Oral performance, writing, and the textual tradition of the medieval epic in the romance languages: the example of the Song of Roland

Oral performance, writing, and the textual tradition of the medieval epic in the romance languages: the example of the Song of Roland The medieval epics composed in Old French, Old Provencal, and Old Spanish constitute a sizeable body of material. At least 206 manuscripts and 106 fragments have survived into the modern period. Approximately 95 percent of these are written in French, four percent in Provencal, and one percent in Spanish. The scarcity of surviving discrete epics from south of the Loire can be seen from the fact that while 120 of the poems are in French, only nine in Provencal and three in Spanish are extant in their poetic form. W e generally speak as if most of the French epics which circulated in the Middle Ages have survived in some shape, although it is known that a number of works have not. For southern France, the issue is marked by controversies. M y own opinion is that a flourishing epic literature was largely wiped out during the cultural catastrophe known as the Albigensian Crusade which resulted in the destruction of the economic, social, and political bases upon which Provencal culture was built. For Spain, we are fortunate in having summaries of several epics incorporated into chronicles, and in some cases sequences of poetic lines have been recovered intact from the prose. The number of epics available to twelfth and thirteenth-century Castilian audiences was undoubtedly substantial, but one has no way of knowing just how large it was. When one compares the quantity and distribution of epics in the Romance languages with the corpus of such poems in neighbouring language areas, such as the Anglo-Saxon with Beowulf and a few fragments of other works, or the Old High German, it is obvious that while the Spanish and Provengal numbers are fairly typical, the surviving French tradition is unusually large. If one were to set out to read even a single version of each French epic, one could look forward to perusing nearly a million lines of poetry. But even for French the fragility of the tradition is underscored by the fact that around 40 percent of the chansons de geste are extant in only one copy. Virtually all of the manuscripts of which I speak were written down in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the great age of copying being the hundred years or so that begin around 1250 during which over half of our texts were set down in the form in which we have them today. A single manuscript survives from the twelfth century, the Oxford text of the Song of Roland. I have chosen the Roland as my main example, not simply because it is the most popular and the most frequently studied of the epics, but because its versions—both in French and in various other medieval languages—differ considerably among themselves, because its texts span the chronological range, from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and because it has been edited more often than any epic in the body of medieval Western 80 3.3. Duggan literature.4 Before going into the textual phenomena, however, I would like to say a few words about the poem's literary and social context. It is my belief that the medieval Romance epic was fundamentally an oral genre, that is to say one in which poems were composed, transmitted and performed orally before being set down in writing, with the aid of techniques particularly suited to a state of civilization in which cultural material was primarily conveyed in oral tradition. Obviously we only perceive the epic of that period through its written manifestations, and one of the great problems is how to distinguish the scribe's contribution from the singer's. Some epics were composed, in the form in which we have them, in writing: the Mocedades de Rodrigo, in all likelihood, and certainly the three epics produced by Adenet le Roi, the late thirteenth-century author also responsible for the romance ClGomades, and perhaps others. The epic was not the only type of orally composed poem in the Romance-speaking world of the Middle Ages: many fabliaux surely circulated in tradition, as did...