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Anglo-Norman and dreit engleis: the English character of the lais of Harley M S 978 in the British Library Anglo-Norman as a language and a medium of literary expression is in a thoroughly invidious position. O n the one hand, it is recognized as having enjoyed a large measure of autonomy with respect to continental French, having been used in 'commercial and official use into thefifteenthcentury' and 'survived in the conventionalized form of L a w Frenchtillabout 1700',l and a respectable number of literarytextsare recognized as having been conceived in this language in the Middle Ages. Yet when it is a matter of defining the exact relationship in which the language stands with respect to both Central French and English, major difficulties arise. In an article published in 1977 Brian Merrilees defines Anglo-Norman in the following terms: Anglo-Norman m a y be defined as an Old French dialect whose linguistic features are essentially those of western and northern French, and whose texts have been edited according to French and not English editorial traditions. The 'Anglo-' in the term is geographical and political, the '-Norman' is political and linguistic, to a point: the term is controversial.2 Here, the emphasis placed by latter-dayreadersof medieval literature on AngloNorman 's secondary status vis-a-vis French is apparent. There seems to be a strong reluctance to confront the 'English' qualities which distinguish this medium of expression from continental varieties of French, and thus to describe what allowed this language to acquire the degree of autonomy which w e know it to have enjoyed for so long. One of the major effects of this collective humility with respect to AngloNorman is that a large number of medieval literarytexts,scripted according to the distinctive requirements associated with this language, are not usually acknowledged as forming a part of this separate tradition. A n excellent example of this is the Oxford Roland ( M S Digby 23, in the Bodleian Library), one of the earliest vernacular texts still extant in Western Europe, which is written in the distinctively Anglo-Norman language. It is not an isosyllabic poem, as it would almost certainly have been had it been composed by continental scribes. Rather, 1 The Oxford Companion to French Literature, compiled by Paul Harvey and J. E. Heseltine, Oxford, 1959, repr. with corrections 1969, under 'Anglo-Norman'. 2 Brian Merrilees, 'Anglo-Norman', in Editing Medieval Texts: English, French, and Latin, Written in England, ed. A. G. Rigg, Papers given at the 12th annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 5th-6th November, 1976, New York and London, 1977, pp. 86-106 (p. 102, n. 1). P A R E R G O N ns 10.2, December 1992 g4 B. A. Masters it consists of verses in which the actual number of syllables is flexible, although musical regularity is assured by the division of each verse into five feet or measures, organized two plus three, each measure containing a single stress. In other words, this text like so much English poetry and song, is accentual in its musico-poetic character. There is no other manuscripted version of the Roland dating from the early period of vernacular literature. Continental interpretations of the work composed in other variants of Old French have survived from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. These are six in number, two of them assonanced like the Oxford text, the others rhymed.3 In spite of the Oxford text's isolation from the rest in terms of time and place, and its specific musico-poetic and linguistic form, it is customary to consider the Chanson de Roland as a continental Frenchtextfirst and foremost The Oxford Companion to French Literature offers the anomalous statement that the 'great French national epic, the Chanson de Roland itself, has survived in the manuscript... of an Anglo-Norman scribe',4 as if thetextas it actually exists provides us with only a distant reflection of the 'real' text, when it is at best doubtful whether the existence of such a text could ever be proven, and whether it could be shown that there was any profit to be had in the process. Another Anglo-Norman...

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