La Chanson De Roland, And The Song Of Roland - 1802 Words

La Chanson de Roland, or The Song of Roland, is the oldest surviving French poem. It is also the oldest and greatest of the chansons de geste, medieval epic poems written in French. In old French, geste means a deed or action, often of heroic proportions. A hundred or so of these epic poems survive, dating from around the year 1100 to the late fourteenth century. In their time, they were exceedingly popular. Although we know neither the identity of The Song of Roland s composer nor the date of its composition, most scholars estimate that the poem was written between 1098-1100. This dating puts the poem s origin at the time of the First Crusade, and indeed the poem has been characterized by some scholars as propaganda to encourage Christians to take up arms against Islam. Propaganda here is a loose term, including a broad range of artistic creations that can intend to push listeners to action or simply paint certain policies or events from a specific perspective. What can be said for certain is that The Song of Roland seems animated by the spirit of the Crusades, a time when the medieval Catholic Church, at the height of its power, sought to expand Christendom into the Holy Land. The poem describes events happening several centuries earlier, during the reign of the mighty Christian warrior-king Charlemagne. The historical context of the poem therefore straddles several centuries, and to properly understand the poem we must bear in mind its rich historicalShow MoreRelatedJacques Le Goff s The Imaginary World1582 Words   |  7 PagesJacques le Goff, the most renowned French medievalist, proclaimed in an interview for the journal L Express in 2005 that â€Å"les hommes et les femmes d une socià ©tà © vivent et pensent autant par l image et l imagination que par le contact avec la rà ©alità © et la raison† (Men and women of a society live and think just as much through images as by contact with reality and reason). That s why, in my opinion, studying the imaginary world is so important, indeed, it is about telling the story of what makesRead MoreSummaries of Indapatra and Sulayaman, the Song of Roland and Iliad2416 Words   |  10 PagesThe plant wi thered and it means that Sulayman died * He removed the wings and he prayed to Bathala. * And the hero ressurected The Song of Roland A French Epic Author * Since the song of Roland is the oldest surviving major work of French Literature, there is no evidence about the author * It is written from 12th to 14th Century The song of Roland is attributed to... * France, specifically, the story told in the poem is based on a historical incident, the  Battle of Roncevaux Pass  onRead More The Greatest Literary Emblem of the Middle Ages Essay2067 Words   |  9 Pagesthe quest for auto representation through their readings and creations, where they represent different characters such as poets, lovers, knights, bourgeois, and others, according to Valerie Fasseur, Medieval French Literature Professor at Università © de Pau. Troubadours’ lyrics were originally written in the language called Occitan, which is a romance language spoken in the southern region of France (Occitania) where the troubadours flourished. Linda M. Paterson states this region was well known forRead MoreMedieval Poetry3509 Words   |  15 PagesAquinas. One of the most famous religious works of the period was  The Golden Legend, a collection of stories about the saints by Jacobus de Voraigne. Not all medieval literature was religious in nature, however. Secular poems and prose works related the deeds of semi-legendary heroes and villains. Examples of this type of work include the French  Song of Roland  and  Beowulf, an early English poem about a heros battles against a series of monsters. Other popular heroes in medieval literature includedRead MorePurgatorio Essay4430 Words   |  18 Pagesarranged climactically, we tend to find this kind of geometric construction artificial and surprising, even though the practice was fairly common in medieval literature. Dante had himself already experimented with this kind of structure in La Vita Nuova. La Chanson of Roland, to cite another well-known example, seems by our standards to drag on surprisingly beyond the heros death; the plot has been carefully arranged, however, so that this event of central importance occurs at the very center of the poem