The Song of Roland

Overview

About four thousand lines in the Oxford manuscript, which is the oldest and best of the seven surviving copies and dates from around 1170. The poem itself is usually put at about 1100, and the last line names a Turoldus, who may have been the poet, the scribe, or a performer, and about whom nothing is known.

It is a chanson de geste, a song of deeds, composed to be chanted to a simple melody by a jongleur, probably over several sessions. The verse is decasyllabic and arranged in laisses, irregular blocks of lines held together by assonance rather than rhyme, each laisse a unit of narration. Sometimes the same event is told two or three times in consecutive laisses with slight variation, a technique called laisses similaires, which is not a mistake but the poem’s way of dwelling on a moment.

The history behind it is thin. In August 778 Charlemagne, returning from an unsuccessful campaign in Spain where he had been intervening in a quarrel between Muslim governors, had his rearguard destroyed in a pass in the Pyrenees by Basque mountaineers. Einhard’s biography mentions it in a sentence and names three dead, one of whom is Hruodlandus, warden of the Breton march.

Three centuries later this has become a campaign of seven years, a betrayal by a Christian traitor, an enemy who is Saracen rather than Basque, armies of hundreds of thousands, a miracle of the stopped sun, and a death attended by angels. The poem is what the eleventh century needed the eighth century to have been.

What happens

The betrayal. Charlemagne has conquered all of Spain except Saragossa, where King Marsile holds out. Marsile’s counsellors advise a false surrender: offer hostages, treasure and conversion, let the Franks go home, and abandon the hostages to their fate.

Charlemagne consults his barons. Roland, his nephew, wants to fight on, recalling that an earlier embassy was murdered. Ganelon, Roland’s stepfather, argues for peace and is supported. When the question of who will carry the reply arises, Roland nominates Ganelon.

Ganelon takes this as a death sentence intended for him, and the poem gives him a real grievance: the mission is genuinely dangerous, and Roland laughs. In front of the whole court Ganelon declares his hatred openly, which under feudal custom is the formal defiance that makes private vengeance legitimate rather than treacherous. This distinction is the entire subject of the trial four thousand lines later.

At Saragossa, Ganelon and Marsile arrange it: the Franks will withdraw, Ganelon will see that Roland commands the rearguard, and a hundred thousand Saracens will fall on twenty thousand in the pass.

Roncevaux. The rearguard, with Roland, Oliver, Archbishop Turpin and the twelve peers of France, enters the pass. Oliver climbs a hill and sees the Saracen army coming.

Three times he begs Roland to sound the oliphant, the ivory horn, and bring Charlemagne back. Three times Roland refuses, in almost the same words: he will not have his family shamed or sweet France disgraced, and he intends to strike a thousand blows with his sword Durendal. The poem gives its famous judgement in this passage: Roland is brave, Oliver is wise, and both are good beyond measure.

The battle occupies the centre of the poem and is told as a series of single combats, each described in the same formula, with the lance going through the shield and the hauberk and the body, and the man falling dead from his horse. Turpin fights and absolves the dying between blows. The Franks kill enormous numbers and are worn down.

When only sixty are left, Roland says he will blow the horn. Oliver, who is dying, refuses him permission, saying it would be a disgrace now and that Roland’s folly has killed them all, and it takes the Archbishop to reconcile them. Roland blows so hard that his temples burst.

Charlemagne, thirty leagues away, hears it. Ganelon says it is nothing, Roland hunting a hare. The Duke of Naimes says otherwise, Ganelon is arrested, and the army turns back.

Roland’s death. Oliver, blinded by his own blood, strikes Roland by mistake; they take leave of each other and Oliver dies. Turpin dies. Roland, the last alive, tries to destroy Durendal against a rock so that no pagan will carry it, and the stone splits instead of the sword. He lies down under a pine, facing Spain so that Charlemagne will know he died conquering, puts the sword and the horn beneath him, confesses, and holds up his right glove.

The glove is the crucial image. Offering the glove is the gesture by which a vassal acknowledges a lord, and Saint Gabriel comes down and takes it, and Roland’s soul is carried to paradise by Gabriel, Michael and a cherub.

Charlemagne’s vengeance. The emperor arrives, finds the dead, faints, and mourns. He pursues the fleeing Saracens, and God halts the sun so that the killing can be finished; the survivors are driven into the Ebro and drowned.

Then the second half. Baligant, the immensely old emir of Babylon, arrives with the forces of all Islam, and there is a second and larger battle, ending with Charlemagne and Baligant in single combat. Charlemagne is losing until an angel speaks to him, and he splits the emir’s head. Saragossa falls; Queen Bramimonde is taken to France and later converts sincerely, which the poem treats as the only conversion worth having.

The trial. At Aix, Ganelon is tried. His defence is precise: he never denied the act, he had declared his enmity to Roland publicly before the whole court, and what he did was legitimate private vengeance and not betrayal of the emperor. Thirty of his kinsmen stand surety for him, and the barons, who understand the argument, incline to acquit.

Thierry, a small and unimposing man, argues that whatever Ganelon’s quarrel with Roland, Roland was in the emperor’s service and therefore under his protection, so the act was treason. The matter goes to judicial combat. Thierry defeats Ganelon’s champion Pinabel, and God’s verdict is taken as given: Ganelon is torn apart by four horses, and his thirty hostages are hanged.

The last laisse has Gabriel come to Charlemagne in the night to summon him to help a Christian city in another land. The old emperor weeps, pulls his white beard, and says how weary his life is.

How to read it

Read a verse translation. Burgess in Penguin or Dorothy Sayers in the older Penguin both give the line-by-line movement; a prose version loses the formulaic rhythm, which is most of the effect.

Get used to the repetition rather than fighting it. The same blow, the same lament, the same refusal delivered three times in slightly different words: this is oral composition, and the pleasure is in the variation within the pattern, like verses of a ballad.

Keep the two virtues in view. Roland is brave and Oliver is wise, and the poem states this as a balance and then shows what happens when bravery decides. Nobody in the poem, not even Oliver, says Roland should have been a different man; they say what his being that man cost.

Take Ganelon’s case seriously. The poem’s audience did, or the trial would not be there. He is not Iago; he is a man operating inside a legal custom that permits declared feud, and the question of where private vengeance ends and treason begins was a live one in eleventh-century France.

Notice how the Saracens are drawn. They are chivalrous, brave, well armed, organised in twelves like the peers, and they worship a trinity of Mahomet, Apollo and Tervagant, which is a complete invention. The poem knows nothing about Islam and does not care to; the enemy exists to be the mirror image with the wrong religion.

And read Baligant’s arrival as a structural puzzle. Some scholars think the whole second war is a later addition, because the poem could end with the vengeance at Roncevaux. Reading it either way changes what the poem is about: a story of one man’s death, or a story of a world-war between two faiths.

Questions it raises

• Is Roland’s refusal to blow the horn courage or vanity, and does the poem distinguish them?
• Oliver says valour without sense is nothing. Why does the poem give him that line and still honour Roland above him?
• Ganelon declared his enmity openly. Is his defence good, and what does the judicial duel actually settle?
• A skirmish with Basque raiders becomes a holy war against Islam. What was the poem for at the time of the First Crusade?
• Turpin fights and kills and absolves. What kind of Christianity is this?
• Charlemagne is called by an angel to another war and wishes he could stop. What is the poem saying in its last four lines?