Songs of Roland

The Song of Roland is a long epic poem that deals with the invasion of Spain by the Frankish King Charlemagne in the year 778. It was generally unsuccessful although that king's son, Louis, was subsequently to lead several expeditions into the northeast of Spain that did create a Frankish county there in and around Barcelona and Girona that furnished a nucleus for modern Catalonia.But it was the expedition of his father and its tragic end at the pass of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees...
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The Song of Roland is a long epic poem that deals with the invasion of Spain by the Frankish King Charlemagne in the year 778. It was generally unsuccessful although that king's son, Louis, was subsequently to lead several expeditions into the northeast of Spain that did create a Frankish county there in and around Barcelona and Girona that furnished a nucleus for modern Catalonia.But it was the expedition of his father and its tragic end at the pass of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees when the Frankish rearguard was trapped and massacred that captured the imagination of subsequent Frankish poets. But poets are not historians any more than historians are usually poets. The kernel of the story of Charlemagne's invasion is true and its tragic hero, Roland, was a certifiable count in his kingdom. However the story was cast with the Spanish Muslims as the vengeful victors at Roncesvalles and in all likelihood the Frankish rearguard instead fell victim to an ambush by the semi-Christianized Basque tribes of those mountains. The oldest existing manuscript of The Song of Roland is today in the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford and the best scholarship dates its composition to about 1150. Its poet casts the warriors of Charlemagne as mounted knights of his own times. He found his artistic frame of reference in the expeditions of contemporary French warriors against the Muslims, the Crusades in the Holy Land but also in Spain. He portrayed their thoughts and their actions as he saw them all about him and gave classic expression to an entire series of subsequent martial poetry - tales of chivalry. Of course, he rather bent the facts in the process - artistic license and all that.Professor Reilly, long a professor of the History of Medieval Spain at Villanova University, here offers his own contribution to the continuing dramatic distillation of that human tragedy.