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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Where Orlando Loses It but Gets It Back

By Ludovico Ariosto - Orlando Furioso (Oxford World's Classics) (1999-02-12) [Paperback] by Ludovico Ariosto
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you've got the time, this is amazing.

Partly, I wanted to track down whatever stuff Don Quixote had been reading, see what he loved so much, and this is one of those chivalric stories (a long epic poem, actually) that he supposedly read. And yeah, it's very cool. I'd like to have a chat with Don Quixote about it.

This poem by Ariosto is the continuation of another Italian poem--Orlando Innamorato, or Orlando in Love, [or Roland, actually, to use a more familiar form of his name], written by Boiardo--but that poem was less successful and has received much less attention over time than this continuation. The Orlando here is the same Roland we might know better from The Song of Roland, the story of Charlemagne's withdrawal from Muslim Spain back to France, where Roland and his men, the rear guard of the army, are ambushed by a Muslim army (or a Basque army, depending on the version) and Roland is reluctant to use his horn to call for help. This epic brings together many of stories found in other forms that are collectively called the Matter of France, mostly stories of Charlemagne's knights. The so-called Matter of Britain, mostly King Arthur stories, is thrown into the mix.

In general, this tells how certain key knights (including women, several of whom are nearly unbeatable) participate in the war between North African Muslims on the one side, who are trying to take Paris, and the multi-national force of Christians led by Charlemagne, who are trying to defend it. Most of the story, though, follows individuals as they go on separate quests and fight strangers and save maidens or warriors or whoever from monsters and sorceresses and all sorts of bad guys, especially the type who will stand on bridges and challenge all comers. The story starts with Orlando in love with Angelica, though she doesn't love him back (because they drank from different magic streams in the original poem by Boiardo) and he is chasing after her. Other knights are just as in love with her, which she doesn't enjoy. The "furioso" part of the book (meaning crazy, not angry) comes in the middle when Orlando learns Angelica has fallen in love with someone else and has gone off to live with him. (She leaves the story at that point.) He loses his reason, rips off his clothes, and starts tearing up the countryside, killing people everywhere he goes.

(The English knight Astolfo goes to save Orlando, with direction from a kind sorcerer. He rides a hippogriff to Africa, where he helps the Christian king Prester John with his harpy problem and has many adventures, eventually being allowed to ride Elijah's flaming chariot up to the moon where lost things, like Orlando's wits, can be found. He eventually restores them to Orlando, who as a result no longer loves Angelica.)

One of the best passages, earlier on in the poem, tells how Angelica is captured (even though she is a top fighter) and is chained to a rock like Andromeda to be a sacrifice to the sea creature called an orc.

The orc, seeing the shadow cast by the spreading wings flitting here and there across the water, left its certain prey awaiting it on shore and started a furious chase, curving and coiling, after the elusive one instead. Ruggiero dropped down and struck a blow, like an eagle dropping from the sky when it has spotted a snake weaving through the grass, or lying on a bare stone in the sun...

Ruggiero--supposedly an actual ancestor of the poet's patrons, the Este family, even though he was a Muslim--defeats the orc and rescues her from the rock with the help of the hippogriff that Astolfo later rides to Africa. He gives her a ring of invisibility and she uses it to go hide from all the guys trying to find her.

So many modern fantasy elements and tropes are found here that, with a little revision and updating of some 500-year-old stylist things, it could be on the shelves beside LotR or Wheel of Time or Mistborn books. Like a grandpa fantasy near it's descendants.

The original ~40,000-line poem in Italian was in ottava rima stanzas, which rhymed abababcc. There are English versions that attempt a similar format, but that's a terrible thing to do to a nice poem. This translation is given in prose, split into paragraphs, written in a way that doesn't do violence to the poem's meaning. The only sign of the original format is a / placed between stanza breaks. This translation is very readable with only a hint of quaintness, and it has an extensive annotated index in the back for those of us who need help remembering who is Brandimart (a knight who is Orlando's best friend) and who is Bradamant (a female knight who ends up marrying Ruggiero) and things like that.

I read this in tiny pieces. That worked for me. I don't know about other readers. In any case, I really enjoyed it. 5 stars.

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I Finally Learn Who Roland Was

Swords of Anjou by Mario Andrew Pei
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is an older book--1953--but it's written in the style of much older books, romances such as those Don Quixote would have read, and I enjoyed it.

It is the story, more or less, of Roland from The Song of Roland. Charlemagne and his army are leaving Spain after forcing Zaragoza to surrender, and as they reach the passes through the Pyrenees, the defeated army attacks the rearguard and kills them all, including the famous Roland. The main army returns and defeats Zaragoza once more. The author adds characters from other tales and invents a few more to add love stories and subplots, making them the main characters in the story, following a tradition (according to the author in the historical note at the end) of retelling the Roland story with embellishments and a change of focus. I like that kind of invention and retelling; I enjoy the many forms of Sherlock and Wizard of Oz and Robin Hood and Cinderella; I think that's a fun way to renew a story, and I think it works here.

The author keeps his characters true to the times, which sometimes is annoying. The misogyny and narrow-mindedness and religious bigotry of middle age men is wearisome. That's not his fault--people were horrible, then as now--but 2019 me wants them to learn a lesson. Alas.

It is a fun story, though, if we can overlook our heroes' painful flaws. They also have admirable strengths. The courage and loyalty on display here are as impressive as the chauvinism is disappointing. It is inspiring to see men (and women, in some cases) sacrifice everything for a principle. After seven years, I want to go home, but I will fight on. I will give up the love of my life to serve my nation. The reader has to wonder--would I be able to sacrifice so much for a vow I made, for a principle I believe in?

I dunno.

So--problematic characters seem to reflect problematic times, not a problematic author. But YMMV. I liked the book, the story, the history.

Recommended.

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