From Epic to Romance: The Literary Transformation of Private Blood Feud into Societal Ressentiment

In this essay the author presents a comparative critique of the Chanson de Roland and Beowulf. Using Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment, he examines how the Roland represents a literary transformation from the epic to the Romantic that mirrors the turbulent social changes of the late eleventh century, which were not only violently acted out but comparably symbolized in a novel form of anti-Semitism resulting from a rejection of elder heroic values, as embodied in Beowulf, for a new world-view, as expressed in the emerging Romantic genre. Driven by Anselm’s revolutionary theological recasting of the sacrifice of the Crucifixion and its attendant suffering as the heart of Christian belief, which marked a radical change from the prior Anglo-Saxon spirituality that did not worship sacrosanct victimization but rather Christ as Hero, the author examines the literary aspects of a conceptual evolution from private blood feud to an unprecedented societal foundation of ressentiment by comparing the respective “heroes” of Beowulf and the Roland. In this regard, the author paradigmatically contrasts the Roland’s Charlemagne, who willfully subverts the law to further his passions and ambitions, against the eponymous protagonist of Beowulf, who struggles to remain always faithful to the ealde riht, the “old law.”