3 - Charlemagne ‘Appropriated’: The Middle English Tradition

Summary

Adapting the Anglo-Norman Inheritance: Themes and Concerns

THE enhanced emphasis on religious warfare discerned in the insular French-language tradition is decidedly to the fore in the English Charlemagne romances, which often take the opportunity to sharpen the confrontation between two opposed faiths. In the Middle English Song of Roland, for example, Roland's first encounter on the battlefield, where he kills Amaris, is clearly figured as a stereotypical combat between Christian and heathen, by contrast with the French tradition, where the issue at this point is exclusively the honour of France and Charlemagne. In the English version, Amaris challenges Roland as representative both of Charlemagne and of Christianity: ‘wher art thou, Roulond, leder of charles? | thy lay is fals, and also thy lordes’ (655–56). Having felled ‘that fals kinge’, Roland responds: ‘thy soule … to satanas I beteche! | thou shalt neuer greve man þat to god will seche’ (663–64). Similarly, whereas the Egerton Destruction de Rome has the Roman leader Savari encourage his troops with conventional thoughts of their wives and heirs and the fear of shame (245–9), in the Sowdone of Babylone Duke Savaryz's speech focuses instead on the battle as a proxy war between the Christian and Saracen gods:

Thenke yat Criste is more myghty

Than here fals goddis alle;

And he shal geve vs the victorie,

And foule shal hem this day bifalle.

(196–9)

The earliest of the Middle English adaptations of Otinel, the Auchinleck Otuel, specifically represents the climactic single combat between the converted Otuel and the Saracen Clarel as a trial of strength between their respective deities (1265–70). In fact, the prologues in all three Otuel texts (Otuel, Otuel and Roland, and Roland and Otuel) stress the conflict between heathen and Christian as their central concern, whereas in the French Otinel, in both manuscript versions, the prologue ends with the promise of a hitherto untold adventure of renowned Charlemagne. The English poems promise ‘bolde batailles … Þat was sumtime bitwene | Cristine men & sarrazins kene’ (Otuel, 4–6), tales of the doughty douzeperes ‘Þat wele couthe feghte with a Saraȝene’ (Roland and Otuel, 17), and stories of Roland's achievements defeating infidel opponents (Otuel and Roland, 15–17, 24–5).