Fierabras and Floripas: A French Epic Allegory (review)

This book offers us translations of two separate old French chansons de geste, which can reasonably be read as a single tale: La destruction de Rome and Fierabras. The former tells of the destruction of Rome by a Muslim army from Spain led by the emir Balan and his son Fierabras, during which the population is massacred and holy relics are captured. The attack was in reprisal for a Christian slaughter of Muslim merchants and report of a greater threat posed by the pope. The Muslims return to Spain before Charlemagne is able to arrive from France to defend the city. The latter tells of the fortunes of Charlemagne and his knights who have pursued Balan to Spain. The suspenseful but unsurprising turns of events between the Christian and Muslim armies, ending with the defeat of the Muslims, the execution of Balan, and the conquest of the Iberian peninsula are rendered particularly interesting, however, by the behaviour of Fierabras and his sister Floripas. Fierabras is defeated in single combat by Oliver, converts to Christianity and is baptised, and is granted half of Spain as his kingdom. Floripas falls in love with Gui of Burgundy, betrays her father, aids Christian knights in difficult moments, likewise receiving baptism and marrying Gui, and reigns with him over the other half of Spain.

The greatest merit of this book is surely to make these two epics available to a wider audience in a very accomplished and readable verse translation, which succeeds in conveying much of the sense of oral performance that their medieval audiences would have enjoyed. In order to achieve this effect, Michael Newth has necessarily taken some liberties (cf. pp. xxx–xxxi), so that this cannot be regarded as a literal translation, but it joins a respectable series of similar translations by him. While he includes a selection of excerpts from the original Old French version as an appendix, such translations are only serviceable to specialist scholars and students when accompanied by the complete facing text.

The bulk of the Introduction proposes an historical and interpretative approach to the poems. Newth claims that they were probably composed under the influence of Abbot Suger and originally performed at the annual market of Lendit at the abbey of Saint Denis. The abbey claimed to possess several of the relics depicted in the poems, Saint Denis is regularly mentioned and Suger supported a political programme which appealed to Charlemagne in order to establish France’s exemplary role as defender of Christendom and of Rome. Newth arranges the two poems, as a single whole, into four parts reflecting a spiritual progression, notably of Fierabras, which he considers implicit in them and which raises the poems from an adventure story to a moral epic: vanity, submission, desires, and deserts.

At several points, the translator seems to be at pains to demonstrate that a medieval poem can also be ‘relevant’ to modern readers, and this relevance seems to lie partly in its alleged moral and religious message. While allowing that a medieval audience could have made associations based on names or other details in the narrative with religious models and thereby indeed perceived a higher meaning in such entertainment, Newth’s suggestions here seem overdrawn, and there is nothing in the poems’ prefaces to support them. We need to distinguish between medieval hermeneutics and modern relevance. The relics, for instance, do assume some importance in the story, but they do not inspire any spiritual contemplation by the characters; they function only as booty, as a source of healing and protection, and as the object of simple piety.

The other significant difficulty with this text lies with its composition. This edition would be more useful to scholars with a discussion of the manuscripts, the relationship between the various dialect versions, and evidence as to why we should consider the poems to have been originally composed in the Picard dialect while...