Crusades (of which the most famous is the imaginative Chevalier au Cygne) and those of
Lorraine, Blaye, Nanteuil, and Saint-Gilles.
The masterpieces of the genre are generally considered to be the earlier poems: the
Chanson de Roland, the Chanson de Guillaume, and Gormont et Isembart, from the early
12th century, and Raoul de Cambrai, Girart de Roussillon, Aliscans, the Couronnement
de Louis, the Charroi de Nîmes, and the Prise d’Orange from the late 12th or early 13th
century. Throughout the cycles, traits of the genre may be distinguished. The matter is
generally grave in tone and women play a dependent role, particularly in the earlier
poems. At the heart of the tale are the battle and accompanying motifs: arms and armor,
the warhorse, and formulaic acts of combat. The typical jongleur organized his materials
so as to recite the events in a linear story without flashbacks or such withholding devices
as interlacing, popular in the prose romances. Often, too, the story commences in medias
res. The narrator’s voice could be heard infrequently but with considerable authority to
comment on the events, characters, or outcome. If the Roland, for example, portrays two
fairly unified actions (Roland’s defeat, Charles’s victory), poems of the Guillaume legend
tend to be episodic, even contradictory, despite their generally shorter length. Some lack
a unified plot entirely, such as the Couronnement de Louis and the Moniage Guillaume.
In a second generation of chansons de geste, composed in the late 12th and 13th
centuries, the influence of romance was strongly felt, and women and the fantastic came
to play significant roles. Totally absent in Gormont et Isembart, more masculine than
feminine in Guillaume, women came to play major roles in such epics as Raoul de
Cambrai, the Prise d’Orange, and Aye d’Avignon. The motif of the Saracen princess who
converts to Christianity is important in many epics, but love themes always remain
secondary to those of battle. Woman is an object of possession, identified generally with
the fief and marriage, and is never an object of desire for her own sake. Increasing
interest in the marvelous can be seen in Huon de Bordeaux, which places in the
foreground a handsome magician and dwarf, Auberon, who will, he claims, take a seat
next to God when he decides to depart this world. Even later epics (also called chansons
d’aventure), such as Tristan de Nanteuil and Lion de Bourges, feature extraordinary
adventures throughout the known (and imagined) world, played out by a cast that
includes invulnerable heroes, seductive damsels, angels, shapeshifters, magicians, dwarfs,
giants, and fabulous beasts.
Since the 15th century, several notable attempts to revive the epic as a viable genre
have failed: among others, Ronsard’s La Franciade, Voltaire’s La Henriade, and Hugo’s
Légende des siècles. When the Middle Ages were rediscovered in the 19th century,
reaction extended far beyond literary circles into the realm of politics, architecture, and
the military. Louis-Napoléon attempted to restore the spirit of epic crusades by venturing
into Syria and Crimea. Intellectuals seized upon the epic as a model of the French
heritage. While the Round Table was vigorously hailed as a precursor of democracy, the
courtly practice of adultery seemed scandalous. To counter the spread of illicit relations,
moralists praised the virtues of the epic hero. The scholarly methodology applied to the
epic has had handsome rewards. Aside from the variety of approaches that have been
useful for other genres, the question of orality has been particularly rich. The study of a
warrior society in which the mode of literary consumption was oral has led to new
definitions of the process of thinking as well as to surprising cultural ramifications of
reliance on voice rather than writing.
The Encyclopedia 367