Roland (Ital. Orlando, Span. Roldan), the name of the most prominent hero in the Charlemagne legend. Unlike most legendary heroes,
Roland is a figure in history as well as in poetry and fable, though it cannot be said that the place he occupies as a historical personage is an imposing one. All that we know of him is contained in one line of Eginhard's Vita Karoli, chap. ix., and that simply records his name, Hruodlandus, his rank of prefect or warden of the march of Brittany, and his death at the hands of the Gascons in a valley of the Pyrenees. Such is the acorn from which a whole forest of romance has sprung up. According to the Annals (commonly attributed to Eginhard, but by some to Angilbert, who died fifteen years before they end), Charlemagne was invited in 777 to take possession of Saragossa and other cities in Spain by Ibn al Arabi, leader of the revolt against the Khalif Abd-er-Rahman, and in 778 crossed the Pyrenees into the territory of the Gascons, attacked and took Pamplona, the stronghold of the Navarrese, and advanced to Saragossa, and having received the submission of Ibn al Arabi and his friends, and taken hostages of them, returned the way he came. According to other accounts the Saracens played him false, and a rising of the Saxons compelled him to hasten home. Al Makkari merely says that after warring for some time with Abd-er-Rahman he sent him an embassy proposing an alliance and friendship, and that peace was concluded between them. At any rate it is certain that Charles made but a short stay in Spain, that on his way back he levelled the walls of Pamplona to the ground, and that about 25 miles north-east of it the rearguard of his army was annihilated by the Gascons. 'Roscida Vallis,' the common etymology of Roncesvalles, the scene of the disaster, is, of course, like all such etymologies, nonsense. In its oldest known form the name is Rencesvals, and there can be no doubt that it is Basque. Whatever may be the true reading of the first syllable, the last two are clearly a corruption of zabal or zavul, a word which enters into the composition of perhaps a hundred place-names in Navarre and the Basque provinces, always indicating a flat, level space, which exactly describes the battlefield. It is a small oval plain, evidently an old lake-bed, shut in all round, except on the south where the waters escaped, by steep mountain-ridges clothed from base to summit with thick beech woods. To the north there is a slight depression where, by the Col of Ibañeta, a path crosses the crest of the Pyrenees and descends the Val Carlos to St Jean-Pied-de-Port. The features of the spot, and the facts of the catastrophe, no doubt, also, are faithfully given in a few words by Eginhard, who in his youth must have often heard them spoken of by Charlemagne's old soldiers. As the army, by reason of the narrowness of the place, was marching in extended order, the Gascons, who, profiting by the denseness of the woods that abound there, had posted themselves in ambush on the heights, rushing upon those guarding the rear, hurled them into the valley beneath, and there slew them to a man; and having seized the baggage, dispersed under cover of the night in all directions, so that there was no finding them to take vengeance upon them. Roncesvalles is in fact a natural trap, and it says little for Charles as a general that he should have ventured into it without first securing the heights and scouring the woods; for when Roland, in the Chanson, thinks of it, it is too late. He was in a hostile country, made so by his own acts. It may be—to put him in the most favourable light—that he was compelled by military necessity to invade Navarre, that resistance forced him to take Pamplona, that levelling its walls, though it looks awkwardly like spite, was a precaution in view of a future campaign, and that, in short, he 'simply used military license upon the country.' But this, as Major Dalgetty observes, 'excites no benevolence in those who sustain injury,' and the Basques of Navarre had good reason to resent their treatment at his hands. They were not semi-savage mountaineers, as most French writers try to make them out, but a gallant little Christian state holding their own stoutly, after the fashion of Pelayo, against the common foe; and yet this pillar of the church, this pious champion of Christianity, hot from the conversion of the Saxons, comes down upon them, for his own ends treats them as if they were Saracens, or worse, takes away from them their armour wherein they trusted, their walls, next to their mountains their best reliance, and leaves them naked to their enemies. Eginhard may talk of the perfidy of the Gascons, and poets sentimentalise over the dolorosa rotta, but history and justice will call it a merited retribution for overbearing militarism, and the proper punishment of insolent contempt for a weak adversary.
Naturally, the tragic character of the disaster, and the reverse to the mighty king of the Franks at the close of what was looked upon as a holy war, made a deep and wide-spread impression. Upon himself the effect, the Annals say, was that it clouded the success of his expedition, and there can be no doubt that already in his lifetime it was a theme with the popular minstrels far and wide. In the middle of the 9th century the biographer of Louis held it needless to mention the names of those who fell, quia vulgata sunt. In course of time the story underwent modifications in the hands of the poets. Everything in it was magnified. The expedition became a campaign lasting twice as many years as it had occupied months; the disaster was made a defeat of vast proportions, which, as a matter of course, was accounted for by treachery, the traitor Ganelon being invented for that purpose; the Basques were turned into Saracens; and for further dramatic effect Charlemagne, who was but thirty-six, was represented as a venerable old man with a snow-white beard, and Roland as his nephew. And here it may be asked, how came Roland to be set up as hero? Eginhard mentions two others as having fallen, Anselm and Eggihard, both of them persons of at least equal rank, and more immediately connected with the sovereign; but nothing more is heard of either. The only explanation is that, if they were left unwept, unhonoured, and unsung, it was because the jongleurs could not conveniently sing their names, while Rodland, Rotland, Rollanz, Roland lent itself to song as if made on purpose. 'An old song' is held to mark the zero of importance, but it is one of the most potent of agencies. It lurks among the roots of history, dispensing immortality at will, and conferring renown irrespective of deeds or merits. Roland, for aught we know, was only an ordinary Breton country-gentleman, but old songs have made him the equal of Achilles, Hector, Alexander the Great, and Arthur of Britain. Of these old songs we know little or nothing beyond the fact of their existence. If the barbara carmina taken down by Charlemagne's orders were of the same sort, they were probably the only ones of the kind ever committed to writing. Nor do we know much more of their relation to the earliest written lays. M. Léon Gautier, who has made the subject the study of his life, at first held that the chansons de geste were little more than the primitive songs string together, but he now thinks that they were merely inspired by them, and borrowed only their legendary and traditional elements. The truth probably lies between the two views. It is more likely that there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between the songs and the chansons de geste, and that the latter were of very gradual growth. The jongleurs in singing the songs, cantilène, or ballads, as we should call them, relating to an event like the Roncesvalles disaster, would naturally from time to time introduce new ones for the sake of novelty or as connecting links, and thus a recognised sequence would be established, which, as minstrelsy became more and more of an art, the jongleurs more like trouvères, and their hearers more cultured and critical, would in course of time grow into a continuous lay. By some such process as this, in all probability, the Chanson de Roland, unquestionably the oldest and best of the chansons de geste, was produced.
The oldest form in which we have it is that of the MS. in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, written presumably towards the end of the 12th century; but this is evidently by no means its oldest form as a consecutive poem. M. Gautier, who loves precision, places its composition between the Norman Conquest and the first Crusade, but it is impossible to fix precisely the date at which it ceased to be a mere congeries of songs and became a chanson de geste; at any rate the two references to England as one of Charlemagne's many conquests cannot be relied upon. Nor do the allusions to Mont Saint-Michel justify the assertion that it is certainly the work of a Norman. It is of course in the language of the northern half of France, the language of the trouvères, but there is no good reason for assigning it to any one province. An interesting reference to the country of the poem is supplied by M. Gautier. The death of Roland, we are told, was presaged in France by storms and earthquakes 'from Saint-Michel to Seinz, from Besançon to Wissant.' It is not certain here what place is meant by Seinz. M. Francisque-Michel suggests Sens; a 13th-century MS. reads Rains (Reims); M. Gautier boldly proposes the 'saints of Cologne'—i.e. the relics preserved there. Far more probably, as a glance at the map will show, the place intended is Saintes on the Charente, the old capital of the Santones and of Saintonge, a town that makes a considerable figure in the middle ages and in the Charlemagne legend. With the other three places mentioned it forms a quadrangle which exactly represents the region within which the langue d'oil was dominant. South of the line from Saintes to Besançon was the country of the langue d'oc, the Provençal; west of the line from Mont Saint-Michel to Saintes was the Breton; east of the line from Besançon to Wissant, near Calais, the language was Teutonic. The old minstrel was not thinking of a Rhine frontier, as M. Gautier imagines, but of the habitat of his hearers, the country where his words would be understood. The best, and most likely the oldest, part of the poem is that which deals with the combat at Roncesvalles, Roland's refusal, until too late, to sound his horn, the deeds and deaths of the peers one by one, and of Roland last of all. The opening portion, the despatch of Ganelon at Roland's suggestion as envoy to the Saracens, his anger and betrayal of Roland in revenge, and the concluding part, the vengeance of Charlemagne, and the trial and death of Ganelon, probably came later. There can be little doubt that the episode of the Emir Baligant was a comparatively late addition.
Besides the Oxford MS. there are half-a-dozen others ranging from the 13th to the 16th century. The differences between the earlier and later are significant. In the Oxford MS., which is one of the little pocket copies carried by the jongleurs, the assonant rhyme (that which disregards the consonants and depends on the accented vowel) is maintained throughout, the same assonance being kept up to the end of each break or paragraph. In the later MSS. the assonant is turned into the full consonant rhyme, and the poem expanded to twice or thrice its former length. The first shape is the poem as sung; the second as adapted for readers when the minstrel was no longer the sole vehicle for poetry and reading was becoming a common accomplishment. A very close German version, the Ruolandes Lied, shows that early in the 12th century the chanson had passed out of its native country and language; and it is almost as closely followed in the Icelandic Karlamagnus Saga of the 13th. The Chanson de Roland is the foundation of the Charlemagne legend. Charles's wars and quarrels with his vassals would no doubt of themselves have furnished themes for the jongleurs, but the legend, culminating in the Morgante of Pulci and the Orlandos of Boiardo and Ariosto, is the outcome of the story of Roland and Roncesvalles.
The following are the printed editions of the Chanson de Roland: From the Oxford MS., by Francisque Michel (Paris, 1837); Text, with translation, by F. Genin (Paris, 1850); the Oxford text, ed. by Professor Müller (Göttingen, 1851; reprinted with additions, 1863, 1878); 2d ed. of F. Michel's, with text of 13th-century MS. in the Bib. Nat. added (Paris, 1867); Roncesval, Oxford text, E. Boehmer (Halle, 1872); MS. of Lib. of St Mark, Venice, fac-simile by E. Kolbing (Heilbronn, 1877); Oxford MS., ed. by E. Stengel, with a photograph fac-simile (Heilbronn, 1878); Text, with translation in assonant rhyme, Petit de Julleville (Paris, 1878); Text, with translation, commentary, notes, &c., by Léon Gautier (16th ed. 1887). There are other translations by Jonain, Lehugeur, St Albin, and Jubert. By far the best is by the Baron d'Avril (Paris, 1865, 1866, 1877). The Ruolandes Lied was printed in 1727, and again by W. Grimm in 1838, and by Karl Bartsch (1874); and there is a translation by W. Hertz (1861). Mrs Marsh in 1854 translated Vité's epitome of the poem, and Mr John O'Hagan has given an accurate, scholarly, and spirited version from the original (2d ed. 1883). There is also an English translation by L. Rabillon (New York, 1885).