Page:The Song of Roland.djvu/19

 HAT follows is not a work of scholarship, nor yet of imagination: it is an attempt to reproduce line for line, and, so far as is possible, word for word, the Old French epic poem which lay dormant for centuries in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

My part in it began almost by accident when, on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1918, turning into the coolness of Hatchard’s, I found lying there a copy of M. Petit de Julleville’s edition of La Chanson de Roland. Amid the distractions of that summer in London, where the sound of the olifant came so often and so direfully across the Channel, Roland was a constant solace, and in the leisure hours of that summer the first fourteen laisses were translated, copied, and circulated in manuscript. Afterwards the original went with me during winter and spring through France and Belgium, and returned with me to London where, in the summer months of 1919, the translation was begun again.

M. Petit de Julleville’s is the only edition I have used or even seen: of Mr. Masefield’s and other translations I know only by hearsay. M. de Julleville’s text, with which his translation was interleaved, is in the main that of the Oxford MS., with some emendations by Muller and himself. In the Oxford MS. there are 3,998 lines; to these Muller added four, as follows:—