General Introduction

Summary

The chansons de geste

The three poems presented in this volume are representatives of the medieval Romance epic or chansons de geste, which were traditional heroic tales that flourished from the late eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Chansons de geste are long narrative poems in monorhymed or assonanced stanzas of unequal length, called laisses. The poems themselves ranged from as few as 870 lines (Voyage/Pilgrimage of Charlemagne) to over 34,000 (Lion de Bourges), and the laisses could be as short as three or four lines, or over a thousand. The word geste refers to the subject matter of the poems – the heroic deeds of an individual hero or the collective deeds of a family or clan. Chanson suggests a musical dimension for the genre. Although no extant chanson de geste manuscripts contain musical notation, evidence from textual and iconographical sources suggests that the earliest such poems were performed to the accompaniment of a vielle, which is a type of medieval fiddle. The origins of the genre are controversial, but they most likely began as oral poems recited or sung by professional entertainers known as jongleurs, then eventually came to be written down, beginning in the late eleventh century. The first written texts may have been taken directly from oral performances, but the later poems are essentially written products designed to imitate the formulaic style of the oral tradition.

Despite being set generally in the eighth and ninth centuries, at the height of the Carolingian empire, the poems are highly politically engaged and reflect the feudal realities of the time when they were first written down. The chansons de geste were instruments of both religious and social propaganda. This was notably the time of the great Crusades to the Holy Land (1095– 1291), led by powerful barons and the occasional king, so that conflicts between Christians and Muslims are a central feature. The crusading ethos called upon the European warrior aristocracy to defend Christendom against the military and cultural forces of Islam, and chief among those defenders was the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne (r. 768–814), who actually spent much of his reign fighting the Saxons in the north and the Muslims in Italy and Spain.