The Song of Roland

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1095

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: Epic Poetry and the Chansons de Geste

The Song of Roland is one of the earliest and most studied works of French literature. Though poets wrote in the French language prior to Roland, none of their works survive to the present day.

Roland participates in the tradition of epic poetry, a genre that accounts for some of the oldest and most influential works in the Western literary canon. Epics tend to be long narrative poems of supernaturally heroic deeds that culminate in the founding of a nation or national identity; these poems are often rooted in historical events that define a people’s identity or ethics. Moreover, typically, epic poets construct their works to be easily memorized for oral recitation. Roland’s repetitive structure suggests that its author intended it to be memorized and performed orally (See: Literary Devices). The surviving version of Roland is one of many written variants, all of which are likely based on an oral original.

Roland is one of many French chansons de geste, or songs of deeds. This mode of old French epic relates the events surrounding the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors. Like Roland, these poems focus on the superhuman deeds of particular heroes of French history. The popularity of chansons de geste during the Middle Ages influenced the developing genre of the chivalric romance. Chivalric romances, which came to prominence during the 13th century, continued to place emphasis on heroic deeds but prioritized narratives of love and courtly manners over those of militaristic nation-building.

Historical Context: The Battle of Roncevaux Pass

The Song of Roland recounts the 778 Battle of Roncevaux Pass, wherein a large force of Basques ambushed King Charlemagne’s rearguard after the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. Historians named the battle after the high mountain pass on the border of France and Spain. The Basque attack used this natural passageway as a choke point and slaughtered the entire rearguard, including its commander, Roland, and Charlemagne’s elite paladins. In total, about 3,000 Frankish soldiers died in the confrontation.

The Basque army was made up largely of guerrilla warriors. There were several motivations for the attack. Modern scholarship discounts Roland’s depiction of a Frankish informant advising the ambush. Instead, it suggests that the attack could have been the work of Lupo II of Gascony, who paid homage to Charlemagne but strongly opposed Frankish expansion. However, the most likely motivation for the ambush was Charlemagne’s destruction of the Basque capital, Pamplona.

As Roland presents events, the conflict between the French and the Basques was religiously motivated (See: Poem Analysis). Charlemagne’s impetus for invading Spain was to extend his own power through religious conversion. Many of the Basque fighters involved in this conflict had weak claims to the destroyed Pamplona or the Basque religious cause. Unlike the 400,000 Saracens in retellings of the Roland legend, the Basque army was actually largely made up of untrained locals. These fighters would have been untrained in combat and uninterested in the religious ideology behind the conflict.