and Roland in a manuscript in the Bodleian, although they were not quite sure what this poem was. It was known to Thomas Tyrwhitt, who appears to have read the entire work and mentions it in one of the notes to his Canterbury Tales of 1778; to Abbé Gervais de la Rue, who had worked in the Bodleian while in exile in England during the Terror; and to John Josias Conybeare, formerly professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.13 De la Rue classified it as “un Roman de la bataille de Roncevaux qu’on appelle encore le Roman des douze pairs de France” and found it not without its interest, primarily because of its age. He even published a few excerpts in his Essais historiques sur les bardes, les jongleurs et les trouvères, and it is here that the famous opening lines first appear in print, although publication was delayed until 1834, years after de la Rue had examined the manuscript.14 But de la Rue never connected the Oxford poem to Taillefer; indeed, he lamented that he had never been able to find even a fragment of Taillefer’s song and poured scorn on those like Paulmy who claimed to have found traces of it in later romances.15 In short, when Michel came to Britain in 1835, both French and British scholars had been dreaming of discovering Taillefer’s lost performance for at least half a century, but nobody yet believed he had found it.
Guizot sent Michel to Britain as part of an extensive cultural mission to recuperate fragments of early French literature and history.16 As one of the many treatments of Charlemagne, the Oxford poem was numbered among these desired fragments and thus justified a trip up from London, where Michel was copying Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis and Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie.17 On 13 July Michel announced the discovery that would eclipse the rest of his voyage in a triumphant letter to one of his patrons, Louis-Jean-Nicolas Monmerqué, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and Monmerqué quotes from this “cry of exultation that burst out at the moment of a discovery” in his own letter to Guizot a week later. Michel believed he had found not just a poem about Roland that was older than any of the others that had survived but something far more precious, a copy of the great lost chanson de geste of Taillefer itself:
I am writing to you from Alfred’s city, a few steps away from the Bodleian, where I have just found … what? Guess! … The Song of Roland!! It was almost like squaring the circle.
It is nothing less than the Roman de Roncevaux, rhyming through assonance, as marches, corages, vaille, homme.… etc. but it is the Roman de Roncevaux in a manuscript from the beginning of the twelfth century, and each couplet ends with aoi, which you will explain for me; might it not be the cry away a fervent battle cry (cri d’élan sur l’ennemi)?18
This letter was soon followed by a more cautious report to Guizot.19 Here, too, Michel suggested the “AOI” “might be a kind of battle cry, and in the title he adopted for his edition—a title that appears nowhere in the manuscript—he made the connection to Taillefer’s lost battle song explicit: “One might also believe from the words Chanson de Roland that I wanted to create the impression that I think of the poem of Turold as being the one from which Taillefer sang fragments at the Battle of Hastings. I will not conceal that I am fully persuaded that the Norman minstrel’s song was taken from a chanson de geste; I would even say that this song could well be that of Turold.”20
Over the years the fascination with Taillefer and his performance has faded or lost much of its scholarly credibility, but in its broad outlines, Michel’s understanding of the poem in the Oxford manuscript remains in force to this day. This particular version of the poem, in its entirety, is imagined as a song, something that a minstrel might sing, chant, or recite. As Michel noted when queried on his imposition of the title, the work is clearly a chanson de geste and Roland its chief hero; the title is his addition but it fits.21
Michel realized that he had made an important discovery, but his scholarly edition was not intended for a general readership and gives little sense of the widespread excitement the Roland would generate or the role it would soon play in the canon of French literature. Others made the larger claims for it. The Roland was hailed both by scholars and by the popular press as a national epic—“perhaps our oldest, our true national epic.”22 As such, the Roland filled a major lacuna: without its own epic, French literature could never match the classical tradition; with the publication of the Roland, it could. The need to reach a broader public was soon recognized, and in 1850 François Génin published a popular edition with a translation, the first major step toward enshrining the poem as a literary classic.23 As Génin declared, “Henceforth people will not reproach French literature for lacking a national epic: here is the Roland of Turold.”24
The search for Taillefer’s song was not just about establishing a literary canon; it was part of a broader quest for a national literature to renew a languishing France. The social conflict of the Revolution and the demise of the First Empire brought a strong demand, often explicitly articulated, for poetry that would revitalize the country, restoring political harmony by evoking the lost glories and the nobler conduct of earlier times.25 Most nineteenth-century philologists, conservative Catholics and staunch Republicans alike, saw the Middle Ages as a period of simpler, nobler virtues. For them, the vigor of the simple, youthful age was matched by the vigor of a simple, youthful language, French before it became sophisticated. They extolled Old French poetry as a kind of folk art, a direct expression of the national spirit in a pure and original state, free of the corrupting influence of later civilization.26 The Chanson de Roland would offer the preeminent example of such simplicity. In his edition of 1850, Génin expressed openly the qualities both critics and philologists were seeking: “The essential character of the epic is grandeur combined with naïveté, virility, the energy of a man united with simplicity and the graceful ingenuity of a child: it is Homer.”27
The Chanson de Roland was, then, more than just a literary monument. Its editorial construction was part of the quest for national origins that dominated French Romantic philology; its subject, as Génin put it, “touches the very heart of the fatherland.”28 Gaston Paris insisted that while Old French literature could appeal to readers of the most diverse political temperaments, its recovery was nonetheless a unifying project inspired by piety toward the tradition of one’s ancestors.29 For Gautier, “True epic poems do not always treat of the struggle between two races, but they do always depend on the unity of the fatherland, above all its religious unity.”30 The Roland soon became a symbol of the very spirit of France. For Ludovic Vitet, writing in 1852, “Roland is France, in its blind and impetuous courage.”31 As the century progressed, this totemic value increased. The threat of German scientific industrialism in both the military and scholarly fields, culminating in the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, strengthened the tendency to see the Roland as an expression of the French genius for doomed gallantry.32 During the siege of Paris of 1870, Gaston Paris lectured on “La Chanson de Roland et la nationalité française” and called to his audience, “Let us make ourselves known as the sons of the men who died at Roncevaux and of those who avenged them.”33 Gautier in his edition of 1872 called the poem “France made man.” Writing “in the midst of the fatherland’s sorrows,” he drew attention to the poem’s early patriotism as a direct rebuke to the Germans:
Never, never, has anyone so loved their native land. Listen carefully, ponder what I am about to say, you Germans who are listening. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE XIth CENTURY. I have the right to tell those who today are choking my poor France just how great she was some eight centuries ago.34
The Roland was given the highest form of official sanction when in 1880 it was assigned to lycée students in seconde,35 In 1900 a teacher from the prestigious Lycée Henri IV echoed the praise of three generations of French philologists when he told his audience at the academy for staff officers at Saint-Cyr, “La Chanson de Roland is our Iliad”36
Sung
