CARLES li reis, nostre emperere magnes,
Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne :
Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.
N’i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne ;
Mur ne citet n’i est remés a fraindre,
Fors Sarraguce, ki est en une muntaigne.
Li reis Marsilie la tient, ki Deu nen aimet.
Mahumet sert e Apollin recleimet :
Nes poet guarder que mals ne l’i ateignet.
So begins the epic poem la Chanson de Roland, penned by an Anglo-Norman scribe in 1090 or thereabouts. It’s a gripping tale of betrayal, tragic love and vengeance. Legend has it that it was the rallying call that fired William the Conqueror’s army to victory at the Battle of Hastings. And it’s also a window into the origins of the French language.
The Birth of Modern French
Modern French was born in the north of France in the first millennium AD. In pre-Roman times the region had been occupied by Gauls. Their Celtic language bequeathed a few hundred words (gobelet, mouton, bagnole…), but little else survived the Roman invasion. Gallo-Roman, a descendant of Latin, became the norm.
When the Romans retreated from the 5th century onwards, Frankish tribes from the north settled in their place. Frankish monarchs would come to rule France and give the country its name. But instead of imposing their culture as the Romans had done, the Franks adopted that of the existing population: converting to Christianity and learning Gallo-Roman.
The Franks learnt the language but they also influenced it. Their native tongue was German – and its accents, syntax and vocabulary acted as a destabilising catalyst. Linguistically France was split in two. Names were given to the two families based on their different ways of saying “yes”: oc and oil. To the south, the langue d’oc, untouched by German influence, remained close to its romance origins. To the north a new hybrid family of languages was born, the langue d’oil. And it was out of this mix that modern French emerged.
Throughout this formative period, Latin remained the language of written communication. So while the specialists can guess what old French was like from the increasingly wayward nature of these Latin documents, hard evidence is scarce. Occasional texts do survive: a peace treaty in 842, les Serments de Strasbourg, was written in the vernacular to make absolutely sure that troops on both sides got the message. But these political documents are limited in scope.
It wasn’t until the 11th century that clerks began transcribing poems in French. Read them now, and it’s as if we are witnessing the birth of a child.
Reading La chanson de Roland
La chanson de Roland tells the story of a real battle that took place in Roncevaux in the Spanish Pyrenees in 778.
It’s a fast-paced adventure written in 291 stanzas. The opening depicts courtly intrigue and rivalry. The battle is described in a rapid sequence of short scenes, the form mirroring the pace of action. The final sequences depict a quest for vengeance and retribution. The action takes place in a moral landscape quite different from our own – on one level it is a work of propaganda designed to inspire religious crusades – yet the issues confronting the characters, as they struggle to reconcile their desires and their flaws with the expectations that society puts on them, have a distinctly contemporary ring to them.
Is it readable without having studied early French (or more precisely Anglo-Norman, the dialect in which it is written)? With a bit of effort, it’s certainly possible to get the gist. If we take a look again at the opening stanza:
CARLES li reis, nostre emperere magnes,
Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne :
Tresqu’en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne.
N’i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne ;
Mur ne citet n’i est remés a fraindre,
Fors Sarraguce, ki est en une muntaigne.
Li reis Marsilie la tient, ki Deu nen aimet.
Mahumet sert e Apollin recleimet :
Nes poet guarder que mals ne l’i ateignet.
We can recognise for example ki as qui (coincidentally ki is now back in fashion in text messaging). Many other words involve the change of just a letter or two (set/sept, anz/ans, muntaigne/montagne, fors/hors, poet/peut), while some are guessable because of the surrounding context (tresqu’en la mer/jusqu’à la mer). Others again we recognise because they’ve survived in English but not in French (castel, remaigne).
It helps to know that grammatically we are at a halfway point between Latin and modern French. Verbs don’t necessarily have to have a subject pronoun (il, elle…) and word order doesn’t define the function of a noun. So for example
Mahumet sert
means
Il sert Mahomet
He serves Mohammed
the he/il is implicit in the verb form sert, just as the person was implicit in the verb endings of classical Latin.
Even so, reading the raw text unaided remains a challenging task, so a parallel French text is a good option. An open-source version is available online, but the bilingual book with a translation by Jean Dufournet is more helpful, as he stays closer to the original text. Here is Dufournet’s version of the opening stanza (laisse):
Charles le roi, notre grand empereur
sept ans* tout pleins est resté en Espagne.
Jusqu’à la mer il a conquis les hautes terres ;
il n’est château qui devant lui résiste
mur ni cité qui restent à forcer,
hors Saragosse qui est sur une montagne*.
Le roi Marsile la tient, qui n’aime pas Dieu ;
il sert Mahomet et invoque Apollin ;
il ne peut empêcher le malheur de l’atteindre.
*In fact Charlemagne only went to Spain for a few months and Saragossa isn’t in the mountains, so factually this is not a great start. Historical exactitude is not the poem’s strongest card.
The rallying call at the Battle of Hastings?
The thought that La chanson de Roland was sung to William the Conqueror’s troops as they prepared for the Battle of Hastings is tantalising credible. Early historians of the battle such as William of Malmesbury make reference to it. The 12th-century poet Wace says that as soldiers engaged, a juggler sung to them:
De Karlemainne et de Rollant,
Et d’Olivier et des vassals
Qui morurent en Raincesvals.
In the Bayeux tapestry, the name Toruld appears next to a juggler. In the final line of La chanson de Roland, Toruldus is named as the person telling the story. (It’s not clear whether Toruldus refers to the scribe writing or the poem’s author).
But it’s possible that the Hastings connection was the medieval equivalent of an urban myth, repeated so often that people ended up believing it to be true. What the different references do prove is the poem’s contemporary popularity. Further evidence of that can be seen on the facade of the 12th-century cathédrale Saint-Pierre in Angoulême, illustrated with scenes from La chanson de Roland.
The text was subsequently lost for many centuries and it wasn’t until the first half of the 19th century that medievalists unearthed several different manuscripts. The one now considered to be the most authentic was discovered in Oxford’s Bodleian library.
