the moment of its rediscovery, the Song of Roland has been associated with minstrel performance; that is what it means to call it a song. Both its epic dignity as a French Iliad and its patriotic value as a repository of martial valor depend upon this classification. It has become an article of faith that the poem was recited by minstrels to largely illiterate knights in a series of linked sessions, so that over several days the audience might hear the poem in its entirety. Jean Rychner first suggested that these sessions might typically have extended for a thousand to two thousand lines, from dinner to dusk, and a figure in this range has been widely accepted.37 Ian Short, in a popular edition, sums up the consensus:
Transmitted by singers who specialized in recitation (that is, by jongleurs) the epic poems were declaimed to musical accompaniment and before an audience, in sessions of about a thousand or 1300 lines. They were jongleurs’ epics (épopées jongleresques) and intended to be heard, not epic poems for reading.38
This epic dignity was closely associated with a vision of what the poem was, how it was received, and by whom. In his edition of 1872, Gautier described a wandering minstrel reciting a heroic epic at length while the isolated baron, a man of simple faith, and his knights listen enthralled:
They saw themselves in these lines. This poetry was made in their image. It had the same passion for the Crusades, the same ideal or memory of French and Christian royalty, the same love for spilling blood and for a good thrust of a lance. Roland is nothing more, so to speak, than a sublime thrust of a lance (un coup de lance sublime) … in four thousand lines.39
Edmond Faral echoes the association of epic simplicity with oral delivery, describing the jongleur as a wandering light that illuminates the monotonous life of the knights.40 Faral recognizes that the jongleurs performed not just for knights but before all classes. He insists, however, that for that very reason they were obliged to stick to healthy old traditions and could not embellish, as later court-based minstrels could, so that their art retained its elemental simplicity.41 Later scholars such as Rychner, drawing on the work of Milman Parry, insist on the complexity of oral poetry rather than its simplicity but still maintain the connection between orality and epic.
A major shift in the attitude to the poem comes with the work of Joseph Bédier and his insistence that the poem is primarily the work of a single artistic genius rather than the amalgamation of earlier materials. For Bédier, the beauty of the Chanson de Roland, like the beauty of Racine’s Iphigénie, lies in its unity, and this unity came from the poet, Turold, who in a flash of genius discovered the central theme of the conflict between Roland and Oliver.42 Bédier envisaged Turold as a man of letters, one who writes “at his work bench,” but his reassessment of the poem’s composition did not cause him to reassess how it might have been delivered, a subject on which he is distressingly vague.43 No one seems to have directly challenged the notion that the Chanson de Roland was performed by jongleurs, although some may have harbored suspicions. Eugene Vance, for example, has shown how the figure of Charlemagne embodies textual attitudes and argued that the final poem documents “a historical transition from an oral épistémè to one of writing.”44 Hans-Erich Keller and Gabrielle Spiegel have argued persuasively that the latter part of the poem, especially the trial of Ganelon, reflects the ideology of the Capetian monarchs as formulated by Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, thus providing a possible milieu for a clerical writer.45 All this might raise questions about how the final work would have been delivered, but the prevailing assumption that as a chanson de geste, it was actually sung remains in force. The oral performance of the text is central in Paul Zumthor’s account of mouvance, in which the regular alternation between oral performances and free copyings and reworkings produces the flowing tradition and “the text is but the moment of an act of the voice” (le texte n’est que l’occasion du geste vocal).46 For Peter Haidu, Digby 23 “freezes one instant of a fluid, ongoing oral tradition.”47
For many modern readers the vision of the chanting minstrel is a crucial part of the experience of reading the poem. Zumthor’s account of his own response brings this out clearly:
I take down from my library an edition of the Song of Roland. I know (or assume) that in the twelfth century this poem was sung to a tune that, for all intents and purposes, I have no means of reproducing. I read it. What I have before my eyes, printed or (in other situations) handwritten, is only a scrap of the past, immobilized in a space that is reduced to the page or the book.48
Here Zumthor acknowledges the unavoidable role that a highly speculative history plays in our appreciation of a medieval poem. We are “forced to come up with an event—a text event—and to perform the text-in-action, and integrate this representation with the pleasure that we experience in reading—and take this into account, if the need arises, in our study of the text.”49 We hold a book in our hand, but we listen for a lost song.
The reconstruction of this surmised oral tradition formed a crucial part in the early construction of the poem. In Les Epopées françaises, for example, Gautier describes in some detail the life of a jongleur, who sings a chanson de geste in the square in front of the town church. Gautier speculates freely on how the jongleur might have played his audience, modifying his repertoire to win their attention.50 But it is in his 1895 study La Chevalerie that Gautier offers his fullest account of minstrel recitation. He describes a wedding feast:
Three jongleurs who specialized in singing had been invited to the wedding feast, but on this day only one will perform. Admittedly, he is the best in the land and in his singing, as in his life, he is not like the others. He is a Christian (this word alone is the highest praise), and he looks on his profession as a kind of lower order of priesthood, still dignified and almost sacred.… “What would you like me to sing this evening?” he says, striking a vigorous and resonant chord with his bow. The host thinks for a moment and replies, “I have an idea, which I’ll propose to you. Instead of reciting a single song for us (which sometimes seems to go on a little long) I would ask you sing us the finest passages from our finest poems.”51
Responding to this request, the jongleur works through a series of great moments in French epic. Finally, for the day is passing, he offers one last song, a song about Ogier the Dane recapturing Rome, but as the minstrel reaches the end and recounts the pope’s triumphal entry, the barons are reminded of the religious politics of their own day. A voice cries out that Philip does not love Pope Innocent so well, the host speaks of their reconciliation, and this response brings the performance to a close:
These words bring the long afternoon to an end. The lord gives the jongleur a mule from Arragon and a surcoat of red striped silk.
The epic session (séance épique) is completed; night falls.52
Gautier’s imagination conjures up a lengthy recitation, one that continues throughout the afternoon until dusk. Admittedly, Gautier sees this recitation as exceptional, but his account presupposes two situations as norms: the performance of the less exalted “others,” who presumably offer more vulgar entertainment, command less strict attention, and play to humbler audiences, and whom Gautier’s jongleur in no way resembles, and the performance of the normal “séance épique,” in which a single jongleur would recite or sing a single epic in the great hall to an audience that might grow a little restless but would nonetheless provide him a reasonable chance to complete his song.
Gautier draws support from references to performance in the chansons de geste themselves, but his “séance épique” is actually modeled upon an eighteenth-century work, André Chénier’s L’Aveugle, and its account of an extended performance by Homer in which the blind bard sings in succession the great moments of Hellenic epic. “I do not think that the French language, in all its rich treasury, has finer verses; they are the despair of anyone who tries to imitate them,” writes Gautier of
