1 - Roland and the second death

Summary

Reading medieval French writing, one is struck by how widely known and how influential was the story of Roncevaux. Other chansons de geste return tirelessly to the subject; Roland's death is the foundational event of the cycle du roi, the group of around twenty chansons centred on Charlemagne's foreign campaigns. The conventional dating of the Oxford text to the end of the eleventh century makes it one of the earliest surviving works of French literature, while the rhymed tradition was still being recopied in the fifteenth century. Roland himself epitomizes a powerful and disturbing conception of heroism: that of a violence mesmerizing in its ferocity, its energy and its intimate connection to death. We might have little difficulty in accepting such destructiveness in a villain (such as Ganelon), but in a hero it requires more ethical exploration. Most discussions of the Chanson de Roland which recognize the hero's extreme violence have taken one of two paths. Many place it within cultural contexts – Christian, warrior (Germanic, feudal), or legal – said to consider such violence familiar and justifiable though lost to us today. Numerous others show the failings of Roland's moral or strategic judgement, considering the text either critical or tragic. Valuable though such readings are, I wish to concentrate on the heroic desires expressed in and by Roland. For his combination of high energy and activity with a magnetic pull towards death and general catastrophe is hardly unique, but typifies culturally significant notions of heroism and of the hero.