about origins: our business is with the poem itself—the Song of Roland; just one, the earliest, the most famous, and the greatest, of those Old French epics which are called “Songs of Deeds”—Chansons de Geste. It is short, as epics go: only just over four thousand lines; and, though it is undoubtedly great literature, it is not in the least “literary”. Its very strength and simplicity, its apparent artlessness, may deceive us into thinking it not only “primitive” (which it is) but also “rude” or “naïve”, which it is not. Its design has a noble balance of proportion, and side by side with the straightforward thrust-and-hammer of the battle scenes we find a remarkable psychological subtlety in the delineation of character and motive. But all this is left for us to find; the poet is chanting to a large mixed audience which demands a quick-moving story with plenty of action, and he cannot afford the time for long analytical digressions in the manner of a Henry James or a Marcel Proust.

The style of epic is, in fact, rather like the style of drama: the characters enter, speak, and act, with the minimum of stage-setting and of comment by the narrator. From time to time a brief “stage-direction” informs us that this person is “rash” and the other “prudent”, that so-and-so is “angry” or “grieved”, or has “cunningly considered what he has to say”. But for the most part we have to watch and listen and work out for ourselves the motives [11] which prompt the characters and the relationship between them. We are seldom shown their thoughts or told anything about them which is not strictly relevant to the action. Some points are never cleared up. Thus we are never told what is the original cause of the friction between Roland and his stepfather; not until the very end of the poem does Ganelon hint that “Roland had wronged [him] in wealth and in estate”, and we are left to guess at the precise nature of the alleged injury. Very likely it was all part of the original legend and already well-known to the audience; or the traditional jealousy between stepparent and stepchild, so familiar in folklore, could be taken for granted. But we do not really need to know these details. The general situation is made sufficiently clear to us in the first words Roland and Ganelon speak. The opening scenes of the poem are indeed a model of what an exposition should be. The first stanza tells us briefly what the military situation is; the scene of Marsilion’s council gets the action going and shows us that the Saracens are ready for any treacherous business; the great scene of Charlemagne’s council introduces all the chief actors on the Christian side and sketches swiftly and surely the main lines of their characters and the position in which they stand to one another: Charlemagne—at the same time cautious and peremptory; Roland, brave to the point of rashness, provocative, arrogant with the naïve egotism of the epic hero, loyal, self-confident, and open as the day; Oliver, equally brave, but prudent and blunt, and well aware of his friend’s weaknesses; Duke Naimon, old and wise in council; Turpin, the fighting archbishop, with his consideration for others and his touch of ironic humour; Ganelon, whose irritable jealousy unchains the whole catastrophe. Ganelon is not a coward, as he proves later on in the poem, and his advice to conclude a peace is backed up by all his colleagues. But it is unfortunate that, after Roland has pointed out that the proposed mission is dangerous and that Marsilion is not to be trusted, he does not at once volunteer to bell the cat himself. He lets others get in first. Charlemagne vetoes their going, and so shows that he too is aware of the danger and doubtful about Marsilion. Then Roland names Ganelon—and coming when it does, and from him, the thing has the air of a challenge. And Charlemagne does not veto Ganelon—infuriating [12] proof that he values him less than Naimon or Turpin, less than Roland or any of the Twelve Peers. Ganelon’s uneasy vanity reacts instantly: “This is a plot to get rid of me”—and Roland (who has quite certainly never had any such idea in his simple mind) bursts out laughing. That finishes it. Rage and spite and jealousy, and the indignity of being publicly put to shame, overthrow a character which is already emotionally unstable. Self-pity devours him; he sees himself mortally injured and persecuted. He is obsessed by a passion to get even with Roland at the price of every consideration of honour and duty, and in total disregard of the consequences. The twentieth century has found a word for Ganelon: he is a paranoiac. The eleventh-century poet did not know the word, but he has faithfully depicted the type.

What is interesting and dramatic in the poet’s method is the way in which the full truth about Ganelon only emerges gradually as the story proceeds. We are kept in suspense about him. We cannot at first be certain whether he is a brave man or a coward. When he refuses, with a magnificent gesture, to let the men of his household accompany him to Saragossa—“Best go alone, not slay good men with me”—are we to take the words at their face-value? Is it not rather that he does not want witnesses to the treachery that he is plotting? It is, indeed. Only when, after deliberately working up the fury of the Saracens to explosion-point, he draws his sword and “sets his back to the trunk of the pine”, do we realise that, so far from being a coward, he is a cool and hardy gambler, ready to stake his life in the highly dangerous game he is playing. Even when at last brought to judgement, he remains defiant, brazenly admitting the treachery, claiming justification, and spitting out accusations against Roland. If his nerve fails him, it is not till the last moment when his own head and hands can no longer serve him, and he cries to his kinsman Pinabel: “I look to you to get me out of this!” There is a hint of it, but no more.

Ganelon, like all his sort, is a fluent and plausible liar, but this, too, we only realise by degrees. His first accusations of Roland are obviously founded on fact: Roland is rash, quarrelsome, arrogant, and his manner to his stepfather suggests that the dislike is not all on one side. The tale Ganelon tells Blancandrin (LL. 383-389) [13] about Roland’s boastful behaviour with the apple is entirely in character—invention or fact, it has nothing improbable about it. Ganelon’s offensive report of Charlemagne’s message (LL. 430-439) certainly goes far beyond the truth, but it may, for all we know, truly express what Ganelon believes to be Charlemagne’s intentions; even the further invented details (LL. 474-475) may only be “intelligent anticipation”. So far we may give Ganelon the benefit of the doubt. But when he returns to the Emperor’s camp and explains his failure to bring back the Caliph as hostage (LL. 681-691) by a long, picturesque, and circumstantial story which we know to be a flat lie from first to last, then we know where we are. And after that, we are not inclined to believe in the apple-story, or in Ganelon’s alleged wrongs, or in anything else he says.

Similarly, we may accept, and even admire, throughout the council-scene and the scenes with Blancandrin and Marsilion, Ganelon’s scrupulous deference and fervent loyalty to the Emperor. If nothing is too bad for Roland, nothing is too good for Charlemagne; this is the voice of the faithful vassal uplifted in praise of his liege-lord. But when the plot has been laid and is going well, then, as he rides homeward with Charlemagne, they hear the sound he never thought to hear again—the blast of Roland’s horn. “Listen!” says Charlemagne, “our men are fighting.” Ganelon answers with scarcely veiled insolence: “If any man but yourself said this, it would be a lie.” And when the Emperor insists, the insolence breaks out undisguised:

“You’re growing old, your hair is sere and white;

When you speak thus you’re talking like a child.”

There is in him neither faith nor truth nor courtesy; for all his wit and courage, he is rotten through and through. Yet perhaps he was not always so; he had won the love of his men, and the French held him for a noble baron; there must have been some good in the man before the worm of envy gnawed it all away.

Before the King stood forth Count Ganelon;

Comely his body and fresh his colour was;

A right good lord he’d seem, were he not false.

So the poet sums him up and leaves him.

[14]

The portrait of Charlemagne is partly stylised by a number of legendary and numinous attributes belonging to his status as the sacred Emperor. The holiness of the Imperial function, handed down from Constantine through Justinian to the emperors of the West, hovers about him still. He is of unfathomable age—or rather, he is ageless and timeless, for his son and nephew are both young men: his flowing white beard, his strength unimpaired by “two hundred years and more”, are hieratic and patriarchal in their symbolism; he is God’s vicegerent, the Father of all Christendom, the earthly image of the Ancient of Days.[2] Angels converse with Charlemagne, and the power from on high over-shadows him.

Beneath this larger-than-life-size figure, we discern another: the portrait of the ideal earthly sovereign—just, prudent, magnanimous, and devout. In Charlemagne, the poet has done his best to depict for us the early-mediaeval notion of what we should now call a “constitutional” monarch. He “is not hasty to reply”; he does nothing except by the advice of his Council; he has (it seems) the right to veto any proposition before it has been put to the vote, but once it has received the unanimous assent of the Council, he is bound by that decision, whether he personally approves of it or not. In this, he is carefully contrasted with the Saracen king Marsilion, who conducts most of his negotiations himself, and is at one point restrained with difficulty from throwing his javelin at an ambassador; and also with the Emir Baligant, who, when he calls a Council, merely announces his own intentions, whereupon the councillors advise him to do what he has already said he is going to do. By some writers, Charlemagne’s constitutional behaviour has been reckoned as a sign of weakness; but I do not think that is at all what the poet meant. He appears to consider it very proper conduct in a monarch, though we may be doubtful about the extent to which it reflects the behaviour of any actual monarch in the [15] feudal era. It comes much nearer to that of an English sovereign to-day, giving his assent to a bill duly passed by both Houses; he may doubt its wisdom, but he will not for that reason withhold his signature.

Beneath all this again is the personal character of Charlemagne—his stately bearing, his courtesy, his valour and strength, his deep religious feeling, his friendship for Naimon, his warm affection for his nephew and the Peers, and all the “young bachelors” whom he calls “his sons”. He rides and fights among his barons as the greatest baron of them all.

Here too, I think we must not reckon it weakness in him that he is overcome by grief for Roland’s death, that he faints upon the body and has to be raised up by the barons and supported by them while he utters his lament. There are fashions in sensibility as in everything else. The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin. By the standards of feudal epic, Charlemagne’s behaviour is perfectly correct. Fainting, weeping, and lamenting is what the situation calls for. The assembled knights and barons all decorously follow his example. They punctuate his lament with appropriate responses:

By hundred thousand the French for sorrow sigh;

There’s none of them but utters grievous cries.

At the end of the next laisse:

He tears his beard that is so white of hue,

Tears from his head his white hair by the roots;

And of the French an hundred thousand swoon.

We may take this response as being ritual and poetic; grief, like everything else in the Epic, is displayed on the heroic scale. Though men of the eleventh century did, in fact, display their emotions much more openly than we do, there is no reason to suppose that they made a practice of fainting away in chorus. But the gesture had their approval; that was how they liked to think of people behaving. In every age, art holds up to us the standard pattern of exemplary conduct, and real life does its best to conform. From [16] Charlemagne’s weeping and fainting we can draw no conclusions about his character except that the poet has represented him as a perfect model of the “man of feeling” in the taste of the period.

Compared with the subtleties of Ganelon, Roland’s character is simplicity itself. Rash, arrogant, generous, outspoken to a fault, loyal, affectionate, and single-minded, he has all the qualities that endear a captain to his men and a romantic hero to his audience. He has no subtlety at all; other men’s minds are a closed book to him. He refuses at first to believe in Ganelon’s treachery, and when the truth is forced upon him he can only suppose that the crime was committed “for gold”. He never really understands why Oliver is angry with him, nor how much his own pride and folly have contributed to the disaster of Roncevaux. He has the naïve egotism of an Achilles, which will wreck a campaign for a piece of personal pride; but he is a much pleasanter person than Achilles. He never sulks or bears a grudge; he endures Oliver’s reproaches with a singular sweetness of temper. Beneath all his “over-weening” there is a real modesty of heart, and a childlike simplicity of love and loyalty—to God, to the Emperor, to his friend, to his men, to his horse, his horn, his good sword Durendal. His death-scene is curiously moving.

But the picture that remains most vividly with us is that of gay and unconquerable youth. No other epic hero strikes this note so ringingly:

Through Gate of Spain Roland goes riding past,

On Veillantif, his swiftly-running barb;

Well it becomes him to go equipped in arms,

Bravely he goes and tosses up his lance,

High in the sky he lifts the lancehead far,

A milk-white pennon is fixed upon the shaft,

Whose falling fringes whip his hand on the haft.

Nobly he bears him, with open face he laughs;

And his companion behind him follows hard.

The Frenchmen all acclaim him their strong guard.

On Saracens he throws a haughty glance,

But meek and mild upon the men of France,

To whom he speaks out of a courteous heart—

[17]

So he rides out, into that new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged), but which has perhaps a better right than the blown summer of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth. It is a world full of blood and grief and death and naked brutality, but also of frank emotions, innocent simplicities, and abounding self-confidence—a world with which we have so utterly lost touch that we have fallen into using the words “feudal” and “mediaeval” as mere epithets for outer darkness. Anyone who sees gleams of brightness in that world is accused of romantic nostalgia for a Golden Age which never existed. But the figure of Roland stands there to give us the lie: he is the Young Age as that age saw itself. Compared with him, the space-adventurers and glamour-boys of our times, no less than the hardened toughs of Renaissance epic, seem to have been born middle-aged.

“Roland is fierce, and Oliver is wise.” Oliver is Roland’s “companion”—brought up with him, according to the practice of the time, sharing his pursuits and training—and he displays something of that blunt, hard-headed common-sense which is the traditional characteristic of the “hero’s friend”. Wisdom, in the sense of practical prudence, is a valuable, but not a showy or perhaps a very endearing quality. It is the disastrous Mary Stuarts of history, not the cautious and thrifty Elizabeth Tudors, who flame their way through the pages of ballad and romance. Oliver is a sounder soldier than Roland—more concerned with military necessities than with his own prestige. He mounts a hill before the battle to find out how many enemies they have to reckon with—an action which, by chanson de geste standards, scarcely becomes a gentleman; finding the odds unreasonable, he urges Roland to summon assistance—a thing which that hero considers to be beneath his dignity. He goes grimly and gallantly to a task which he knows to be impossible, but he cherishes no illusions, and is unromantic enough to feel no pleasure in the knowledge that “someone had blundered”. He has not Roland’s sunny disposition; he is capable of cherishing resentment, and when his forebodings have proved all too true, he has a regrettable tendency to say, “I told you so”:

[18]

“Companion, you got us in this mess.

There is wise valour, and there is recklessness;

Prudence is worth more than foolhardiness.

Through your o’er-weening you have destroyed the French;

Ne’er shall we do service to Charles again.

Had you but given some heed to what I said,

My lord had come, the battle had gone well,

And King Marsile had been captured or dead.

Your prowess, Roland, is a curse on our heads.”

Only too true. Is it a little ungenerous to rub it in like this in the moment of disaster? Perhaps; but it is very natural. Responsibility yoked with irresponsibility, however brilliant, has been known to speak its mind thus. A good many married women will sympathise with Oliver.

He has his own pride. It flashes out, sullen and embittered, when Roland, seeing the rear-guard reduced from twenty thousand men to sixty, proposes at long last to summon Charlemagne. “When I told you to do it, you would not; if you had, you would have saved the day and saved our men. To do it now (i.e. when there is nobody to save but ourselves) would be shameful.” The Archbishop intervenes, saying that although nobody can now be saved, Charlemagne can avenge them and give them all Christian burial. To this excellent argument Oliver submits in silence. He is a very reasonable young man.

The figure of Archbishop Turpin is “historical” in the same sense that those of Charlemagne and Roland are historical; that is to say, there actually was an Archbishop Tilpinus of Rheims at the end of the eighth century, but his portrait in the poem probably owes more to imagination than to fact. Not that it is an altogether impossible portrait—the warrior-priest is not unknown to Christian history; but Turpin is surely hors concours, both for prowess and for personal charm. The poet treats him with very special honour: in the first assault of the Saracens he is given a distinguished place, immediately after Roland and Oliver (LL. 1243sqq); in the second assault he has the honour of “opening the battle” (L. 1487); and he is the last left to stand beside Roland when all the rest are slain. Turpin belongs to an age, which, when the Song of Roland was [19] made, was already passing—an age when the secular priest lived very close to the laity. At a later period, Turpin’s slighting reference to the life of the cloister (LL. 1880-1882), would have come very oddly from an Archbishop’s lips; “evidently”, as Marc Bloch remarks, “the Gregorian reform had not yet got round” to our poet. Yet, when the French cry: “Well doth our Bishop defend us with his crook!” (or, more literally, “In our Archbishop the crozier is strong to save”), the words are meant in a double sense. With all his fighting qualities, Turpin is a good churchman and a good pastor. He is wise in council; with strong good sense and mild but firm authority he composes the quarrel between Roland and Oliver; his address to the troops is a model of brevity and simple piety, and he takes his priestly duties seriously; his last dying action is a heroic attempt to aid another. There is something peculiarly touching in Roland’s lament for him:

“Ah, debonair, thou good and noble knight!

Now I commend thee to the great Lord of might;

Servant more willing than thee He shall not find.

Since the Apostles no prophet was thy like

For to maintain the Faith, and win mankind.

May thy soul meet no hindrance in her flight,

And may Heav’n’s gate to her stand open wide!”

This is perhaps the right place at which to speak of the essential Christianity of the poem. It is not merely Christian in subject; it is Christian to its very bones. Nowhere does the substratum of an older faith break through the Christian surface, as it does, for example, in Beowulf. There is no supernatural except the Christian supernatural, and that works (as being fully Christian it must) only to influence men’s minds and actions, and not to provide a machinery for the story. And it is a Christianity as naïve and uncomplicated as might be found at any time in the simplest village church. These violent men of action are called on to do their valiant duty to the Faith and to the Emperor; and when they die, they will be taken to lie on beds of flowers among—strangely but somehow appropriately—the Holy Innocents, in a Paradise inhabited by God and His angels. They make their prayers directly to God Himself—no [20] saints are invoked, not even, I think, the Mother of God; it is as simple as that.

Simplicity does not mean ignorance. The poet is not likely to have been a monk or an ecclesiastic in major orders, but he was “clerkly” enough to be acquainted with the lections and liturgy of the Church, and his theology, so far as it goes, is correct. But like most of his Christian contemporaries he has only the vaguest ideas about the Moslem religion. For him, Saracens are just “Paynims” (i.e. Pagans) and therefore (most inappropriately) idolaters. They worship an “infernal trinity”, very oddly made up of Mahound (Mohammed), Termagant (a diabolic personage of obscure origin) and—rather unexpectedly—Apollo, who is in process of degenerating into the “foul fiend Apollyon” familiar to us from The Pilgrim’s Progress. The images of these “false gods” are carried before the Saracen armies, and worshipped on bended knees; when disaster overtakes the Paynim cause they are abused, and maltreated after the manner of savage fetishes. The “law” (i.e. doctrine) of “Mahound and Termagant” is contained in a book, though it is not clear whether the poet is aware of the existence of the Koran, or is merely supposing, on the analogy of the Bible, that every religion must have a sacred book of some kind. (That the ignorance was mutual may be seen by anybody who cares to examine the account of Christian worship and customs given in parts of the Thousand Nights and a Night.)

Some slight attempt is made to differentiate Oriental manners from those of the Occident. The Paynim King, Marsilion, holds his council lying down on a dais or divan, whereas Charlemagne sits upright on a faldstool (chair, or throne); the use of darts and other throwing-weapons is confined to the Saracen armies; and the description of the taking of Saragossa suggests that the poet had in mind the great walled cities of Moslem Spain, where the art of fortification was much more advanced than in Northern Europe. It is also perhaps significant that the Emir Baligant is made to promise his warriors not only booty but “fair women” as the reward of valour. Generally speaking, however, Moslem society is deemed to conform more or less closely to that of the West, and is credited with much the same kind of feudal structure. Nor is the [21] Christian poet ungenerous to the enemy. Marsilion is, of course, treacherous, and the autocracy of the Emir is contrasted with the “constitutional” monarchy of Charlemagne; but prowess and personal courage are plentiful on both sides, and though many of the Saracen champions hail from sinister and mysterious territories abounding in devils and sorcerers, they make no unfair military use of magical aids; it is all good, clean fighting. The great and chivalrous figure of Saladin had not yet risen up to compel the admiration of the Franks, but the reputation of the Moslem fighter stood high, and is ungrudgingly admitted:

From Balaguet there cometh an Emir,

His form is noble, his eyes are bold and clear,

When on his horse he’s mounted in career

He bears him bravely armed in his battle-gear,

And for his courage he’s famous far and near;

Were he but Christian, right knightly he’d appear.

Roland and his Peers are not merely overwhelmed by numbers; they are given foemen worthy of their steel. This is as it should be; you cannot make an epic out of a conflict where all the heroic qualities are on one side.

The battle-scenes are described with immense relish and, from our point of view, at rather tedious length. We must remember that for mediaeval people warfare was not only a calling but the greatest of all sports. They enjoyed the details of fights and the enumeration of the various warriors engaged as we to-day enjoy a running commentary upon a Test Match or a Cup-Tie Final, with biographical notes upon the players.

The fighting is all done upon horseback, and only the “noble” weapons of spear and sword are employed. There is no mention of foot-soldiers, or of the archers who played so large a part in the Battle of Hastings. This is partly due to the epic convention, but it is also historically true that at this period the most important part in a battle was played by the cavalry charge. Neither was it in fact very desirable to encumber an army with great numbers of infantry, especially in a foreign country; speed of movement was essential when long distances had to be traversed over few and bad roads, with poor facilities for transport and victualling.

[22]

Of the activities of the rank-and-file we are not told much, beyond that, in a general way, “the French” or “the Paynims” exchange good blows in the mellay; the emphasis is all placed on personal encounters between the leaders on either side. We shall notice the same thing in sober historical accounts of mediaeval battles. This, again, is not merely a convention, still less is it (as some writers would have us believe) the manifestation of an “undemocratic” spirit or a contempt for the common man. There was a very practical reason for it. Under the feudal system, it was the duty of every great lord to serve the King in battle, bringing with him so many armed vassals, each of whom in turn brought so many lesser vassals of his own, and so on down the whole scale of hierarchy. Each vassal was bound by oath of allegiance to his own lord and to his own lord only, “while their lives should last”; consequently, if a great lord was killed in battle, his followers were automatically released from their allegiance; they could—and some did—retire from the conflict and take no more part in it. Similarly, if he was taken prisoner or fled from the field, they were left without leader and tended to disintegrate.[3] Hence it was of enormous importance that a lord should lead his men boldly, fight with conspicuous bravery and (if possible) not get killed, or even unhorsed, lest his followers should lose sight of him and become discouraged. This is why Ganelon is so insistent that, if only Roland can be got rid of, the flower of the French army, most of whom are Roland’s vassals, will melt away; and this is why, when Marsilion is wounded and flees, the whole Saracen army turns tail. Similarly, when, in the final great battle, the Emperor Charlemagne and the Emir Baligant, lord of all Islam, meet face to face, the whole [23] issue of the war hangs upon their encounter. Baligant falls; and the entire Paynim army at once flees the field.

The poem is called The Song of Roland, but only the first half of it deals with the exploits of Roland himself. He dies (L. 2396) at the end of his great stand with the rear-guard against the treacherous assault of King Marsilion.[4] The remainder of the story is concerned with the vengeance which Charlemagne takes for his death, and for the slaughter of the other eleven Peers and the twenty thousand French who are slain with them. By the standards of the time, the tale would be left incomplete without the vengeance, and the name of Charlemagne would be left under a cloud, for to allow the slaying of one’s vassal or kinsman to go unavenged was held to be a very shameful thing.[5] But there is more to it than that; there is a question which concerns the whole scope and function of epic, and of the Roland’s right to bear that majestic title.