Roland's song

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The Roland song (French La Chanson de Roland ) (written between 1075 and 1110) is an old French verse epic about the heroic end of Roland . It comprises 4002 assonant ten-syllable verses in 291 stanzas (so-called Laissen) and is one of the oldest works of the genre Chansons de geste . Around 1900 it was stylized in France as a kind of early national epic, because of the love with which it speaks of "la douce France" (sweet France) and because of the prominent role it plays in the "Français de France" ( the French from the Île de France) in the multi-ethnic army of Emperor Charlemagne .

The epic is about Charles' campaigns against the " heathens ", ie against the Islamic Saracens who came from North Africa and who have ruled southern and central Spain since their invasion of Europe in 711/12.

The Roland song was written or written down, but perhaps only dictated and / or performed more often by an otherwise unknown Turoldus, of whom the last verse does not clearly state that he "declined" the work ( Ci falt ("ends here" ) la geste que Turoldus declinet ). It is unclear whether it is a compilation of older songs. Various manuscripts of the song were discovered in the 1830s. An older version contained around 9,000 verses.

The work has been preserved in seven complete manuscripts and three fragments . The most important are the so-called Oxford manuscript ( Digby 23 ), which apparently originated on English soil in the second quarter of the 12th century and whose language is strongly colored by the Anglo-Norman dialect, as well as a manuscript from the 14th century stored in Venice , which, however, only has 3846 Contains verses that are closely related to the Oxford version ( Marc. 225 ). This is followed by a depiction of the siege of Narbonne that has not been passed down , followed by the plot of the rhymed versions.

The plot

Roland storms Mahomet's temple. Illustration from the Heidelberg manuscript of the Middle High German version ( Cod. Pal. Germ. 112, P, fol. 57v), end of the 12th century.

The Roland song comprises two larger parts: in the first three fifths (verse 1–2396) Roland is clearly the protagonist, in the last two (verse 2397–4002) rather Charlemagne .

At the beginning of the action, he has conquered almost all of pagan Spain except for Zaragoza in seven years of war . Its king Marsilie, "who serves Mohammed and calls Apollo ", now offers him submission and conversion to Christianity - but both only in pretense in order to achieve the withdrawal of the Frankish army. Karl assembles the council of barons in which his brother-in-law Ganelon advises accepting the offer, while his nephew Roland, who is also Ganelon's unloved stepson, wants to continue the fight. Karl, who is already old and tired of war, joins Ganelon, whereupon Roland suggests Ganelon with hurtful irony.

The offended Ganelon seeks revenge. He goes to King Marsilie, to whom he portrays Roland as a warmonger, without whose removal there would be no peace. Marsilie should therefore attack the rearguard of the withdrawing Frankish army with a superior force; Ganelon wants to make sure that Roland is their commander.

Everything is going as planned. When Roland and his twelve friendly warriors as subordinates notice the ambush, he is urged by his level-headed friend and future brother-in-law Olivier to call the Frankish army for help with the Olifant bugle , but he proudly refuses. Only when the situation was hopeless after defending against the first wave of attacks, on the advice of the militant Bishop Turpin, he blows the horn. After the second wave (whose heroic battles are again shown in loving detail), only Roland is left. After he, too, was fatally injured by a hail of spears and arrows, the heathen flee because they thought they were hearing Karl's army. Roland dies on the battlefield in the pose of the victor, with his face towards Zaragoza. The archangel Gabriel and two other angels guide his soul into paradise.

Charles, who has indeed rushed over, pursues and destroys the heathen, whose remains are fleeing to Saragossa with the seriously wounded King Marsilie. A huge army of heathens is just arriving there, led by “Admiral” Baligant from “Babylonia”, whom Marsilie had asked for assistance years ago. But even this army is destroyed by Karl, not without that he himself, who is still vigorous despite his age, meets Baligant in the turmoil and defeats him in a long duel with the help of an angel. After taking Saragossa and the forced conversion of its inhabitants, Karl returns to his residence in Aachen .

Here he has to deliver the news of his death to Roland's fiancé, Aude, which also causes her death. He now wants to have a court held over Ganelon, but thirty relatives stand protectively in front of him, including Pinabel, who wants to represent him in a judicial duel . Only when Thierry, the young brother of the Count of Anjou , offers to fight for the just cause and defeats Pinabel with God's help, Karl can punish Ganelon and his family. The same night the archangel Gabriel appears to him and asks him to help King Vivien, who is besieged by pagans in his city "Imphe". Karl is crying and pulling his beard - but one suspects: he will go.

Historical background

The plot is based on a war campaign that Charlemagne led in 778 against the Islamic Saracens in Spain. The reason was the request for help from Sulayman ben al-Arabí , governor in Saragossa , against his master, Emir Abderrahman of Córdoba , the aim of which was to secure the (northeast) Spanish mark , which was not carried out until later .

The campaign was canceled after initial success. Saragossa, whose gates did not open against Karl's expectations after the politico-military situation had clearly turned in favor of the emir, was besieged unsuccessfully for months. Illnesses and an increasing lack of food did the rest. A renewed uprising of the Saxons should also be suppressed as a preference .

Roland's death. In: Grandes chroniques de France by Jean Fouquet , Tours , approx. 1455–1460.

When he retreated via Pamplona, ​​Charles released the Basque - Navarre and Christian city for attack and sack by his armed forces. There was a bloodbath and other expected effects on the population. During the onward journey, the Franconian rearguard came into an ambush near the Pyrenees town of Roncesvalles ( Navarra ). However, these were not laid by the Saracens, but by the Basques, who were intent on retaliation. From Einhard z. For example, these circumstances are wisely concealed in his biography of Karl in favor of his emperor.

The leader of the rearguard was possibly Hruotland (French Roland), who is attested as Roland of Cenomania, Margrave of the Breton Mark of the Frankish Empire. Count Eginhard and Count Anselm fell with him on August 15, 778 (→ Battle of Roncesvalles ). The Roland song turns this debacle of the Franks into a heroic deed in the history of salvation, to which the author of the song was possibly inspired by the Reconquista .

Classification of genre, form and style

The genre Chanson de geste , to which the Roland song belongs, is mainly about the campaigns of Emperor Charlemagne or Emperor Louis the Pious and / or their military leaders against the heathen, i.e. H. the Islamic Moors coming from Morocco , who ruled southern and central Spain since their invasion of Europe in 711/12. But the struggle of the Franks against the initially pagan Saxons is also dealt with. The subject of the pagan wars was topical for a long time, thanks to the Reconquista (= reconquest) of Spain, which was intensified around 1000 from northern Spain, which had remained Christian, and thanks to the crusades that began in 1095 , i. H. the attempts of Christian armies of knights to conquer Jerusalem , which has been ruled by Muslims for over 400 years , and to bring the holy grave under Christian rule. The genre of chansons de geste seems to have been cultivated especially in the monasteries along the pilgrimage routes through France to Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain, as a means of entertaining and edifying the pilgrims who stayed there.

The style is sober and not very graphic, but rich in pathetic apostrophes (exclamations). The verses of the Rolandslied create a maximum of mood with minimal means. They each consist of ten syllables, not counting the ending syllable of the word at the end. The ten-syllables are bundled into stanzas of different lengths, so-called laissen , which are not linked by rhymes but by assonances . All verses of a laisse have the same assonances. The technique of repetition, laisses similaires , i.e. H. the resumption of what has already been said and thus the parallelization of whole laissez-pans. Simple main clauses displace subordinate clauses: As a rule, the subject is placed in front of the verb, which emphasizes its strong position that drives the action and makes the song appear particularly popular.

Lecture

Daron Burrows sings Laisse 1 of the Chanson de Roland

The Roland song, in which verse and syntactic unit almost always coincide, is obviously intended for the performance. The performance of the first Laisse by Professor Daron Burrows (Oxford) gives an impression of this.

effect

Roland with the Olifanten , below him the dead Olivier. Statue of Jules Labatut (1888) in Toulouse .

The Roland song was not only well known and widespread in France, but also provided the template or material for numerous translations, arrangements and other texts in other European languages. One of the earliest of these foreign language versions was the German adaptation of Konrad the priest , which replaced various specifically French aspects with generally Christian ones. Even Norse , English, Dutch and Spanish versions have survived or witnessed. In Italy in 1476 Matteo Maria Boiardo and, after 1505, Ludovico Ariosto processed the material for their much-read heroic-comic verse novels Orlando innamorato (= Der amliebte R.) and Orlando furioso ("Der raging Roland"), which in turn made Roland's figure well known . In Spanish, the enormous baroque epic El Bernardo (5000 eight-liners in 40,000 verses) by Bernardo de Balbuena , written in Mexico at the beginning of the 17th century and printed in Madrid in 1624, stands out as the most important fantastic epic of the language as a masterpiece of Mexican baroque poetry. Romantic literature was also influenced by the Roland song.

The Roland song also formed the basis for the later popularity of the Roland statues in Europe.

analysis

As a sociologist, Franz Borkenau developed the Roland song as a programmatic epic which marked the transition from the individual heroism of the Great Migration to the Norman military discipline. The Romanist Karl Voss also points out that in the Roland song for the first time "reason and measure" are literarily designed as peculiarities of the French "national character".

Erich Auerbach points out the “puzzling nature” of the emperor's behavior: when choosing the leader of the rearguard, he was “paralyzed like a dream, despite all the authoritative determination that sometimes emerged”. His “prince-like” position as “head of all Christianity” contrasts with his powerlessness in the face of Ganelon's plan. Auerbach sees the possible causes in the weak position of the central authority at the beginning of the development of the feudal system , which is also expressed in the trial against Ganelon, as well as in the deliberate parallel to Christ (twelve pairs like the number of disciples, foreknowledge, but not preventing the Schicksals), which gives Karl suffering-martyr-like traits and stands in contrast to the sharpness and definiteness of the expression in the Laissen LVIII to LXII, in which the sentences are paratactically strung together.

Text output

  • Wendelin Foerster (Ed.): The old French Rolandslied. Text from Paris, Cambridge, Lyon and the so-called Lorraine fragments with R. Heiligbrodt's Concordanztabelle for the old French Roland song. Unchanged reprint of the 1886 edition. Hansebook, 2016. ISBN 978-3-7434-1570-6
  • The old French Roland song. Bilingual edition. Translated and commented by Wolf Steinsieck , afterword by Egbert Kaiser. Reclam, Stuttgart 1999. ISBN 3-15-002746-2 .

literature

  • Dr. Goehling: The sentence connection in the old French Rolandsliede . Wiesike, Brandenburg 1886 ( digitized version )
  • Fatemeh Chehregosha Azinfar (2008): "Dissent, Skepticism, and Medieval Texts: La Chanson de Roland and its Persian Prototype Vis and Ramin ", in dies .: Atheism in the medieval Islamic and European world. The influence of Persian and Arabic ideas of doubt and skepticism on medieval European literary thought , Bethesda, Maryland: Ibex Publishers, ISBN, pp. 101-144.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Alexandre Micha: History of the transmission of French literature in the Middle Ages . In: History of the text transmission of ancient and medieval literature. 2. History of transmission of medieval literature . Zurich 1964, pp. 187–259, here pp. 238–240
  2. ↑ La Chanson de Roland. In: Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . Vol. 18. Munich 1996, p. 384.
  3. ↑ Erich Köhler: Lectures on the History of French Literature Edited by Henning Krauss and Dietmar Rieger Volume 1.1. 2nd edition Freiburg 2006, p. 44 f.
  4. ↑ End and beginning , Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1984. ISBN 3-608-93032-9 . Pp. 489-507
  5. ^ Karl Voss (ed.): Ways of French literature: A reading book. Berlin 1965, p. 9.
  6. ↑ Erich Auerbach: Mimesis. (1946) 10th edition, Tübingen, Basel 2001, p. 98 f.

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