Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Catalogue of Medieval Literature, Especially of the Romances of Chivalry: And Books Relating to the Customs, Costume, Art, and Pageantry of the Middle Ages
The French romantic poems devoted to the history of Charles the Great and his feudatories were very numerous, and (like the Arthurian parallels) grew to their full metrical forms in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the compilers reduced them to prose and rearranged the parts, but no French prose-romance is known combining all the separate stories in the same way as Mallory compiled the Arthurian cycle in English, and as several of his forerunners had done in French. The fine poem called the Chanson de Roland is known to have existed in the eleventh century before the battle of Hastings; the oldest extant ms. Of it was written in England in the twelfth century, and enables us to regard the Roland as the first sustained literary effort in the French language. A work of the kind, treating the hero as a personage of superhuman valour and extraordinary powers, is seldom composed until a century or two have passed away after the date of the events recorded in it. We may therefore assign the Song of Roland to the middle or latter part of the tenth century. The curious fact that it was chanted as a war-song at the battle of Hastings is another proof of the theory set forth above, that the Franks and Normans had by that time become entirely French in their language and traditions.
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