It is nothing less than the Roman de Roncevaux, rhyming through assonance, as marches, corages, vaille, homme.… etc. but it is the Roman de Roncevaux in a manuscript from the beginning of the twelfth century, and each couplet ends with aoi, which you will explain for me; might it not be the cry away a fervent battle cry (cri d’élan sur l’ennemi)?18
This letter was soon followed by a more cautious report to Guizot.19 Here, too, Michel suggested the “AOI” “might be a kind of battle cry, and in the title he adopted for his edition—a title that appears nowhere in the manuscript—he made the connection to Taillefer’s lost battle song explicit: “One might also believe from the words Chanson de Roland that I wanted to create the impression that I think of the poem of Turold as being the one from which Taillefer sang fragments at the Battle of Hastings. I will not conceal that I am fully persuaded that the Norman minstrel’s song was taken from a chanson de geste; I would even say that this song could well be that of Turold.”20
Over the years the fascination with Taillefer and his performance has faded or lost much of its scholarly credibility, but in its broad outlines, Michel’s understanding of the poem in the Oxford manuscript remains in force to this day. This particular version of the poem, in its entirety, is imagined as a song, something that a minstrel might sing, chant, or recite. As Michel noted when queried on his imposition of the title, the work is clearly a chanson de geste and Roland its chief hero; the title is his addition but it fits.21
Michel realized that he had made an important discovery, but his scholarly edition was not intended for a general readership and gives little sense of the widespread excitement the Roland would generate or the role it would soon play in the canon of French literature. Others made the larger claims for it. The Roland was hailed both by scholars and by the popular press as a national epic—“perhaps our oldest, our true national epic.”22 As such, the Roland filled a major lacuna: without its own epic, French literature could never match the classical tradition; with the publication of the Roland, it could. The need to reach a broader public was soon recognized, and in 1850 François Génin published a popular edition with a translation, the first major step toward enshrining the poem as a literary classic.23 As Génin declared, “Henceforth people will not reproach French literature for lacking a national epic: here is the Roland of Turold.”24
The search for Taillefer’s song was not just about establishing a literary canon; it was part of a broader quest for a national literature to renew a languishing France. The social conflict of the Revolution and the demise of the First Empire brought a strong demand, often explicitly articulated, for poetry that would revitalize the country, restoring political harmony by evoking the lost glories and the nobler conduct of earlier times.25 Most nineteenth-century philologists, conservative Catholics and staunch Republicans alike, saw the Middle Ages as a period of simpler, nobler virtues. For them, the vigor of the simple, youthful age was matched by the vigor of a simple, youthful language, French before it became sophisticated. They extolled Old French poetry as a kind of folk art, a direct expression of the national spirit in a pure and original state, free of the corrupting influence of later civilization.26 The Chanson de Roland would offer the preeminent example of such simplicity. In his edition of 1850, Génin expressed openly the qualities both critics and philologists were seeking: “The essential character of the epic is grandeur combined with naïveté, virility, the energy of a man united with simplicity and the graceful ingenuity of a child: it is Homer.”27
The Chanson de Roland was, then, more than just a literary monument. Its editorial construction was part of the quest for national origins that dominated French Romantic philology; its subject, as Génin put it, “touches the very heart of the fatherland.”28 Gaston Paris insisted that while Old French literature could appeal to readers of the most diverse political temperaments, its recovery was nonetheless a unifying project inspired by piety toward the tradition of one’s ancestors.29 For Gautier, “True epic poems do not always treat of the struggle between two races, but they do always depend on the unity of the fatherland, above all its religious unity.”30 The Roland soon became a symbol of the very spirit of France. For Ludovic Vitet, writing in 1852, “Roland is France, in its blind and impetuous courage.”31 As the century progressed, this totemic value increased. The threat of German scientific industrialism in both the military and scholarly fields, culminating in the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, strengthened the tendency to see the Roland as an expression of the French genius for doomed gallantry.32 During the siege of Paris of 1870, Gaston Paris lectured on “La Chanson de Roland et la nationalité française” and called to his audience, “Let us make ourselves known as the sons of the men who died at Roncevaux and of those who avenged them.”33 Gautier in his edition of 1872 called the poem “France made man.” Writing “in the midst of the fatherland’s sorrows,” he drew attention to the poem’s early patriotism as a direct rebuke to the Germans:
Never, never, has anyone so loved their native land. Listen carefully, ponder what I am about to say, you Germans who are listening. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE XIth CENTURY. I have the right to tell those who today are choking my poor France just how great she was some eight centuries ago.34
The Roland was given the highest form of official sanction when in 1880 it was assigned to lycée students in seconde,35 In 1900 a teacher from the prestigious Lycée Henri IV echoed the praise of three generations of French philologists when he told his audience at the academy for staff officers at Saint-Cyr, “La Chanson de Roland is our Iliad”36
Sung Epic and the Séance Epique
From the moment of its rediscovery, the Song of Roland has been associated with minstrel performance; that is what it means to call it a song. Both its epic dignity as a French Iliad and its patriotic value as a repository of martial valor depend upon this classification. It has become an article of faith that the poem was recited by minstrels to largely illiterate knights in a series of linked sessions, so that over several days the audience might hear the poem in its entirety. Jean Rychner first suggested that these sessions might typically have extended for a thousand to two thousand lines, from dinner to dusk, and a figure in this range has been widely accepted.37 Ian Short, in a popular edition, sums up the consensus:
Transmitted by singers who specialized in recitation (that is, by jongleurs) the epic poems were declaimed to musical accompaniment and before an audience, in sessions of about a thousand or 1300 lines. They were jongleurs’ epics (épopées jongleresques) and intended to be heard, not epic poems for reading.38
This epic dignity was closely associated with a vision of what the poem was, how it was received, and by whom. In his edition of 1872, Gautier described a wandering minstrel reciting a heroic epic at length while the isolated baron, a man of simple faith, and his knights listen enthralled:
They saw themselves in these lines. This poetry was made in their image. It had the same passion for the Crusades, the same ideal or memory of French and Christian royalty, the same love for spilling blood and for a good thrust of a lance. Roland is nothing more, so to speak, than a sublime thrust of a lance (un coup de lance sublime) … in four thousand lines.39
Edmond Faral echoes the association of epic simplicity with oral delivery, describing the jongleur as a wandering light that illuminates the monotonous life of the knights.40 Faral recognizes that the jongleurs performed not just for knights but before all classes. He insists, however, that for that very reason they were obliged to stick to healthy old traditions and could not embellish, as later court-based minstrels could, so that their art retained its elemental simplicity.41 Later scholars such as Rychner, drawing on the work of Milman Parry, insist on the complexity of oral poetry rather than its simplicity but still maintain the connection between orality and epic.
A major shift in the attitude to the poem comes with the work of Joseph Bédier and his insistence that the poem is primarily the work of a single artistic genius rather than the amalgamation