The Sense Of The Song Of Roland - ( Cantar De Rolando )

Descripción

The Sense of the Song of Roland
by Robert Francis Cook
ISBN: 0801419301
Cornell Univ. Press, 1987
Hardcover , 266 pages

### BRAND NEW BOOK ###

The Song of Roland, like Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, occupies a curious place in modern medieval studies. It is the best-known example of its genre, the subject of a greater amount of scholarly commentary than all the other chansons de geste combined; indeed, it is often treated as if it so perfectly exemplifies the genre that no other works need to be considered in a discussion of the heroic ethos of the French Middle Ages. As a result, however, it has become an indispensable part of survey courses in translation, taught to unsuspecting undergraduates by people who are not specialists in the field, who do not know the scholarship, and who may even be unable to read the poem in the original language. In such circumstances, teachers tend to rely on received opinion concerning a work's central concerns and interpretative cruces; Roland is too short to make a decent-sized paperback, so translators are quite willing to provide introductions embodying such opinions, developed from the work of generations of specialists. The result is that most studies of Roland say much the same thing; the difficulty with the common consensus, as Robert Cook argues ably and convincingly, is that it is wrong. For teachers of the poem, the most important section of this book is the Commentary on the Narrative (pp. 3-124). Cook proceeds through the poem stanza by stanza, discussing both the text and previous critical pronouncements about its meaning. This procedure quickly reveals (1) that certain stanzas have been privileged by earlier critics not because of their importance to the narrative but because of their utility in defending preconceived notions about the poem's essence; (2) that other stanzas have been ignored and that they undermine or contradict such preconceived notions; and (3) that once such notions have been abandoned, the poem and its characters make more sense, more coherently and more in accord with what we know of the poet's world, than received opinion about the work would allow. In the process Cook makes it clear that we will have to abandon many of the commonplaces around which we have organized classes on Roland. The First Horn Scene ceases to be a depiction of erroneous choice,or even choice at all, when we realize that Roland's decision here has been determined hundreds of lines earlier when he accepted his position as commander of the rear guard. Roland's "pride" vanishes when we pay proper attention to the contrasts between his vows for the future and those of the pagans; they boast that they will succeed, and they fail, but he says only that he will carry out his duty, and he does. A further proof that he is humble, and not proud, comes in his death scene: would a twelfth-century poet show a man guilty of such a mortal sin being accepted into heaven by Gabriel and Michael? It becomes difficult to speak of "tragedy" here-tempting as it might be for teachers whose syllabus stretches back to Sophocles- if we think for even a moment about the Christian context of the poem.

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( TE # 25 )

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