The Song of Roland

Subtract a link and ask what goes. In the first two thirds nothing can: Roland names his stepfather Ganelon for the deadly embassy; Ganelon, wounded in his pride, names Roland for the rearguard; Roland refuses the troops Charles offers; Oliver asks three times for the horn and is refused three times. Take one away and the disaster has no cause. The repeated laisses are not redundant: they hold a decision still while it is made. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the Baligant episode. Its argument is real, that Roncevaux is one battle in a war of Christendom against all heathendom and that Charles himself must be tested in single combat, but it is made at great length through catalogues of pagan divisions, and the poem would stand without much of it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The poem states its disclosure in one line, “Rollant est proz e Oliver est sage”
“Roland is brave and Oliver is wise”, and does not choose between them. It shows that the ethic of honour, which forbids Roland to call for help lest “dulce France”
“sweet France” be shamed, is the ethic that kills the rearguard, and that the man who is right dies of the other’s virtue. A second disclosure is in the trial: Ganelon pleads that open vengeance on a man he had defied is not treason, and only Thierry’s combat establishes that service to the king overrides private feud, a public law born out of a feudal one. Held a tenth below the gate by the other half of the vision: “Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit”
“pagans are wrong and Christians are right”, and its Saracens are a mirror, not a people.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Elevation here is austere and frequent. “Halt sunt li pui e li val tenebrus”
“high are the hills and the valleys dark”: the line sets the rearguard in the pass and returns as a refrain of dread. The horn debate rises three times. The second horn scene is terror at full height: blood at Roland’s mouth, Charles hearing the horn thirty leagues off, Ganelon telling him it is only Roland hunting. Turpin, dying, goes for water for Roland and falls before he reaches the stream. Roland dies under a pine on a height, his face toward Spain, and holds out his glove to God. The sun stands still for Charles; Aude falls dead at the emperor’s feet. The Baligant battle runs lower, and that keeps the axis off the top.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The myth is built, not evoked, and it bears weight at every joint. Roland’s death is a Passion: a betrayal for gold by a man of his own house, the peers a company of twelve, the hill, the pine, the glove taken up by Gabriel, Michael and the cherubim bearing the soul to paradise. The sun stands still for Charles as for Joshua. Charlemagne is the patriarch king, white bearded, to whom angels speak in dreams, and who must fight the last battle himself against the emir of all heathendom. Durendal holds relics in its hilt, sword and reliquary at once. The archetypes stay particular: Roland is sulky, generous and wrong; Ganelon is a brave man consumed by a grudge, not a demon; Oliver’s rebuke is a friend’s. And the poem founded a myth that later centuries built on.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field it entered is partly lost, and that widens the doubt. Behind it lie Latin hagiography and liturgy, Latin epic in the schools, and almost certainly a vernacular tradition of Roland, oral and perhaps written; before it in French stand only short religious poems, the Eulalie and the Vie de saint Alexis. Against that field the turn is large: a vernacular heroic poem of four thousand lines, in a laisse used as a dramatic instrument, whose hero brings about the catastrophe by his own excellence and whose second hero is right against him. The stake is the double vision, a crusading poem that lets its hero be wrong and makes a martyr of him anyway. What cannot be measured is how much of form and story lost predecessors had already given.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The form is the knowledge. The laisse is a block, closed by its assonance, and the poem uses each block as a station: the action does not flow, it is set down in panels, and the panels can be repeated with variation. In the horn debate and at Roland’s death the same moment returns two or three times with a different emphasis, so that a decision is seen from several sides and time is held still, as in the liturgy or in a row of carved capitals. Parataxis does the same work in the line: deeds placed side by side, causes left unstated, the hearer left to judge. Turn this into continuous narrative, with motive explained and the joins smoothed, and the poem loses its sense of a judgment made in public, and with it the weight that lets Roland’s fault and his sanctity stand together without comment.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: nearly two centuries of hard return since the edition of 1837, which have not exhausted it. The questions stay open. Is the poem one poet’s work, as Bédier held, or the crystallisation of a tradition, as the oralists and neo-traditionalists hold, and is the Baligant episode integral or added? Is Roland’s refusal a fault the poem condemns, the right choice of a martyr, or both? What does the trial mean in law, what is AOI, who was Turoldus and what does “declinet” mean in the last line? Study of the repeated laisses and the formulas keeps yielding. Held below the deepest epics because its people have little inner life, and the rereader finds the same few great tensions rather than new ones.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The field is the vernacular literature of western Europe about 1100, which held almost no long secular poem. The force is high: the first great chanson de geste and in effect the model of its genre, showing a vernacular capable of epic and of tragedy. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: through the legend and its later versions the poem fathered the Matter of France, about a hundred chansons de geste, the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle, Konrad’s German Rolandslied, the Norse Karlamagnús saga, the Spanish ballads of Roncesvalles, and in Italy a line running through Pulci and Boiardo to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and down to the Sicilian puppet theatre, with the Roland statues of German market towns beside it. Since 1837 the Oxford text has been the founding text of French literature as taught. Held below 9.0 because so much of the reach passed through other versions while this text lay unread.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Survival over centuries, some nine of them. The form is whole and legible in its one manuscript of this version, with some lines lost or damaged and supplied by editors from the other versions; the charge on form is small, a tenth or so for the single witness and its gaps. Presence is the main charge. In the later Middle Ages the Oxford text was superseded by rhymed reworkings and prose, and it then went unread for some five or six centuries until its recovery and edition in 1837, though its legend stayed present across Europe without a break. Since then it has been edited, taught in French schools as the national epic and translated without interruption, but its reading leans toward school and academy. That places it in the band for a text long neglected, toward its upper edge, since the neglect ended long ago.

Score: 8.9 / 10

The command is of a severe instrument: the decasyllable with its fixed caesura, one assonance to the laisse, the formula and the epithet, all under exact control. The first two lines set the whole war down: “Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, / Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne”
“Charles the king, our great emperor, has been seven full years in Spain”. The timing of the first two thirds is masterly: each nomination answers another, the horn debate stands at the turn of the battle and the second horn scene at its end, and the peers die in a mounting order, Oliver, then Turpin, then Roland. Speech is spare and characterises: Ganelon’s flourish of the cloak, Roland’s laugh. Charged: the catalogues of pagan champions and divisions, and stretches of the Baligant battle where the formula runs without pressure. The assonance is not judged by ear and is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs: a world of vassalage under a God who judges and intervenes. Take the two most distant elements, Roncevaux, a tragedy of honour in a mountain pass, and the Baligant war, a cosmic battle of emperor against emir. They obey the same physics: loyalty owed upward to lord and God, angels carrying messages and souls, a sun that can stop, battle as judgment. The trial ends under the same law, settled by a combat in which God’s verdict shows in the outcome, and Bramimonde’s baptism and Gabriel’s last summons close the poem in the same register. Even the tension between Roland’s fault and his sanctity is held within it. Charged: the mirror world of the Saracens, built to the poem’s ideology rather than to its own law of particular people, and the more schematic register of the emir’s war.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Several orders held in one structure: the sacred, in angels, relics and a conversion; the state, in the emperor in council, the barons’ counsel and the claim of public law over private feud; war; the feudal bond and the bond of companionship between Roland and Oliver; kinship, in a stepfather and his stepson; love, in one figure, Aude, who has a few lines and dies; and the land itself as “Tere Major”
“the Great Land”. They are integrated, not listed: the trial joins family, law and the sacred in one scene. What is thin or absent is weighed as it is: inner consciousness, labour, the household, the natural world beyond the mountains and the sun, and women other than Aude and Bramimonde. Against most single works of its century it holds a great deal; against the widest epics, less.

Score: 8.2 / 10