9 - The Reception of the French Charlemagne Epic in Medieval Wales: The Case of Cân Rolant and Pererindod Chiarlymaen

Summary

Four Middle Welsh texts make up the Charlemagne compilation in Wales: three Old French works, the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople, the Chanson de Roland, and the Chanson d’Otinel, and the Latin work known as the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. Except for the Welsh Otinel (=WOtuel) all works are contained in eight manuscripts: National Library of Wales Peniarth MSS 5, 7, 8a, 8b, 9, 10, Cwrtmawr MS 2, and Jesus College, Oxford MS 111; the WOtuel is found in two of these, Peniarth MS 5 and Jesus College, Oxford 111. The manuscripts range in date from the late thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries.

The reception of the earliest of the Old French works into Middle Welsh, the Roland (Welsh Cân Rolant) and the Pèlerinage (Welsh Pererindod Chiarlymaen), respectively, will be the focus of this study. The time frame for the discussion begins prior to the dating of the translation of both works into Middle Welsh, which I posit to be in the first half of the thirteenth century; for Cân Rolant, I have concluded that its French source was a late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript, and my work to date on that aspect of the Pererindod suggests much the same for that text. A completed collation of all the manuscripts of Cân Rolant and the Pererindod, respectively, reflects that each text has basically the same stemma of manuscript filiation.

I suggest that both texts came into Wales under similar circumstances and conditions. Key to this hypothesis is the role of Reginald, king of Man and the Western Isles (1188–1226; d. 1229), whose name appears in a colophon for the Pererindod that survives in all manuscripts but two, this last due to lacunae. In the colophon, it says that Reginald had the Pererindod translated from ‘Rwmawns’ (‘Romance’; i.e. Old French) into Latin; I have proposed that he conceived of having this done not just for that text but for Cân Rolant as well in order to combine them with the Latin Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. The reference to Latin is in all probability a variation on the traditional appeal to that language as a guarantee of authority.