The Circulation of French-Language Charlemagne Material in England

Reception of the Chanson de geste

THE Matter of France entered insular literary consciousness largely through two genres: the chanson de geste and the chronicle, or rather the pseudo-chronicle in the text of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. If the latter apparently brought a respectable clerical imprimatur, the former might be expected to have had more popular appeal. While only a restricted group of texts became fully appropriated into Middle English popular culture through translation into Middle English, there is evidence of much wider dissemination of the legends of Charlemagne in French-language texts.

The chansons de geste are more distinct by form than any other French narrative genre. After some early experimentation in versification, by the middle of the twelfth century most French narratives were written in rhyming couplets. The chansons de geste, however, retained the verse form of the earliest surviving examples of the genre, namely the laisse, a strophe of variable length united by assonance or rhyme and with a line length of ten or twelve syllables. The basic unit of meaning is the hemistich. The narrative is related using an episodic structure. With these formal features we find a characteristic discourse related to the oral origins and dissemination of the chanson de geste. This discourse can be epitomised as using different forms of repetition: formulaic lines and half-lines, different patterns of repetition to link the laisses (including reprise, picking up some of the sense of one laisse in the following one), and different forms of parallelism.

Some aspects of the reception of the chanson de geste in the insular context, and in particular in England, have long puzzled critics. All of the oldest chansons de geste survive only in Anglo-Norman manuscripts. The Chanson de Roland, the iconic text of French nationalism, and in particular of nineteenth-century French nationalism,3 survives in its oldest known form in an Anglo-Norman manuscript, as noted above; this version of the text is known as ‘the Oxford Roland’, because of its modern resting place, the Bodleian Library. Almost as venerable (but set in the reign of Charlemagne's son Louis), the only complete text of the non-cyclical version of the Chanson de Guillaume is an Anglo- Norman manuscript (BL MS Add. 38663); a further fragment discovered in St Andrews University is also Anglo-Norman.