Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/650

Rh 626 ROLAND Appeal to an Impartial Posterity, those memoirs which display a strange alternation between self-laudation and patriotism, between the trivial and the sublime. On 8th November 1793 she was conveyed to the guillotine. Before yielding her head to the block, she bowed before the clay statue of Liberty erected in the Place de la Revolution, uttering her famous apostrophe " O Liberty ! what crimes are committed in thy name ! " One week later Roland, having heard of his wife's death, wandered some miles from his refuge in Rouen ; maddened by despair and grief, he wrote a few words expressive of his horror at those massacres which could only be inspired by the enemies of France, protesting that " from the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies." He affixed the paper to his breast, and unsheathing a sword-stick fell upon the weapon, which pierced his heart, on 15th November 1793. (T. s.) ROLAND, LEGEND OF. The main incident of this legend is founded upon an undoubted historical event, the Spanish expedition of Charlemagne (778). The Prankish king, having crossed the Pyrenees and captured Pamplona, was beaten back from the walls of Saragossa. 1 On his return the " Gascons " (Basques) surprised his rear- guard, and, according to the testimony of Eginhard, cut it off to a man ( Vit. Car., c. i.), " In which battle were slain Eggihard, provost of the royal table . . . and Hruod- landus, prefect of the Britannic march." This account is supported by other evidence more or less contemporary, as, for example, the Vita Hludourid? From this work we gather that at the time of its composition (c. 840) the Roncesvalles disaster was already the subject of popular tradition ; for its author, speaking of the Frankish chiefs slain in this battle, says, "quorum, quia vulgata sunt, nomina dicere supersedi." Yet in its earliest extant form the legend has already worked in the names and traditions of a later age, e.g., the traitor Ganelon, who probably, as Leibnitz has suggested, represents Wenelon, archbishop of Sens, accused of treason towards Charles the Bald in 859. 3 It is interesting to note that during the last few years Dummler (Romania, ii. 146-148) has discovered what appears to be the epitaph of the above-mentioned Eggihard. This, as G. Paris remarks, renders it highly probable that the similar elegiac verses quoted in the Pseudo-Turpin (cc. 24, 25), which make Roland thirty-eight years old at the time of his death, are also genuine survivals from the Carolingian era. According to Diimmler's discovery, the battle of Roncesvalles was fought on 15th August. Earliest Extant Forms. The legend of Roland makes its first appearance in (a) the so-called History of Archbishop Turpin and (b) the Chanson de Roland. The former, according to Paris, may be divided into two parts ; of these the first (cc. 1-5), written about 1050, deals with Charle- magne's conquest of Spain, but contains no allusion to Roland. The latter section, written by a monk of Vienne between 1109 and 1119, gives the main outlines of the familiar legend: Marsilius and Baligant appear (c. 21); Roland fights with the giant Ferracute, Ariosto's Ferraii (Orl. Fur., c. 1); then follow the narrative of Ganelon's treachery (c. 21) and punishment (c. 26), the episode of Roland's horn, Roland's address to his sword (c. 22), his last prayer, his death (c. 23), and Charles's vengeance on the Saracens (c. 26). 4 The Chanson de Roland, in its extant version probably composed in England between 1066 and 1095, looks like the expansion of an earlier poem written towards the beginning of the same century. 1 Annales Eginhardi, 778, with which comp. Dozy, Hist, des Muss. d'Espayne, i. 376-380. * Ap. Pertz, ii. 608. 3 Ann. Imperil, ed. Pertz, i. 77. 4 Turp. Hist., ed. Castets, 1880. It gives the legend in much the same form as the Pseudo- Turpin, but with far more detail and poetic fire. There are, however, a few striking differences between the two accounts. Such deal with the causes and method of Ganelon's treachery, the personality of Baldwin, and the fate of Archbishop Turpin. Above all, the Latin prose- writer has no second hero in Oliver and knows nothing of Roland's love for Aude. Additions to the Early Legend. The name of Roland was soon transplanted from its native soil in the gestes of Roncesvalles into almost the whole cycle of later Charlemagne romance ; and by weaving these notices of him together we may construct the legendary story of his life. Thus the Enfatices Roland (c. 1200) tells of his parents' disgrace and his infant valour ; in the Chanson d' Aspremont (late 12th century) we read how he became possessed of his famous sword Durendal ; Girars de Viane (c. 1200) recounts his great fight with Oliver and his love for that hero's sister Aude. Roland plays scarce less prominent a part in Rcnaud de Montauban (13th century) and figures in Fierabras (12th century), Otincl (c. 1250), and the Voyage a Jerusalem (c. 1130). Nicholas of Padua's Entree en Espagne (c. 1320) makes Roland quarrel with Charles and fly to Persia, whence he only returns to aid in the siege of Pam- plona and to perish at Roncesvalles. Diffusion of the Roland Legend in Literature. The immense popularity of the Chanson de Roland and the Pscudo-Turfrin may be measured by the influence they have exercised on the literature of nearly every country of western Europe. To the original CJutnson de Roland a poet of perhaps the reign of Philip Augustus added a new ending of some 2000 lines. From this full version are descended the Remaniements or Ronccvaux, of which so many French MSS. remain. During the 12th century a Swabian priest, Conrad, translated the Chanson into rhymed German verse. This Rolandslied forms the basis of the Strieker's Karl (c. 1230), in its turn the foundation for the Roucesvalles section of the so-called Karl Mcinct (early 14th century). In England Taillefer's singing of a "cantilena Rollandi " prefaced the first Norman charge at Hastings ; 5 but, curiously enough, the English Roland of the 14th century in some places seems to look back for its original to the Pseudo-Turpin rather than to the Chanson de Roland, which received its final shape in England. 6 It was probably from that country that the Roland legend passed to Scandinavia and Iceland. There the battle of Roncesvalles forms the eighth section of the great Karlamagnus Saga (13th century), which is of critical import- ance, as it preserves some details not to be found in the Chanson de Roland as we now have it. Translated into Danish, this work took the form of the Kejser Karl Magnus (15th century), to this day a popular book in Denmark. The legend penetrated eastward into Hungary and Bohemia ; while in the west Roland appears in the Welsh Mabinogion and the tales of Ireland. M. Bormans has published Flemish fragments of the Roncesvalles story ; and these, which belong to the 13th and the 14th century, are based on the Chanson. In the 16th century the same legend circulated through- out the Low Countries in one of the most popular books of the clay. In the 13th century the Spanish "fabulae histrionum," of which Roderic of Toledo speaks (d. 1247), and which may, on one hypo- thesis, have been the sources whence the Pseudo-Turpin drew his materials, gave way to a new and more patriotic legend, in which Bernard del Carpio takes the leading place ; but three centuries later (1528) Nicolas di Piamonte revived the purer Fraukish tradi- tion in the still popular Karlo Magno. It is, however, on the literature of Italy that the Roland legend has exercised its widest influence. Here the songs, chanted by the early French jongleurs, towards the end of the 12th century made place for the Italianized Remaniements, till the epoch of Nicholas of Padua (c. 1320), whose gigantic Entree en Espagne (with its sup- plement the Prise de Pampeluttc), though but a mosaic of earlier materials, formed the groundwork of the Tuscan poem, the Spagna (1350-1380), on which the Rotta di Roncisvalle in its turn is founded. Somewhat later than the verse Spagna came the Spagna in prose ; and the extraordinary popularity of the legend in its new guise made the names of Charlemagne's paladins familiar down to the age of the Renaissance. We have now reached the era of the great Italian poets Pulci (Morgante Maggiore, 1481), Boiardo (Orlando Innamorato, 1486), Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, 1516), and Berni (1541), whose poems, however, with the exception of Pulci's, are indebted to those of their predecessors for little more than the names of their chief characters and their general plan. Roland in Mediaeval Art. The earliest remaining statue of 8 Will, of Malmes., Gest. Reg. Angl., iii. 242 ; Wace, ed. Andresen, ii. 11. 8035-40. 8 Still more applicable is this remark to Roland and Vernagou (c. 1330), and the death of Roland in Caxton's Charles the Orete. All three works have been edited for the Early English Text Society by Mr Heritage.