here the songs of our jongleur in a language worthy of the heroes it celebrates.”53 Then, before returning to his account of the Middle Ages, Gautier quotes from the beginning of Homer’s song. The simple shepherds welcome the stranger, and he repays their charity by singing while they listen rapt:
Commençons par les Dieux: Souverain Jupiter;
Soleil, qui vois, entends, connais tout; et toi, mer,
Fleuves, terre, et noirs Dieux des vengeances trop lentes,
Salut! Venez à moi, de l’Olympe habitantes,
Muses; vous savez tout, vous déesses, et nous,
Mortels, ne savons rien qui ne vienne de vous.54
Let us begin with the Gods: Sovereign Jupiter, and you, O Sun, who see, hear, and know all; and you, sea, rivers, and dark Gods with your creeping vengeance. Hail! Come to me, you Muses, from your home in Olympus; you know all, you goddesses, and we mortals know nothing except what comes from you.
Gautier quotes Chénier no further, but the lines that immediately follow illustrate even more fully the Orphic power that Chénier attributes to Homer as he stills nature and unites man with his song. Gautier objects only to Chénier’s underlying paganism and so casts himself as Chénier’s Christian surrogate and offers an elaborate fantasy of an honored minstrel’s sustained performance. Echoing Homer’s opening prayer to Jupiter and his stilling of nature, Gautier’s minstrel begins, after a short exposition, with Charlemagne praying to God to stop the sun. In the 1895 edition of La Chevalerie, the lines from Chénier appear directly beneath an engraving of this very scene, further emphasizing the parallel Gautier draws between the medieval and Homeric invocations (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Léon Gautier, La Chevalerie, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1895), 658.
Like Chènier, Gautier offers a vision of social and spiritual integration in which audience, song, and singer become one. In the chivalric tradition this unity is achieved when the knights’ valiant deeds are re-embodied in the poet’s words, so that the two are “simultaneously reborn together, thanks to the memory and voice of the poet,” to borrow the words of Eugene Vance.55 This continual cycle of chivalric narrative is figured in the Oxford poem itself when Roland says to his men:
“Or guart chascuns que granz colps [i] empleit,
Que malvaise caiçun de nus chanteit ne seit!” (fol. 19r, lines 1013–14)56
“Now let each man take care to deal great blows,
Lest a bad song be sung of us!”
But even before these lines were recovered from the Bodleian manuscript and brought into wider circulation, the image of the unified band of warriors linked in song was powerful. As we have seen, Paulmy, in one of the earliest modern evocations of the lost Song of Roland, imagined it as the marching song of the Norman soldiers. The image remains strong through the nineteenth century and beyond. It is not just Gautier who sees the Roland as “a sublime lance thrust” In numerous accounts the epic material merges with the warrior class it celebrates in the full embodiment of oral tradition.
In this vision of medieval culture, the orality of the epic is crucial. Gautier’s baron, with his “simple, vigorous, almost brutal” faith and his simple pleasures, untainted by gallantry, cannot read. The epic, as Gautier understands it, matches its audience in the purity of its primitivism:
The age that suits these works is exclusively that of primitive times, when Science and Critical Thinking do not yet exist, and an entire nation naively confuses History and Legend. Some sort of nebulous credulity permeates the atmosphere of the time, and encourages the development of this poetry that has not yet been examined by science or taken over by sophistry. The later centuries of writing are not made for these poetic narratives that circulate invisibly on the lips of a few popular singers.… One does not read these epics, one sings them.57
The grandeur of oral epic is thus part of the long history in which writing marks a fall from some lost state of primal unity. In the jongleur’s song the national and spiritual body of early France is reconstituted.58 The epic is not read, it is sung.
The Manuscript and Its Anglo-Norman Readers
The simplest means of connecting the 4,002 verses preserved in Digby 23 to this putative performance history is to claim that Digby 23 itself once belonged to a minstrel or jongleur.59 This is exactly what Léon Gautier did when he distinguished between the great illuminated manuscripts of the late Middle Ages and the earlier and simpler ones of the twelfth century, which he called “manuscrits de jongleur,” a category in which he included Digby 23. The manuscript was thus classified as a reference tool for a professional performer of some kind.
What is striking about this classification is how widely it has been accepted when even a cursory examination of the codex raises the gravest doubts. The classification of Digby 23 as a “manuscrit de jongleur” went unchallenged until 1932, when Charles Samaran, in his introduction to the facsimile edition, offered the first full codicological description of the manuscript, in the process raising grave doubts about Gautier’s identification. Samaran agreed with Gautier that Digby 23 is a cheap and somewhat worn manuscript, composed of poorly prepared parchment that was carelessly ruled, but he also pointed out that careless compilation, small size, and the wear and tear that suggests widespread circulation are not sufficient grounds on their own for associating a manuscript with a jongleur. There are numerous Latin manuscripts that are equally carelessly executed and equally battered. Samaran noted as well that the Digby copyist shows little familiarity with French epic material, frequently confusing the names of the great heroes, and that the unknown reviser shows even less, which tends to suggest that neither the copyist nor the reviser was a jongleur.60
This leaves the possibility that the book was written by a cleric for the use of a jongleur. The difficulty here is that Digby 23 is in fact a composite volume; the second half is the Roland but the first half is a glossed copy of Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus. Since the Timaeus scarcely seems likely reading material for a jongleur, it is of some importance to establish when the two sections were brought together. Both date from roughly the same period, sometime in the twelfth century, but earlier commentators believed that the two had circulated separately until they came into the possession of Sir Kenneth Digby in the seventeenth century.61 Samaran, however, noted the presence on the last page of the Roland of what he believed to be the word “Chalcidius” in a thirteenth-century hand on folio [72] r. The same hand also adds several verses from Juvenal’s eighth satire to one of the flyleaves (folio [74]r).62 The implication is that at this point in its history, the Roland was in the hands of someone who could read and write Latin and this person also owned the Timaeus. As Samaran points out, Juvenal’s Satires and the Timaeus are hardly the reading material one would expect of a jongleur. The possibility that at some point the manuscript might have belonged to a jongleur cannot be entirely ruled out, of course. The first century or more of the manuscript’s history is unaccounted for, and it is possible that during this time it passed into the hands of a jongleur, as Maurice Delbouille has suggested.63 But there is nothing about the manuscript to encourage such a speculation. It is a cheap, portable volume; jongleurs were itinerant and were not wealthy—those circumstances, and the prevailing assumption that the poem must be associated with a jongleur are all the basis there has ever been for Gautier’s classification of Digby 23 as a jongleur’s manuscript. In comparison to many of the richly
