account of the Spanish expedition and Battle of Nájera in 1367. The poem is extant in a
single manuscript in Worcester College, Oxford.
William W.Kibler
[See also: EDWARD, THE BLACK PRINCE]
Chandos Herald. Life of the Black Prince by the Herald of Sir John Chandos, ed. and trans. Mildred
K.Pope and Eleanor C.Lodge. Oxford: Clarendon, 1910.
CHANSON DE GESTE
. A long narrative poem celebrating the exploits (Lat. gesta) of famous national heroes,
particularly Charlemagne. As the word chanson implies, at least at the beginning these
epic poems were sung or chanted in public, rather than read silently in private chambers.
The chanson de geste could vary in length, from the celebrated Chanson de Roland’s
4,002 lines in editions of the Oxford manuscript to some of the later epics, which number
in the tens of thousands of lines. Most lines follow an established form: ten syllables with
a caesura, or pause, after the fourth (sometimes the sixth) syllable. Rhyme did not appear
until near the end of the 12th century. Until then, assonance sufficed to separate strophes
of unequal length, called “laisses.” The early Gormont et Isembart counts only eight
syllables per line, while the Voyage de Charlemagne and many later poems survive in
dodecasyllables, or Alexandrines. The songs connected with the hero Guillaume are
characterized by a short refrain, le vers orphelin, of four syllables, which is sporadically
attached to the end of laisses.
Controversy still rages on the manner in which the chanson de geste was born. Three
early poems typify the problem: the Chanson de Roland, the Chanson de Guillaume, and
Gormont et Isembart. All three portray events that transpired in the 8th or 9th centuries,
yet their earliest documentary evidence dates from the late 11th or early 12th century.
Scholars of the 19th century sought to explain how the kernel of historical truth
underlying such poems could have reached their authors, and in such a distorted form;
they concluded that the extant epics stand in a long line of oral narrative poems, called
cantilènes, originating at the time of, or immediately subsequent to, the events portrayed.
These anonymously composed short poems were later combined into the longer poems
that survived. This view is today labeled “Traditionalist.”
A positivist reaction led by Joseph Bédier at the start of the 20th century rejected the
continuous poetic tradition in favor of a literate, cultured poet, the trouvère, composing
onto parchment like any modern writer—though for singing by a performer, the jongleur.
The individual creator thus replaced the vague group contributors. Few critics have
equaled the influence that Bédier had upon literary history; his persuasiveness and clarity
of style persuaded most scholars to his theories. Bédier’s famous opening of his four-
volume study of Les légendes épiques set forth in a nutshell the basis for his theory: “Au
commencement était la route” (“In the beginning was the [pilgrimage] road”). Truly
positivistic, Bédier accepted only tangible evidence in the elucidation of his theory of
origins. He rejected outright any notion of cantilènes and thus of the existence of oral
tradition as bearer of the legends. Epic poems first appeared not in the 9th century,
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