The Song of Roland and the history of scholarly investigation of the “songs of heroic deeds”

Abstract

The history of scholarly investigation of the Song of Roland (and the Romanic epic on the whole, including the Song of My Cid) refects all the twists and upheavals characterizing epic studies throughout the last 150 years. Search for the origins gave way to the problem of text fxation, its dating and characteristics of the text being fxed; meanwhile, the very methodology of analyzing different narrative techniques, those of traditional oral and written cultures, has become quite elaborate and precise. The article starts with a historical survey of scholarly explorations of chansons de geste, which lays the basis for further inquiry into the peculiarities of the interaction between traditional epic models and the historical and cultural context of the time when the Song of Roland was composed and assumed its fnal shape. Special attention is paid to the problem of transformation of the traditional constituent elements of the Song, i.e. epic character patterns, themes, motifs and formulaic structure of the poem. Such an approach casts new light upon a number of much discussed topics, such as: 1) the contamination of oral and written techniques; 2) the interpretation of plot development and, specifcally, of the episode describing the battle with Baligan; 3) the illogical (from the traditional epic point of view) ending of the poem with Charlemagne's victory; 4) the problem of the poem's main hero (whether it is Charlemagne or Roland) etc. Analysis of these problematic issues shows that within the Song a traditional epic plot interacts with a contemporary ideological framework not in a “smooth and synthesizing” way, but in a rather sharp and pointedly conficting manner. Each component resists an organic unity, and the basic traditional plot (mostly revealed by the poem's motive structure), which has a long history behind it, hardly yields to alignment with contemporary cultural patterns.