On introductions

I found I can't say what I want to say in one post, not even about chansons de geste. So in this post I am talking about the Song of Roland. Just the Song of Roland. In fact, just the first line of one manuscript version of the Song of Roland. I will move to other poems in other posts, because in a bunch of ways it is not my favourite.

The Chanson de Roland is all about rearguard action at the pass at Roncesvalles, in the Pyrennees. Ganelon (all say 'boo, hiss') betrays Charlemagne's army and Roland is the leader of the bit of the army that gets attacked. Roland goes all macho and won't sound his horn for help and so everyone gets slaughtered including his best friend Olivier and and the military man of the cloth, Turpin. The sun halts in the sky so that Charlemagne has time to catch up with the evil-doers and obtain revenge. (The sun stopping in the sky has nothing to do with Medieval astronomy and everything to do with Charlemagne being on the side of religious right and therefore entitled to miracles.)

Roland has the most extraordinary number of medieval spinoffs. My favourite is the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle where Turpin does his own post-mortem version of the events. Maybe I will talk about its introduction in another post.

Most people think of the Song of Roland when they think chansons de geste. It is the famous one. The trouble is, when you are talking introductions, they also think of the most famous version of the most famous epic. This is bad news. The most famous doesn't actually mean the most representative in this case. The introduction to the Oxford version is rather different to most chansons de geste. Basically, it is missing an opening. To us it doesn't look as if it starts in the middle of things, because it begins "Seven long years was Charles in Spain" (from memory). To a Medieval reader, that was starting in media res. What's worse, it is missing all the signals that show it is a chanson de geste.

From a writer's point of view it is breaking genre. The trouble is that this is the one epic legend that most modern people know. So modern readers don't see it as breaking genre. Read it aloud to an audience and the problem with the break in genre is immediately obvious: the audience is given no time to orient themslves and say "Ooh, epic legend, blood and guts and maybe a bit of romance - let me settle in for the evening." We accept this because the Song of Roland to us is a Great Literary Work. In the Middle Ages it was the story that was important and without some sort of genre marker, people couldn't know what version of the story they were getting. (If the Great Literary Work were more important than the story, we would see lots of copies of the Oxford manuscript and not that many other versions - in fact there are a zillion Rolands and only one manuscript precisely like this. Even allowing for destruction over time, the story is more important than the specific version of the story - until the specific version becomes a Great Literary Work, of course.)

In the end, the rest of the Song of Roland has a heap of genre markers, so all you have to do is add 4 lines to the beginning of the Oxford version to let the readers know what they are up against, and it goes right back into a reading comfort zone.

This just goes to show, never use a Great Work of Literature as a model for making your reader feel comfortable. The Song of Roland is a tremendous piece of writing and has a bunch of wonderful things, but whether it has lost the standard intro on purpose or by error, it would have been harder for a medieval reader to get into than other chansons de geste.

More tonight on what the standard intro looked like in other chansons de geste and how it worked to bring the reader into the tale, because I am about to be picked up.

Orlando Furioso and other Rolands

I am using these posts to bring order to a tiny segment of my library. I hauled out all the primary sources I could find related to the chanson de geste thingie. Tonight there will be two posts, because the spin-off idea has taken hold and I want to write a post on the introductions in a range of spin-offs. The Song of Roland I could trust my memory for - from now on I don't trust anything except my capacity to insult people in Old French. The reason I am being good and checking books is because I have somehow mislaid several and it was an excuse to un-mislay them. Maybe that's what I should have done instead of layering my lounge room in bubbles. The bubbles look *pretty* though.

This post will be about Roland spin-offs and the next one will look at chansons de geste in general. Just remember this is not literary history. This is a Medievalist who also happens to be a fiction writer revisiting introductions from a writer/audience point of view. Apply to same principles to the book you are reading now, or to the TV series you watch tonight. It is all about narrative and audiences - these are just different ways the interface with the audience is achieved and the narrative is successfully (or not) begun.

Some of these works were more for private reading (aloud or silently) and some were more for public use - this changes the nature of the audience doing the interfacing. It is like politics or advertising: if the writer reaches the target group and meets their expectations they are going to have an easier time of entertaining or educating or preaching. And you get all three in Roland stories, which is another reason to start with the Roland spin-offs - the introductions are not all introducing the same type of work, even though the overall story remains the same.

On my printer is a pile of books. So this is not in time order, or genre order, or regional order, or alphabetic order of any variety: it is in printer liberation order.

On top of the pile is Orlando Furioso. Orlando Furioso reminds me of a Hollywood movie. It should be subtitled "The Arthurian Romance Version". Do I have to point out it is not technically a chanson de geste? And it's late. But it is about Roland and it shows his continuing popularity.

How does it start? Well, Ariosto is writing across genres - which means having his cake and eating it too - so he sneaks from the standard chanson de geste opening (see next post) and he sneaks from the sort of opening lots of Medieval romances have (about which I may have to write, one day) and he adds a cute plot summary of the back story. He tells us about the Moors crossing Africa and doing bad stuff in France, and about Charles fighting back. That is good. Fits the "Seven full years was Charles in Spain" bit. Close to canon. Telling us next of Orlando being driven mad by love is just about as far from canon you can get. Roland doesn't even think about love in the original and his fiancée is a wimp called Aude who dies on hearing about his death. So a big fat romance focussing on Roland's love life is not what one would expect an introduction to offer.

Ariosto gives us what he offers, too. This is important. He is moving other themes into romance - which seems to happen quite a bit in late Medieval Italian stuff - but he is open and honest about it from the beginning. From the very beginning. The first words are "Le donne" which is his target audience in theory "i cavallier" are listed second. Women ahead of men. Make love, not war. I tend to cross genres, too, so I must remember Ariosto's model: keep enough of the old to let the audience know where things come from, but make sure that your target audience is very, very clearly addressed. They have to know what sort of book you are writing for them.

Next in line is Konrad's version. I can't find my untranslated version of this, which is probably good because I would need a dictionary to read it in any case. I am using the edition by JW Thomas. Now, the Rolandslied is not quite as old as the Oxford Roland, but it is still early (c1170) compared with Ariosto. Konrad was a priest and that shows. His introduction goes "Creator of all things, Sovereign of all kings," etc. He is writing truth, as monitored by God. Instead of being told to sit right back and hear a tale (sorry, those words just sort of snuck in) they are told that heathens were told to recognise the truth. I guess he was doing a bit of a Bernard of Clairvaux and preaching crusade. Crating a tempting crusade by making the violence sexy. Another branch of Hollywood? The religious introduction sets the scene for a Roland replete with religious imagery. One of my favourite manuscripts is the Rolandslied, but one of my least favourite actual versions of Roland.

The next work is multiple versions of the same thing. The Chronicle of Archbishop Turpin, death-dealer extraordinaire, who somehow managed to tell his story hundreds of years after his demise at Roncesvalles. The edition by Walpole of the Old French version begins with a kind of modified chanson de geste introduction. We are told "It is true that many have heard willingly and again of Charles and how he conquered Spain." This is clever. It uses words that are familiar from actual chansons de geste, but changes their sense and suggests to the reader that "This is different. This is not the common-as-muck version you are used to." This is reflected in other versions of the same work (I can't emphasise enough that no two manuscripts are exactly the same.) Familiar words are used, in both prose and verse versions, but in a new way, reflecting the reshaping of the content to emphasises Turpin rather than Roland. The Pseudo-Turpin itself is kind of dull, but it tries to capture the audience from the chansons de geste and drag them into higher thinking. Well, medieval Christian polemical higher thinking, anyhow.

Alas, the only other version of the Roland I can find on my shelves is missing the introduction.

Anyhow, it is really clear (I hope) that when these Medieval writers want to use a popular story and make it fit either a new audience or a new interpretation they take words and even whole concepts form the original introduction, and reshape it to reflect the work to come.

Introductions are important. Audiences need to know what they are getting and how it fits with what they already know. What I found interesting was the level of conservation of words and ideas. Audiences need to understand where they are at so they can hop aboard for the ride. And all of these versions did just that - let their audience in gently before taking them on a wild ride.

Roll up, roll up

You want to get an audience for an entertainment, you promise them the earth.

You tell them you have a tale to tell. You remind them of other tales like the one they are about to hear. You give them a chance to settle down and pay attention before you tell the story, so they won't miss anything. And that is the formula for many chansons de geste. Jehan de Lanson, for instance, says (in disrespectful Gillian-translation), "Shut up sirs if you want to hear a good story with an awesome subject and some really nice poetry." Not to mention battle and betrayal and other juicy goodies.

Like a car chase at the beginning of an action movie. The scene is set.

For chansons de geste with a bit of love in them, the formula is modified. At its most extreme it becomes something more like the opening to a romance (logical) or a chronicle (also logical - chansons de geste were very much a form of popular history). This again is the author trying to communicate what to expect.

For instance, Berte as grans pies (Bertha Big Foot - all classic love stories should be so named) has no calls to lords to sit down or to listen. No cries of valour and warnings of betrayal. Instead we get a pretty piece about how lovely things are in early April and how a monk has revealed the true story of Bertha and Pippin. The call to nature suggests a love story and the call to written authority suggests a history. All the chansons de geste were history told again, but most of them didn't need to rely on a hidden written tradition. Adenet needed to back his telling to have it accepted - making a call to authority.

This is another way of handling cross-genre, and not an effective one, because the audience has to take the manuscript referred to on trust and know it might be a lie. It is not nearly as powerful as using familiar words and distorting them (see previous post). Readers seldom want to have to think and assess before they get into a romantic story

There is no rule. Each writer of a chanson de geste makes his or her own decision based on their subject matter and their feelings about it and their audience. What is important is the first formula I described is the successful one. You see it over and over and over again. Using a variant of something accepted is not a writing failure: it may just be the way into gaining the audience's attention.