What Does it Mean to Be Ber?: Linguistic Ambiguity in the Voyage of Charlemagne

The Voyage of Charlemagne to Jerusalem and Constantinople is one of the most elusive works in the canon of Old French literature. Of the abundant and varied scholarship on the poem, Eugene Vance’s article “Semiotics and Power: Relics, Icons, and the ‘Voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople’” has remained one of the most persistently cited studies of this unusual work.¹ I had the pleasure of reading the 870-verse Anglo-Norman Voyage in the classroom with Gene in the mid-1990s and have been thinking about Charlemagne and the East ever since. The rich bibliography that accompanies the poem is a testament to its complexity, but on a certain level, the poem is fundamentally about the problem of misunderstanding and the disconnection in human speech between what is said and what is meant. My aim in this essay has been to elucidate a series of scenes that are marked by the use of terms that invite multiple interpretations, words such as ber, barnet, and maines. The scenes in question all create visual allusions to iconic moments of Christian kingship such as coronation, enthronement, and investiture. Moreover, the images created by these accidental approximations of royal ceremony all suggest the movement of Charles, King of Saint-Denis between his guises as mortal man and observable embodiment of Christian kingship. Those who observe him in these situations are then charged with describing why he is superior to all others, but in each case, the terms according to which they determine his superiority remain open to interpretation.

The Voyage is a version of the well-known ecclesiastical legend of Charlemagne’s encounters with the Byzantine emperor and his ultimate symbolic triumph over the Greek East.² Playing on the theme of Charles’s bloodless victory over his imperial rival, the poet transforms the story into a caricature of that symbolic triumph by creating a competition for supremacy that will be decided on the basis of which man is perceived to wear his crown better. A careful dissection of the dialogues surrounding the scenes in which Charlemagne is either wearing his crown or sitting on a throne reveals a humorous yet serious meditation on the function of language in determining the ultimately ineffable qualities that combine to make God’s vicar on Earth, the one true Christian emperor.

At a basic level, the poem describes Charlemagne’s journey to the East to compel the emperor of Constantinople to stand next to him while wearing his crown. After a bitter exchange with his wife, he needs the members of the Frankish entourage to either confirm or refute the words of his queen, who claims to have heard of another king who wears his crown better. When the two men eventually stand together in Constantinople, Charlemagne turns out to be more than a foot taller. This detail is a red herring however, since it remains deliberately unclear whether his superior height has had any bearing on the unanimous decision that the queen had been wrong. The competition at the heart of the poem has been interpreted in varying ways.³ Sara Sturm notes that the poem is unified by the royal quarrel over crown-wearing, calling it “a comic poem on a quite unserious theme, the literal reading of the famous question of imperial superiority.”⁴ While it is true that crown-wearing unifies the poem thematically, the nature of the competition is far from simple.

The intrigue of the Voyage relies in part on the fact that the matter of who wears a crown better, whether literally or figuratively speaking, is essentially subjective. Moreover, the question of a which king is better suited to his crown, especially when interpreted metaphorically, cannot be answered by simply having two monarchs stand side-by -side in their crowns for others to behold. For Sturm, “neither spiritual nor moral stature is in question, but rather literal measurement alone, consistently emphasized in both Jerusalem where Charles is proclaimed magne, and in Constantinople, where he is shown to be superior by “plein ped e .iii...