Where Roland Plays His Horn. Eventually.

The Song of Roland by Unknown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Battle of Roncesvals took place in 778. This epic poem of the event comes from maybe two centuries after, give or take, and it can't be relied on to be accurate history, but it serves as a quality literary attempt at telling the story. Honestly, it feels quite foreign to me as a 21st century reader in America, and I suppose that makes sense--I'm not French or Spanish or Catholic or Muslim, and I'm definitely not from the Middle Ages--but it's strange to read the story and just not understand why they do what they do. That's part of what makes this so intriguing and entertaining: trying to understand people from a remote time and place, seeing how they are different and still like us, just the same.

This is an action story, with exaggerated battle scenes like you'd find in King Arthur tales or the Iliad or the Shahnameh or other epics, with one warrior or another wiping out scores of opponents. The army sizes here also have to be wildly exaggerated, but it works in epic like this. The good guys and the bad guys are all heroic in battle, capable of amazing feats, though the Christians are made righteous and the Muslims are slandered horribly. (The poet clearly understood nothing about Islam, even naming Apollo a focus of Muslim worship. The author's errors are as illuminating in their own way of the times and people and general milieu as the stuff he/she/they got right.) In battle, though, even a bad guy can be admired for his heroic feats, and there's a lot of that.

I'll never understand why Roland would rather sacrifice himself and all his troops than blow his horn and call for reinforcements. It's explained, in a way, but I just don't get it. It's just bad tactics, and it's a terrible waste of lives. And the court martial at the end for the traitor--who makes a case for his actions, claiming that Roland deserved it, that his betrayal wasn't treason against the king--ends with thirty of Ganelon's kinsmen being hanged. What? Why?

It's a wild story but entertaining, and brief enough that it's still a good read despite the challenges it poses to a modern reader. The copy I have includes a really good afterword by Guy Gavriel Kay, and he does a good job of putting the poem into perspective for the reader. I recommend getting that version.

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