Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/292

266 form a fine nucleus for the development of a later chanson de geste. Nor need we think it had perished, because the Chronique Saintongeaise does not mention it. Apart from its extreme conciseness, and evident effort to tell merely the "facts," the Chronique had another origin for the name Taillefer in the uncle who went with Charlemagne, and could not reconcile both.

There must have been many local legends and lays of this period which never attained any wide celebrity, and which have been quite forgotten and lost. We have none at all in the peculiar dialect of this district—Saintonge, Poitou, and Aunis. Partly perhaps from its very peculiarities, which made it less easy reading and more like a foreign tongue, we have very few literary or other remains left us. And it is quite likely that there were lays or even chansons de geste composed in it, of which we have absolutely no trace left. If so, this Taillefer de Léon was no doubt one of the heroes of them.

The legends of Charlemagne and of his peers, like Aaron's rod, swallowed up all the legends of lesser heroes. And all fights and warrings had to be affiliated to those of these great heroes. We see this in the case before us, where Taillefer de Léon had to find an uncle who went into Spain. And it is significant that the very last words of this Chronique are the often-quoted ones which mention the three Gestes of France: of Pepin, of Odo of Mayence, and of Garin of Monglane. The photosphere of epic-matter had already condensed itself into three great luminaries, and all wandering meteors had to be drawn into their orbits, or revolve round them as satellites, or else go into black space.

Thus it is that we have to account for the almost total disappearance of any epic of the Norse Invasion. Here is just where we should have expected the epic genius to have found itself at home. "A disaster," says M. Gaston Paris, "always strikes the popular imagination more than a victory." There was surely no lack of disaster in the