Song of Roland

The Song of Roland (French: La Chanson de Roland) is an 11th-century chanson de geste based on the deeds of the Frankish military leader Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in AD 778, during the reign of Charlemagne. It is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various manuscript versions, which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in Medieval and Renaissance literature from the 12th to the 16th centuries.

It is an epic poem written in Old French and is the first example of the chanson de geste, a literary form that flourished between the 11th and 16th centuries in Medieval Europe and celebrated legendary deeds. An early version was composed around AD 1040, with additions and alterations made up to about AD 1115. The final poem contains about 4,000 lines.

Although set in the Carolingian era, the Song of Roland was written centuries later. There is a single extant manuscript of the Song of Roland. It is held at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. It dates between 1129 and 1165 and was written in Anglo-Norman. There are eight additional manuscripts and three fragments of other poems on the subject of Roland.

Scholars estimate that the poem was written between approximately 1040 and 1115 — possibly by a poet named Turold (Turoldus in the manuscript itself) — and that most of the alterations were completed by about 1098. Some favor the earlier dating, which allows that the narrative was inspired by the Castilian campaigns of the 1030s and that the poem was established early enough to be a major influence in the First Crusade, (1096–1099). Others favor a later dating based on brief passages which are interpreted as alluding to events of the First Crusade.

Relevant to the question of dating the poem, the term d'oltre mer (or l'oltremarin) occurs three times in the text in reference to named Muslims who came to fight in Spain and France. The Old French oltre mer (oversea, modern French outremer) was commonly used during and after the First Crusade to refer to the Latin Levant, which supports a date of composition after the Crusade. Those favoring an earlier dating argue that the term is used generically to refer to "a Muslim land." It is possible that the bulk of the poem dates from before the Crusades, with a few additions from the time of the First Crusade.

After two manuscripts were found in 1832 and 1835 and published in 1837, the Song of Roland became recognized as France's national epic.

Scholarly consensus has long accepted that the Song of Roland was at first performed orally in many different versions with varying material and episodes, which were fixed and harmonized in the textual form.

Early 19th century editors of the Song of Roland, informed in part by patriotic desires to elevate a distinctly French epic, could thus overstate the textual cohesiveness of the Roland tradition as they presented it to the public. Andrew Taylor notes, "[T]he Roland song was, if not invented, at the very least constructed. By supplying it with an appropriate epic title, isolating it from its original codicological context, and providing a general history of minstrel performance in which its pure origin could be located, the early editors presented a 4,002 line poem as sung French epic".