In Our Time - The Song of Roland

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss an early masterpiece of French epic poetry, from the 12th Century. It is a reimagining of Charlemagne’s wars in Spain in the 8th Century in which Roland, his most valiant knight, chooses death before dishonour, guarding the army’s rear from a pagan ambush as it heads back through the Roncesvalles Pass in the Pyrenees. If he wanted to, Roland could blow on his oliphant, his elephant tusk horn, to summon help by calling back Charlemagne's army, but according to his values that would bring shame both on him and on France, and he would rather keep killing pagans until he is the last man standing and the last to die.The image above is taken from an illustration of Charlemagne finding Roland after the Battle of Roncevaux/Roncesvalles, from 'Les Grandes Chroniques de France', c.1460 by Jean Fouquet, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Ms Fr 6465 f.113 With Laura Ashe Professor of English Literature and Fellow in English at Worcester College, University of OxfordMiranda Griffin Assistant Professor of Medieval French at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Murray Edwards CollegeAndLuke Sunderland Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham UniversityStudio producer: John Goudie

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, the song of Roland from the 12th century is an early masterpiece of French poetry. It tells of the Emperor Charlemagne's wars in Spain and how Roland, his most valiant knight, chooses death before dishonour,

heroically guarding the army's rear from a pagan. an ambush of hundreds of thousands as it heads back through the Pyrenees. Roland could blow on his horn to summon help, but this to his mind would shame sweet France and destroy his own reputation, so he would rather keep up this gory slaughter of pagans and Saracens until he is the last man's standing. With me to discuss the Song of Roland, I'm Miranda Griffin, assistant professor of medieval friendship at the University of Cambridge

and fellow of Murray Edwards College. Luke Sunderland, professor in the school of modern language and cultures at Durham University, and Laura Ash, Professor of English Literature and Fellow in English at Worcester College University of Oxford. Laura Ash, it's a stirring tale, 4,000 lines long. Can you summarise the plot? I'll do my best.

So, Salomein has been at war in Spain for seven years and the last remaining pagan king, Marseille, offers to submit to him. Roland suggests that his stepfather Gannelon be sent as envoy to this pagan king, and Ganylon is so enraged by this that when he gets there, he forms this plot with Marceal that Roland will be in the rear guard and that Marcile will ambush him with a much greater army. And when that happens, as you said,

Roland refuses to blow the horn to get Charlemagne's army to return and instead they fight to the death of everyone. And when Roland is about to die himself, he finally blows the horn to alert Charlemagne to what has happened. At which point Charlemagne then returns, there is great lamentation, but he's in time to slaughter the remnant of the fleeing pagan army. He then meets in battle another much bigger pagan army the following day and completely destroys them.

And then he returns across the Pyrenees to his homeland, taking with him the Saracen's queen Bramemond. And there we meet Ode, who was Roland's betrothed, who dies on hearing the news of his death. Gamelon is put on trial for treason and after judicial combat in which God proves his guilt, he is executed by being torn apart by horses. Bramond is converted to Christianity. and then finally Charlemagne is in his bedchamber at night and the angel Gabriel comes to him and says, I have another war for you and Charlemagne weeps. Well, that's 4,000 lines, brilliantly reduced,

but not reduced in the sense of being made, less just shortened. Thank you very much. Hi, Lauren. Can you tell us how and when he was composed and by whom? There was clearly a legend of Roland and of Charlemagne for a long time and there must have been many different songs and poems that just don't survive to us. This particular poem that we're discussing now, which is the canonical one that was discovered in the 19th century, is known as the Oxford Rowland because it's in an Oxford-based manuscript that was produced around between, say, 1120 and 1150.

In Norman French? Indeed. Well, it's in the French of England at that time, which is interesting, of course, for this great French national epic. It was definitely produced in England in the dialect. spoken here. And that poem therefore is a whole text that we're discussing, but who its author was, we don't know exactly when it was written, we don't know. The last line of the poem names Turoldus, as someone who told this story, but people are very wary of naming an author Turoldus. We're just not sure about that. I personally think it must have been written after

the First Crusade, which was from 1096 to 99. So that gives us quite a narrow window from about 1,100 to 1150. Was it great jubilation when this was discovered? There certainly was, yes. I mean, it was a huge discovery, I think, for French literature in the 19th century. This is something that Miranda will know a lot more about than I do. Yes, absolutely. In the 1830s, the French government is really interested in finding out about French literary heritage.

And a young scholar called Francis Michel is sent to Oxford, the Bodleyan where they know that there are manuscripts of great French literature. And he's reading through the manuscript, which we now know to be called Digby 23, and he finds this poem, what we now call the Song of Roland. And when he finds it, he writes this letter back describing the moment that he pieced this together and realised this must be the famous Song of Roland. that he's read about in various chronicles and says he cried out in the reading room of the Bodleyan Library

and I really like to think about that as an echo of Mongeau, which is Charlemagne's battle cry, kind of resonating through the years. What makes it such a performable poem? Well, this is a song, and we know very little about how, Chanson de Gest, which is the sort of text that this is, how they were performed. in the Middle Ages.

So we have to look to this manuscript, to the written form, to see if we can trace within it roots of that oral tradition. And one of the things that we can see is this is a poem that's organized into stanzas, into less. And those less, which is the French term for stanzas, they assinate. So each line ends with the same vowel sound.

So you can imagine this, being a kind of very incantatory, stirring sound as this was performed. We have, as I said, really scant evidence about how they were performed, but the evidence suggests that it was performed by singing each line to the same melody. So there's a sense of repetition there, which would be very engaging and stirring to the listener. repetition is also really key to the oral, what we call the oral style of this poem. When you're writing something,

you tend to report all the episodes in order. When you're telling a story aloud, you might come back and you might repeat, you might emphasise things that you really want your audience to understand. And that's exactly what's happening with the standards. of the song of Roland. So we have at moments of intense drama, such as the debates between Roland and Oliver

about whether Roland should blow the horn or not or during Roland's death. These stanzas that seem to tell us the same part of the action, but three times. And a comparison, which is really obvious, but completely anachronistic, is one of the cinema in which we see the same event happening from three different camera angles.

And you can imagine, again, an audience being really gripped by these repeated and slightly different descriptions of these extraordinary events, very often very violent or very inspiring. We hear that Homer has struck his blooming liar, as it were. The idea of an epic being something which is. sung, has dug deep into Western literature, was this self-consciously part of it? Absolutely. Roland all the way through is so concerned with his reputation. And the way that he thinks of his reputation being built and being perpetuated is via song. So at, as he rallies the troops of the rearguard as they ride towards almost certain

death, he emphasises to them that they mustn't have bad songs sung about them. And again, when he's debating with Oliver about whether to blow the horn or not, he says, we mustn't be sung about as cowards. We have to be sung about as heroes. So the form of the song and its heroes' reputations are intimately bound together in the song of Roland. This horn that you've talked about is, as I understand it, an elephant's tusk

cleaned out and blown as a horn which resonates throughout the hills and would call in help which he eschews for until the very very end. But one more thing before we move on, Miranda. What evidence is there for this event in some form or other having happened? Well, we do know that there was a battle at Transerval

in 778 and Charlemagne was there and so was somebody possibly called Roland and that's the extent of the resemblance between the historical events and the action of the song of Roland. We learn about the historical battle in a chronicle by an author called Einhardt who writes a life of Charlemagne but he's writing after Charlemagne's death,

probably well after Charlemagne's death. So he's... writing about this event five or six decades later, so not even this best account is by any means an impartial eyewitness account. So it's a slender thread that we tease out to get us to this epic. Luke Sondland, why was the idea of Charlemagne himself, the Emperor Charlemagne, so fascinating for storytellers at that time. He was the first Heller of an Empire crowned in their 800 and go on from there. The medieval fascination with Charlemagne comes partly from the importance of the real historical figure as emperor, as presiding over a great Christian empire that unites much of Western and Central Europe. And because of the cultural renaissance that he's associated with, so he's thought of as a moral and an intellectual leader who brings about important legal reforms, promotes correct Latin and correct worship. So you might think that that figure would be interesting enough in all his accomplishments.

but there's much embellishment in the narrative tradition that goes on after that. So in the Song of Roland, he's said to conquer Britain, which the real figure didn't. In the 12th century, a fictional crusading past for Charlemagne has developed. He didn't really visit Constantinople or Jerusalem, but he does in some of the later tales. It becomes a powerful myth for the Capitian kings of France, too, at a time when they are quite weak. And they portray him as their ancestor and use him as a figure who takes him. the Franks to their historical destiny as leaders of Christendom. But in other texts is portrayed very negatively. He's used also to think about aggressive, expansive kingship

that disempowers some of the barons around him. And in many other epic songs, he sparks feuds and rebellions. And those songs become popular in areas threatened by capetian expansion and in Italy, where the figure of Charlemagne stands for an aggressive imperial invader. The great ambivalence of the figure is really encapsulated at the end of some of the chronicle tellings of his life when the fate of his soul hangs in the balance in the images it's shown going up out of his body but angels and devils tug at it. He sinned greatly in waging war for much of his life. In the end, the fact that he founded so many churches leads to his salvation. And that image of the angels and devils tugging at his soul really symbolizes the power

of the figure to encapsulate the positive and the negative elements of rulership. Was there any consensus? What it took to be a great reader? What did they expect of a great leader? He's the holy Roman emperor. So he's not only taking on the great Roman Empire, which looms massively in the background for so long, but also the papacy, the holiness of the whole thing.

What did they expect? There are two constants in advice books for rulers in texts about kingship. First, they say kings must choose the right advisors. You can't rule alone. You have to make sure your advisor. by the right men. In the Song of Roland, we see this process go wrong. Both Ganlon and Roland advised Charlemagne and he accepts their advice and in both cases it's part of the disaster. And that corresponds to the problem that advisors will use the opportunity to advise the king

to pursue their own grievances and their own agendas. The other great duty is that kings must ensure justice. Kings have to be just in their own personalities as well. They must study, learn and love the law, and then they must be able to act as judge. So the law is an extension of the king's personality. It's a much more personal conception of how law works than we are used to. It really flows through these powerful individuals, and they are told in the advice books that they need to know when to show mercy, when wrongdoers can be redeemed, and when they must be punished violently.

Getting that right is the key to good rulership. But what territories did he rule? So it's much of modern France and modern Germany and parts of Italy as well. And then the territories in between that, so the low countries are part of his empire as well. He did, in fact, fight wars in Spain. As Miranda mentioned, is that the event at the heart of the Song of Roland is a historical one. Laura, we needn't be quite as rushed with you this time. He could have rolled...

So Roland ends up as being the man to be the rearguard. The Charlemagne has taken his troops back into France He's taken them back into France The pagans and Saracens are after them in great force What help had Roland had specifically to give Roland and his friend Oliver What help had they to give? Well this is at the nub of the debate

The really important debate The centre of the poem that Miranda was talking about This question of whether Roland should blow his oliphant And thereby changed the course of the battle By blowing his oliphant his horn he would have summoned Charlemagne back to help him. Exactly. Oliver says directly, blow your horn, Roland. Charlemagne will come back and then we will win this battle.

That's it. And Roland says, I'm not going to do that. I will not lose my name in sweet France. I will not have a bad song sung about me and so on and so on. And a long strand of criticism of the poem for a very long time was that this is a tragedy of hubris, that this is arrogance and brings about destruction. But I think there are many reasons not to see it like.

that. And they come down to what you just asked me, which is, well, what should have happened then? And the point is that he is commanding the rearguard and the role of the rearguard is to protect the army. And when he's nominated to the rearguard by Gannelin, everyone at that King's counsel reacts to this as a suicide mission. Charlemagne's first reaction is to call Gannelon a devil, diablo. He called him a devil because Roland was a favourite of his and he knew that Gamelin was actually sentencing him to death. I think that's pretty clear. I think it's very clear that they all know this is massive

danger of death. And so when the army arrives, numbers are bandied around all the time and elsewhere in the poem, we're told that there are 40,000 of this and 50,000 of that, but these are very stable numbers. We're told that Roland and Oliver and the 12 peers, the other leaders, have with them

20,000 francs, and they are set upon by 100,000 pagans. And then this battle plays out very strictly saying to us, the Franks almost succeed. You know, they are all dead by the end, but there is only a remnant of the pagan army left and it's in retreat, it's in flight. But the point about this then is, should Roland have blown his horn? Well, then the rest of the army would have come back, then there would have been a pitched battle. But I think it's clear that it would not have had

necessarily a predictable outcome. And one of the ways you can tell that Oliver's argument might not be something that we should put absolute store by, is that he uses the same arguments that Gannelon, the traitor, uses to the pagan king Marcile. So Ganylon persuades Marcile to this plan by saying to him, if you kill Roland, Roland is Charlemagne's right arm. Charlemagne will then be helpless. Then he will have to stop fighting wars.

Then he will go away. And so when Oliver says to Roland, if we all die here, Charlemagne will lose his best supporters, will lose his right arm, he will fail, France will be shamed. I think we should be queued up to notice that this was the traitor's argument. And I think the point about Rowland's decision is that he knows he's going to die. Indeed, he knows they're all going to die.

And the poem doesn't stint on the tragedy of that, the sorrow of that, the lamentation. I mean, the scenes where he looks at the hills and he looks at the corpses of his men whom he loves and the conversations between them on the battlefield as they talk about how they know their days are over. This is it, but they will fight to the death. And the point is all of that is the price paid because that is the position they've been put in. And we need to notice two things above all. One is that Roland's soul is taken to heaven by the angel Gabriel when he dies, which is as strong a sign of approbation as any poet could offer in this era.

And secondly, of course, Roland's death and the destruction of the rear guard in the past is the event that then leads to Charlemagne's complete. conquest of Spain, his total destruction not only of Marseille's army, but then of the superior army led by Balagant. And therefore, I think tragic, sorrowful, awful as it is, and as much pain as it causes, Charlemagne above all, we need to understand that this terrible action was indeed the right action. Thank you very much. Can we get down to this now, Miranda Griffin? It is extraordinarily gory. It is extraordinary violent. And people with their swords, they give their swords names.

They slash the top of somebody's helmet. It goes right through the helmet, through the head, through all the armour, right down to the saddle of the horse. And he goes on and on. And also, the naming of names, which is fascinating, they don't just kill anybody. They kill a particular knight or count from the French, from the Saracens and the pagan side.

Yes, I mean, it really is incredibly violent. and that's also, I think, part of this poem being something to be performed. You can imagine a minstrel invoking these violent deed after violent deed. So we start with one night comes along and he makes a boast and then the night from the opposing army comes along and he makes a boast. And then actually in very kind of orchestrated, very clearly designed ways, the two knights fight each other. And it's almost choreographed the violence.

Each limb of each knight is isolated. It's almost like a dance, but the elements which are being repeated are blood and bone and cutting people in half. And we kind of return to these refrains of the red blood on the green grass. The poet revels in it. They talk about these gorgeous battle.

I mean, it's one of the words they use. And it's a delight in the fury of it and the splendor of it. Not just performance. You've talked about it if it's performance. This is real people being halved in cutting two and that sort of thing. Absolutely. And these become elements of the song which contribute towards Roland's reputation as an extraordinary warrior. So in a sense, this violence, it's shocking to us as modern readers.

It's horrific. But it's also conveying something about the reality of medieval battles. And all of this is grist to the mill to a song which is cementing Roland's place as a hero of the French nation. Luke Sutherland, why do objects take such a central role in the story? For instance, Roland's sort, he calls his salt, is it? Durandau, and he keeps referring to it, almost like a companion, and he has a conversation with it towards the end of his life, thanking it and blessing it and so on. There was a sword, then there are gloves, and then there's the olephant, or that, the horn. The sword has an interesting backstory, which we see in another epic song, Roland conquers the sword from the Saracen enemies.

It corresponds to the fact that Arab-made swords had a very high market value in the Middle Ages, because they were technologically advanced, they were beautifully made from materials. that were precious. It also has symbolic and political value for him. Swords in medieval culture were often passed on from one ruler to the next, symbolising continuity and legitimacy. So for a sword to be taken from one side and to go over to an enemy side, symbolises the power of that culture over the enemy culture. Roland also keeps relics in the hilt of the sword. And so he's desperate to destroy, he's desperate for it not to fall into Saracen hands at the end. And when he dies, he places the sword and the oliphon under him. The oliphon, of course, we've evoked already the fact that he won't blow it to call for help.

He does blow it when it's too late for the help to save his life. And as he blows it, it ruptures a vein in his head. So the horn symbolises his desire to shape the narrative of how he dies as well. The glove is an interesting thing in medieval culture too, because giving the glove symbolizes delegating authority. So a king would give a glove and the baron who takes it then accepts the mission that the king is trying to bestow upon him. That happens in the song early on. We see Ganylon takes the glove from Charlemagne to accept the mission to go and take the message to the Saracens, but he drops it, which hints at the trouble to come.

And at his death, Roland holds up his glove towards heaven and the angel Gabriel comes down and takes it. potentially scandalous there because normally it's the superior figure who offers the glove to the inferior one, but there it's Roland who holds it up to heaven, which shows again how he's writing his own narrative, positioning himself as God's servant and God's martyr. Laura, the commandment says, thou shalt not kill, one of the ten. Yes. So why does the poem celebrate Christian knights who were killing people all over the place? Well, this is why I think that this version of the poem must post-date the First Crusade.

Because absolutely the church was left for the problem in the early Middle Ages that it had to somehow reconcile the reality of the world around it and the world in which it was embedded with this command against violence from Christ. And so there's a lot of idealisation of Old Testament heroes who are allowed to make war, but that doesn't get to the heart of the problem. And knights were still told that they were effectively going to hell for committing violence. As we heard from Luke talking about Charlemagne's soul hanging in the balance. But after the First Crusade, knights and the warrior aristocracy generally just leapt upon the idea that there were kinds of violence which could save your soul.

And it is everywhere in this poem. So Archbishop Turpin, who noticeably is an archbishop but basically is just a knight like all the rest of them and slaughters just as many people, tells them all at the beginning of the battle, you are all going to die as martyrs, you are all going to go to heaven. and this clearly just fires the violence in new ways that matter immensely. And I was thinking as Miranda was talking about the back and forth of battle that characters from each side boast and then enact their violence with greater or lesser success. This is all part of what becomes a grand judicial combat where the Christians can prove that they are in the right

by committing their violence more effectively. You know, Christians are right, pagans are wrong. Exactly. That is what is declaimed and repeatedly declaimed. We are in the right. Christians are right, pagans wrong. Noticing, of course, that it's not Christians are good, pagans are evil. This is about having the right law, the right adherence, because of course the idea of conversion has to be there. But no, this sense of how violence could be good for your soul is absolutely the driving force at the heart of this poem because it was a force that had only recently been. unleashed and it had been leapt upon by thousands and thousands of people who had gone to the Holy Land to fight in the Crusades. Maranda, back to you, Roland tells us, as I've said, Christians are right, pagans are wrong. How does Ganlon fit into this? A Christian who betrays

Christians to the pagans? Yeah, Ganelon is the most complex character in the song of Roland. The bar maybe isn't that high because Roland, Oliver, Charlemagne, the 12 P and are so dedicated to France. Gannelon really tries to be everything to everyone, even though his first introduction into the text, he is described as Gannelon, who was the traitor. So it's no surprise when he then goes on to betray the Franks to Marseille.

But in the opening scenes, when Charlemagne and the other nights are discussing the negotiations that they need to undertake to affect this peaceful withdrawal from Spain, Ganylon's rhetoric is really interesting because he speaks in really quite long sentences that extend over the ends of lines elsewhere in the poem

these ten-syllable lines tend to be kind of discrete units and you don't have more than one idea per line and you don't have more than one line per idea but Ganylone is really quite wordy and he uses the subjunctive to try to imagine hypothesis And then when at the end of the song, when Charlemagne's had him brought back to France in disgrace, he tries this on again. And he argues that he's not actually a traitor to Charlemagne and to France. He says, well, it was just a quarrel with Roland with my stepson.

This was, it was a family matter, not a national crime. And what's really interesting is that the barons, Luke was just saying that a king needs his faithful advisors. and these barons who are the faithful advisors agree with Ganylon initially and say, yeah, that's absolutely right. Roland's dead. Ganylon had a quarrel with him. We'll just move on.

But Charlemagne at that point is so overwhelmed with grief and anger at Ganylon and does see this as a betrayal of the Franks as a whole that he insists on a trial by single combat. Luke, we don't really have any. internal monologues in this poem. Do you think this is a weakness? No, I don't. The 19th century scholars who praised these songs

for their stirring qualities and wanted to make them a national epic, as Miranda mentioned, also labelled them as somewhat primitive. But what we in fact see in the songs is that the positions of individuals are fully spelled out. They're just expressed outwardly.

So characters step up to speak at the King's Court. They always present themselves in terms of their allegiances, an eminities, their desires for justice, recognition and status. This corresponds to historical practice that what you would do when you wanted justice for grievance is you would angrily state your position at the King's court. We see Gannon do that in a speech at the start. He recalls his Roland's stepfather. He states his anger at being nominated to take the message to the emir, and then he swears a vendetta against Roland. And he returns to that idea at the end to justify what he did. So we might

think as modern readers that explorations of the thought processes of characters make a text more sophisticated. But I think these songs are just interested in a different kind of complexity that comes from the fact that individuals have different desires at a political level that can't be reconciled. Couldn't we also say that interiority of that kind is represented differently at moment? So the similar, the laces that tell the same event more than once that Miranda mentioned at the beginning, sometimes do something really dramatic, which is they tell you the same event twice, except both things can't have happened. So when Gannelon nominates Roland to the rearguard, we have two in a row that say, when Roland heard he was nominated, he spoke nobly and said,

of course I will fulfil this mission, did you think otherwise? And then the next one says, when Roland heard that he was nominated, he turned to his stepfather and said, you filthy son of a whore. And these things can't both have happened, we assume. And therefore what we're seeing is kind of an inner monologue represented outwardly as two different versions of the same event. Roland's nomination of Gannelin in the beginning is an absolutely astonishing studied insult because what Charlemagne had just done was say, I'm not sending anyone valuable on this envoy. And then Roland says, oh, well, I can think of someone. How about my stepfather? And so Gamelon's rage is very readable as long as you understand the undercurrents of what's

going on in this otherwise very ordered, ritualised conversation exactly of the kind Luke was describing. Same with you, Laura. This a lot of it depends on doing the right thing in the poem, fulfilling your part, let's say, in the social system. Can you develop that? Yeah. The key value, and it's used as a noun for something impressive, is vassalage.

So this is about being a vassal, a vassal to a lord. and this is an agreement, a bond, which is emotional and feudal and practical and social. And it's about the fact that your lord will protect you and you will fight for him. And that loyalty matters absolutely. And then, of course, there's obviously horizontal loyalty between the peers and so on. But what's really striking about this is we have a whole cluster of words that talk about how this protection works. And one of these words is garant, which is our word guarantee, guarantor. and the ultimate guarantor is your lord.

And so there are moments when during the battle they will sell to each other. You have no protection here. You have no guarantor here. But what's striking is that the difference between the pagans and the Christians is that the ultimate guarantor for the Christians is, of course, not even just Charlemagne, but actually God himself. And there's a key moment in the midst of the battle when the Franks realize that they're all going to be slaughtered,

and they beg Roland and Oliver to be their garant to protect them. And Archbishop Turpin says to them, we're all going to die here today, but one thing I can guarantee to you, same word, you will end up in paradise. And this is the final assertion that what backs the Christian rightness that we keep hearing about that keeps being proven is that they are ultimately protected by God,

whereas the pagans are ultimately not protected at all. And that then is the flaw at the heart. of everything that they do. Miranda, how does the poem present Muslims here? The foe at the initial battle of Ronsevo were not Muslims, they were Basques. And so this is a really crucial change that the Song of Roland makes to this historical event. Laura's mentioned already the importance of the Crusades, and this change of foe really then made.

Shalemain into not just a defender of France, but a defender of Christianity. It's really, really important to say that Saracens, which is the term that's used in the poem, to talk about this collection of foes, is a term which actually has nothing at all to do with medieval or modern Islam. It's a fiction. It's a fabricated label for a group of people who are loosely understood not to be Christian and even more loosely understood to be Muslim. But the way in which they're depicted is really blasphemous. And actually the Saracens are imagined as a distorted image of Christianity. So, for instance, they're depicted worshipping three gods in a kind of warped version of the Trinity.

And they're also depicted as worshipping idols, which of course is entirely counter to any practice of Islam. The way they're depicted these pagans, again, there's a real variety within the camp. So some of them are extremely handsome and chivalrous. And the narrator says things like, what a shame that he wasn't a frank. He would have been a great baron if only he was a Christian. So they're a worthy foe from that point of view and almost indistinguishable from the Christians. But on the other hand, we have other pagans who are depicted in terms which are reminiscent of animals or demons. There's one that lives in a land where the sun never shines. And a lot of them, I mean, it's not very subtle the way they're depicted.

A lot of them have names which start with the prefix mal or bad. So, you know, kind of that sense of evil is really being underlined there. Thank you very much. Luke, this firm is part of what's been called the matter of France. France, can you tell us what that means? So that designation comes from another epic song where the author speaks about there being three great matters, that's three great sets of historical narratives.

And those are Rome, ancient Roman history. Britain, the matter of Britain is the narratives of King Arthur, and then the matter of France is the narratives about Charlemagne and other Carolingian kings. So France in that label goes beyond the kingdom of France reflects that broader Carolingian Empire. And broadly the idea of three matters reflects a division of history into eras which each have a great empire and a great ruler. So you've got Caesar's Rome, Arthur's Court in Britain, and then Charlemagne's France. It also reflects an idea that history

is a set of moral lessons from which we can still learn. So in the matter of Rome, you see characters from antiquity portrayed as though they were medieval knights. The writers of those text are not concerned so much with historical difference as with making the past vivid so that we can learn the lessons from it. We're seeing that in the Roland as well. We've evoked already how vivid it makes the events. It's very interested in moral categories that are very emotive to categories like hero and traitor. It seems to want to draw us in to a shared emotional experience with historical actors and to make history something that's alive for us and that we can experience. Laura, there are very few women in the poem, but they catch the listeners

attention. Can you tell us how? Yeah, there are two women in the poem. There is Bramimonde, the pagan queen, and then there is Ode, who is Roland's betrothed. So Ode is only mentioned when Oliver in the heat of rage with Roland says, you'll never marry my sister, and that's that. And then it is an incredibly moving scene when Charlemagne returns, and she comes to him and asks, where is Roland, who promised to marry me? And he says, sister, dear friend, you ask me about a dead man. and it's an astonishing scene.

She then says, I cannot live while Roland is dead and dies immediately. And it's moving. Clearly, the first people who read this poem felt that that wasn't enough. And in later versions of the same poem, her part is expanded to about 800 lines. Bramamond, meanwhile, is brilliant fun. She is a pagan queen who, when things start going very, very badly for her husband, Marceal, tells it like it is and starts shouting at her husband and leads. a load of her people to start smashing their pagan idols,

obviously this invented religion that Miranda was describing that is described to these fake Muslims. And she, when the new, when the emir turns up and says, okay, I'll deal with Charlemagne. She says, huh, right, okay, I believe you. And then finally, she is the one who gives the keys of the city to Charlemagne. And it's striking that she is there to voice all the pagan distress and torment because there isn't another character on that side of things that can express that kind of dissent.

But it's then a little depressing that once she's taken into Charlemagne's world and we're told she's converted to Christianity, but we never hear from her again. It's all on her behalf from Charlemagne. And we understand that there's no room for kind of vocal female descent in Charlemagne's world. Miranda, can you tell us how this, how did it become the French national epic in the 19th century? It's really fascinating to think of this cornerstone of French culture of being a text that was written in England in the French of England and preserved in a manuscript in Oxford,

which just shows how intertwined the histories and languages and cultures of France and England were in the Middle Ages. There's a story which is told in various chronicles of a minstrel called Taifere riding into battle with Duke William of Normandy, aka William the Conqueror, in Hastings in 1066. And as they ride into battle,

Taifair sings to the troops a rallying, inspiring song about Roland and Oliver and the Great Deeds of Charlemagne. So this is a song which has an important place in French history and French national pride. And I've already talked about

Franciscille discovering it. But then later in the 19th century, in what's a very turbulent and difficult time in French history during the siege of Paris in 1870, an eminent medievalist scholar called Gaston Paris gives a series of lectures at the College of France. And the title of these lectures is the Song of Roland and French nationality. And it's not hard to imagine how poignant and powerful these stories. stories must have been in the dying days of the Franco-Prussian War. And then 10 years later, by 1880, the Song of Roland is on the French national curriculum. So we've got generations of schoolchildren growing up with the tales of the heroic deeds of Roland and Oliver.

And it really takes its place as a really important reference point in French national identity, despite or perhaps because of its links over the channel. No, can you add to that? Can we finally tell, what's the status of the Song of Roland today? It remains important today to France's self-articulation as a nation. It's been set many times over recent years as the medieval text on the national teacher training program. Often French people, if they know one medieval text, this will be it. It remains stirring to this day.

It's part not just a French cultural history. It's part of the culture of medieval England, as we've already evoked. It's part of Italian culture. Relevant more broadly to European culture. In fact, if you go to the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, you can see there's a statue of Roland there attached to the legend that he helped defend that city against invaders as well. So to look at it today is to appreciate why it's inspired people throughout the Middle Ages, through that kind of 19th century revival and why it remains so powerful now in its aesthetics. Any other last comment from you, Laura, or you Miranda? It's just a wonderful poem. The idea of depictions in different art forms, the window in the cathedral of Chartre,

where there's a window that depicts the life of Charlemagne, and there's a panel in that window, which depicts Roland's death. And what's really interesting in that window is that Roland is shown with a halo. So he really is within this cathedral, being represented as a martyr or a saint. Well, thank you all very much.

That was absolutely fascinating. Thank you to Miranda Griffin, Laura Ash, Luke Sunderland, and to our studio engineer, Jars Aspen. Next week we look to the stars with the innovative astronomers, brother and sister, William and Caroline Herschel in the mid-18th century. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now

with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what I think is so important is that actually there is a sense of repetition and of ritual that we talked about. But actually there's real development as well. And there's a sense of violence becoming worse, becoming more extreme. There's a clear ranking of characters as they die very much like in a modern horror film. But there's also even in the early stages, there's almost grim humor. So there's a moment when Oliver first rides into the frame.

and is using his spear everywhere until he finally shatters it down to just a stick of wood. And Roland says to him, what are you doing trying to fight a battle with a stick? What are you playing at? Draw your sword. And Oliver said, I didn't have time. And you imagine this is actually rather a comic scene

early on in the battle before, of course, the sense of horror and destruction builds up as the violence gets worse. There's definitely a movement towards more violence as you go through the poem. I think the start of the poem is really interesting because you see this attempt to make peace between Christians and Saracens, which corresponds to something that really went on, that if Charlemagne's help was sought by some of the Muslim lords of northern Spain, who wanted help against the Emir in Cordoba.

And throughout the period, you have instances of Christians and Saracens trying to negotiate peace to make packs. rulers would often seek tribute from populations rather than converting them. So the poem shows... It's striking, Luke, isn't it? Sorry, I'm sorry to me as you were saying, that even in this poem, so early, there's an attempt to say, oh, well, obviously it's a Christian thing to make peace because you think on the face of it,

how can you simultaneously justify crusading violence against other faiths and then also make peace with them or broke a peace with them? And there's that moment when Ganylon speaks up in a sort of cowardly way saying he's offered peace, we should take it because otherwise we'll die. And the much more respected other figure says, no, well, he's offered peace so we wouldn't be being properly merciful if we didn't accept it. And so this attempt to say, no, it is properly Christian even then to make peace with another faith. Yes, I think it shows that possibility. And then the movement of the poem argues against it to say, well, no, that's not the right way to do. do things. Crusade is the right way to do things.

Well, that was one of the things I wanted to say about Gannelin, this question of how, if pagans are wrong and Christians are right, how can we have a traitor Christian? And the answer is, of course, proved by his conviction of treachery. So he argues, as Miranda said, I just had a private feud with Roland. I just sorted this out as is normal. We all know we live in this world. If I am offended, I must repay that offence. And the councillors sort of agree with him, although tellingly they mostly agree because they're scared. None of them wants to step up and fight against his champion in the judicial combat. But what happens when God proves it the other way is that we're told, no, Gannelin's crime was a crime against Charlemagne,

not just a settling of scores with Roland. And therefore, if it's a crime against Charlemagne, then what he has done is reject Charlemagne's garante, reject Charlemagne's lordship over him, which is in this poem the same thing as rejecting God and therefore becoming wrong. We could talk a little bit more, couldn't we, about divine intervention in the poem as well. Oh yeah, I didn't mention that God stops the sun in the sky.

You know, so there are so many moments where Charlemagne gets off his horse and kneels on the green grass and, yeah, praise for time. to get back so he's heard the horn but of course then he needs more time to get back over the narrow mountain passes in order not to save Roland and the rearguard but but to find their dead bodies and and he prays for for God to help him and and God does he stops the sun in the sky and there's also a sense isn't there when when the battle

is raging, unbeknownst, of course, to Charlemagne and the troops who are kind of pressing forward into France, that almost the whole of the land of France goes into mourning. There are terrible storms and the people of France don't know what's going on, but it's almost like the land does know what's going on and is manifesting this grief ahead of time. But it's so key that they, so we're told the people think this is it, this is the end of the world we're witnessing and we're told, no, they don't understand it's the death of Roland. And I find that perfect in its ambiguity because on the one hand, the death of Roland is so terrible that the whole world quakes. On the other hand, this is not the end of the world. That's the point.

It's like the sky, right, it's like the sky cracking at the crucifixion. I mean, I wouldn't want to push too hard on Roland being a Christ figure, but he is sacrificed to this higher cause and then Charlemagne goes on and completes victory. When you were talking about time, it reminded me that we hadn't mentioned that Charlemagne is more than 200 years old in this poem. And his beard has a starring role. He pulls on his long white beard and he weeps and he faints and he swoons. And Charlemagne's grief, I think, is the main base note of the poem. And we're actually supposed to understand that Roland has a much better deal

because he gets to heroically die and go to heaven. And Charlemagne, meanwhile, just cannot stop. He has to keep fighting God's wars on earth. Can I go back to the numbers? Do you believe the numbers? Can you go through some? There are 100,000. Supposedly, there are 100,000 Saracens in the ambush,

and there are 20,000 francs in the rearguard. And then when we have the next battle, there are sort of six divisions on each side, and each of them has something like 20 or 40 or 50 or 60,000. These numbers are not in the least realistic. They're quite common in medieval texts to talk about an army of 100,000, that that number seems to be to be fixated upon if you want to say an army was really big.

You said it was 100,000 men. So what would it be if it weren't 100,000? Have you any idea? Do you mean in 778 or in 1100? When this battle was supposed to be taking place, what realistically, as far as you can introduce, would it be in the numbers involved? Well, I'll pin my carless some ass and say a few hundred.

Really? I mean, it's interesting. In the Chronicle, it was clearly a very very, very embarrassing occasion. The detail is sparse, but the detail looks embarrassed. The detail is sort of, oh, and the baggage train was ambushed and there were heavy losses and it wasn't Charlemagne's fault. And you think right, okay. So clearly there was some kind of, and the scenery, the situation of the narrow passes and the vulnerability of any army trying to cross the Pyrenees is obviously central to this. But no, I mean, in terms of battles throughout the Middle Ages, you'd have sort of, sort of, you'd have sort of, of tens of maybe hundreds of knights and then many more people who aren't knights, people who have got what weapons they can find. You know, infantry is a bit of a posh name for them.

In more organised versions, you get archers and so on, but that's another matter. I think at this point, when they're talking about thousands and thousands, they just mean this was a great army, but we shouldn't imagine more than, I don't know, between the two sides, a thousand, 2000? Anyone else want to save me from my... Well, I mean, I think you're probably right because, I mean, again, if you think about the mountain passes, getting 20,000 men, you know, like that's just the rearguard. Getting them through those kind of narrow, rocky paths seems really very unlikely. And I suppose there's also a contrast, isn't there, between these huge numbers and then these series of one-on-one combats. we certainly don't get 20,000 versions of that kind of formulaic battle.

Is there a slightest echo of thermopylae? Always. I mean, it was certainly seen, wasn't it, as France's answer to epic? And that was one of the reasons it was so hailed and celebrated when it was discovered. by Francis Michel, it was not just about recounting a moment of French history. It's not really history, French literary history, but it's also about finding something in the literary heritage of France, which can precisely equal to the great battles of antiquity.

But I wanted to actually ask you, Miranda, is, because is it not problematic for this Song of Roland is French identity, French nationality, the poem itself so absolutely intertwines Frenchness with Christianity. And I'm thinking of modern France, of course, very specifically not doing that. Yes, it is. And I think what's interesting is that that's less of a problem in the 19th century. All right, well, thank you all very, very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

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