and sings praise to a text that is considered intellectually and raises troubling questions. As he suggests, the poem illustrates the central conundrum of chivalry, that the knightly class was seen as vital guarantor of social stability but was given over to internecine warfare:
The text sings the praises of force, of military display, the brilliance of armaments. It gives voice to the rhetoric of mutual dependency, vassalic duty and the lord’s protection, singing the virtues of the warrior and the social cohesiveness of men at war for common ideals according to a common code of value and behavior. It also depicts the specific mechanism by which these very virtues are turned into ghastly destructiveness, in which lived and sung ideals of courage, loyalty, and group identification turn into betrayal, somber death, and collective loss. The relations between the assertions of the dominant class ideology and the performance of its narrative program can only be termed tragically deconstructive.151
Haidu returns to the text to elicit deeper and more troubling readings. Transforming narrative into allegory and propagandistic simplicity into internal tensions, he finds in the poem moral ambivalence, abstraction (for the text deals “with a political system rather than just its actors”) and suggestions of an emerging guilt culture with its split subjectivities.152 Haidu is reading as a scholar and perhaps the Digby Roland’s first identifiable readers shared something of this frame of mind. At least one of the canons knew scraps of Juvenal by heart, and it was the lines from the ninth satire that he chose to write on the last leaf of the Roland:
Malo pater tibi sit Tersides dumodo tu sis
Eacide simil Uulcaniaque arma capessas
Quam te Terside similem producat Hachilles.
I would rather that Thersites were your father as long as you were like the grandson of Aecus (that is, Achilles) and could wield the arms of Vulcan, than that you should have Achilles as your father but be like Thersides.
Or, as Gilbert Highet puts it, “Better to be a hero born of a fool than a fool born of a hero.”153 Why were these particular lines so close to the canon’s heart? Was he a man of humbler birth who aspired to be an Achilles, or was he reflecting cynically on the knights he knew who were closer to Thersites? Was he perhaps appalled by the endemic violence around him, the gang warfare and brawls between the northern and southern factions that plagued medieval Oxford?154 It is, at any rate, an intriguing piece of marginalia, and unless we are to dismiss it as an idle doodle on the part of someone who happened to be holding the Roland in his hand but never read it, it becomes the poem’s first gloss.155
A cleric chanting in the refectory or a cleric turning from the Timaeus to the Roland-these two scenes form the core of one possible history of the way Digby 23 was read in the Middle Ages, but it is one that has been almost systematically rejected, so that the Song of Roland can be preserved in all its martial and national purity as a French epic. The intellectual interests of the Augustinian canons have not received attention from the poem’s modern critics, nor have the reading customs of English baronial households or the political anxieties in England during the manuscript’s first two centuries, or anything to do with the communities where the manuscript first appears. In this regard, the attitude of Old French scholars to the Digby manuscript has been curiously conflicted. On the one hand, there has been a determined effort to preserve the classification of Digby 23 as a manuscrit de jongleur, because this preserves the text’s status as a close reflection of an oral performance for a chivalric audience. At the same time, the French poem must be extracted from the English manuscript and saved from its taint, which means that in practice scholars have ignored the manuscript as far as possible. As a result there are a large number of Old French scholars, from Leon Gautier to Paul Zumthor, who have pronounced on the status of the manuscript without ever examining it closely.
With the Roland the taint of writing is compounded by the taint of the foreign and the provincial. It is a singular embarrassment that the earliest written version of France’s national epic survives in an manuscript copied by an Englishman in an Anglo-Norman dialect. It was imperative that the early editors distance the true, original, and national poem from this corrupt witness.156 Gautier confronts the problem in his first edition, claiming that “the dialect of a manuscript comes from its copyist, and not all from its author. It is in the heart and not the form of the Song that we should seek some light.”157 In his school edition of 1887, he takes a curiously convoluted path, insisting on his fidelity to the manuscript (“NOT A SINGLE WORD has ever been given an orthographical form THAT WAS NOT OFFERED BY THE OXFORD MANUSCRIPT”) while at the same time undertaking to restore more than five hundred lines to produce “a text that fits the rules of our dialect.”158 L. Clédat “francisized’ the vowels in his edition of 1886 on the grounds that the Chanson de Roland was “d’origine française.”159 Joseph Bédier, the poem’s most prolific editor and popularizer after Gautier, was highly critical of such normalization. He reproduced the text of the Oxford manuscript with only the most minor emendations, and subsequent editors have followed him in this regard. But for all this fidelity to the words preserved in the manuscript, Bedier, too, distinguished between the original poem and the actual written text that survives, “a late transposition in insular French of a work that was originally written in a different idiom.”160 Thus the manuscript was effectively dismissed in favor of the pristine original. As one admirer put it, “After the work of Bedier no one again will surely ever dispute that the Chanson de Roland, French in language and French in spirit, was a product of the essential genius of France.”161
Samaran’s doubts that the Digby manuscript was ever associated with a jongleur have not prevailed. We call the poem it contains the Chanson de Roland, accepting the title Michel first provided, one that occurs nowhere in the manuscript. We refer to the words preserved in this specific manuscript, and we mean that these words, with some variation, were once sung, as Gautier’s minstrel sang them, in a great hall one long afternoon or through a series of repeated performances.
Was There Ever a “Song of Roland”?
Given the pressing need of postrevolutionary France for a national epic, had the Chanson de Roland not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it. And the Chanson de Roland was, if not invented, at the very least constructed. By supplying it with an appropriate epic title, isolating it from its original codicological context, and providing a general history of minstrel performance in which its pure origin could be located, the early editors presented the 4,002-line poem as sung French epic. They fashioned the poem they desired.
There is, then, an important sense in which if there ever was such a work as the Chanson de Roland it does not survive. If the 4,002 lines now preserved in the Digby manuscript ever were a minstrel’s song, that is not what they were in the manuscript during the twelfth century when they were copied, nor at some later date, when they came to rest alongside the Timaeus. If there ever was a Song of Roland, it was not the late Anglo-Norman transposition but an earlier poem in a slightly different dialect. But this raises a further question. Was there ever such a song, a song of 4,002 lines that was recited or sung by a minstrel and that more or less corresponded to the version preserved in the Digby manuscript? This in turn depends on whether there ever was a tradition of extended or serial recitation in which a work of this kind could have been performed. Here we will encounter another form of material support, that of the sung poem. Just as the material support of the written text is not confined to the physical stuff of ink, parchment, and paper, but must be extended to include the social conventions that govern a text’s circulation, so the material support of an oral poem is not just confined to the sounds of the voice, but must be extended to include the social conventions that govern performance. And just as the materiality of writing is often occluded, so too is the materiality of the voice. Gautier’s noble vision of a minstrel’s dignified and sustained performance bears little relation
