Medieval Literature in Translation

Charles W. Jones

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486149042
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Comprehensive anthology contains exquisite cross-section of Western medieval literature, from Boethius and Augustine to Dante, Abelard, Marco Polo, and Villon, masterfully translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Eliot Norton, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Lord Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Lord Byron, others. `No better anthology exists.` — Commonweal.

VII. ROMANCE LITERATURE

Any living language changes from century to century. Romance language is not otherwise than living Latin many centuries removed from the classical Latin we know. While, in the sixth to ninth centuries, literacy was an attribute almost exclusively the clergy’s, the language of writing changed but slowly because it was tied to the Scriptures and to the liturgy. But oral Latin, the language of business and mundane affairs, changed the faster for being no longer anchored by writing. The language of literature and the language of speech were no longer one. Speech followed provincial lines, so that shortly it broke into many dialectical variations of three main groups — what Dante below (P. 745) and others distinguished as the languages of oc (Spain and Provence), oil (France), and si (Italy), according to the word of assent in each.

These vulgar tongues were enriched and developed by the barbarians who settled in the Roman provinces: the Goths in Spain and northern Italy, the Burgundians on the Saone, and the Franks on the Seine and Meuse. What Gaston Paris says of the Franks may be more generally applied: “Their tongue, which they did not hesitate to exchange for vulgar Latin, nevertheless gave to that language a tremendous number of words, and very much more important words than had been given by Celtic — not only substantives, which always attach themselves to the objects they designate, but adjectives and verbs, signs of the most intimate kind of relationships.”

As early as the seventh century the Church asked its clergy to compose sermons in the vernacular, or non-ecclesiastical, tongue; but authors hesitated to put into a dialect what might be more widely read and appreciated in Latin. Hence it was not until the beginning of the tenth century, when education spread to secular lords, that very much was written in the newer languages. The Strassburg Oaths, exchanged by Charles the Bald and Louis II in 842, were written down in Teutonic and lingua Romana, the precursor of modern French. La Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie is ascribed to the last years of the ninth century. But not until the beginning of the twelfth century is vernacular literature important.

The relationship between ecclesiastical and secular literature in this early period is not clear. Nearly every one of the vernacular works has its parallel in contemporary or preceding Latin literature. How much the secular writers learned from the clergy who schooled them and how much the writings of the Church expressed lay thought cannot be settled. If Walter of Aquitaine was written in a monastic school by a church scholar, whether its author be Ekkehard or another, then the Church appears to have initiated chivalric romance, and the forerunners of Charlemagne and Arthur were St. Anthony and St. George. As early as the sixth century the future bishop Fortunatus was writing Provençal Latin verses that contained in embryo the popular themes of troubadours, and in succeeding centuries church writers developed strophe, accent, and rhyme which the secular writers freely borrowed. The development of the sequence in the Mass was followed, step by step, first by Latin parodies and imitations composed by wandering scholars, and then by canzone and leich of the vernaculars. Yet did romance literature suddenly burgeon in the twelfth century, branching from the liturgy and patristic lore, or had there long been a vernacular literature that has not survived because the nobility was not stable enough to preserve it? The incidence of the crusader and vernacular literature is no doubt important. Not only did travel bring exchange of ideas among a laity previously isolated from each other, but the long periods of idle waiting in camps gave time for storytelling and cultivation of the arts.

Literature thrived in Provence and France before it did in Spain and Italy. Spain was only beginning to flex its muscles against the Moorish overlords in the twelfth century. Italy was partitioned among Greeks, Saracens, Normans, Germans, and the Pope. In Provence, isolation determined the form of literature: though the dukes constantly shifted boundaries and allegiance, distant sovereigns ruled loosely, for the hills and woods protected the natives. The wealth developed from uninterrupted tillage meant leisure for the local count, who lived in new stone bastions like Carcassonne. But isolation breeds peculiarity in art, as prison literature often shows — an excessive interest in attributes of form, a narrow range in ideas, a subjective and personalized view of life. Though the chansons de gestes were cultivated and there are some stories — Aucassin and Nicolete, for instance — Provençal literature lacks universal appeal. It is the lyrics, particularly the love lyrics, that survive; for they grow like tropical plants in such surroundings. In the main, the fortune of Provence was to inspire great art in others; for politics determined that Provençal literature should spread north, east, and south, as it was wiped out by religious wars at home. English, French, German, and Italian literature sprang to life under the goad of troubadour poetry. Chivalric and courtly literature would probably never have existed, and Gottfried, Dante, Chaucer, and Villon would have written quite differently, had it not been for the Provençal lyricists.

This provinciality contrasts with the comparative urbanity of France. Paris was, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, the crossroads of the world, and the new university growing out of the cathedral school dominated the intellectual life of Europe. French manners, French dress, and French thoughts were aped everywhere, at least until the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy in the times of Dante and Giotto began to vie with Paris. The feudal courts were centers of international affairs and adjusted themselves to the new world of trade and commerce. The artisans of Flanders and Artois created a demand for their metalwork and textiles everywhere. The Normans were ubiquitous and curious — whatever they found and thought good they assimilated. Champagne, which cradled the reforming Cistercians and taught the world through Bernard of Clairvaux the cult of the Virgin Mary, also spread through Chrétien the new romance and the cult of Countess Marie. The Church had extolled Virgil and called him The Poet; he was saved from paganism by his Messianic Eclogue. But the poet of the new vernacular was Ovid, who knew how to tell of ars amatoria and the escapades of demigods. Romance, which was thoroughly French, wherever it was written, bloomed and faded quickly. The century between 1150 and 1250 witnessed its rise and fall. Thereafter France retained some pre-eminence in literature, though it found its later metier in rational, cynical, didactic works, as if its great effort at idealism had exhausted its powers for flight.

Italy cannot be said to have had a literature worth reading until the Emperor Frederick II established his renowned court at Naples. “A man pestiferous and accursed, a schismatic, heretic, and epicurean, who corrupted the whole earth,” according to the Franciscan Salimbene, he welcomed all novelty and encouraged all thought however heterodox. To his court came Greek, Saracen, Teuton, and Spaniard. Michael the Scot, with a reputation for wizardry and an ability to translate Hebrew and Arabic science and philosophy, was co-worker with the poet Henry of Avranches, the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, the Jewish philosopher Jacob Anatoli, to mention but a few. Frederick welcomed troubadour and minnesinger, and himself wrote verses. After his death in 1250, the art and science concentrated in Naples spread throughout Europe; his successor as King of Naples, Charles of Anjou, was in an anomalous position common to feudalism — for Naples and Sicily he was vassal of the Pope, for Provence of the Emperor, and for Anjou of the King of France. Little wonder that ideas were exchanged. The newly regularized communes of northern Italy, Florence, Pisa, Bologna, Ravenna, Milan, and Venice, enriched by the trade of the East, which poured through to France, Germany, and England, profited most. Dante, who drew into his all-embracing mind the lyric measures of the courtly poets, the new concept of the world of the explorers, the urbanity of the bourgeoisie, the philosophy of the universities, the idealism of the Franciscans, and the universality of the Church, was not, as Carlyle would have it, “the voice of ten silent centuries” — that any reader of this volume knows; but he does represent the apex of medieval literature. It was part of his greatness as a poet that he chose to write, not in Latin, but in the romance tongue, the language of the people.

THE SONG OF ROLAND

The oldest extant French poetry of any scope is the Song of Roland. It is also the best of its class of literature, the chanson de geste. The manuscript containing the present work was written about 1130, before Geoffrey composed his Histories, but there is general agreement that it was originally formed before the eleventh century came to a close — in the days of popularity of the pilgrim road to Compostella when forces were gathering for the First Crusade. In fact, on the testimony of both William of Malmesbury (A.D. 1120) and Wace, some story like this one was sung by the Norman warriors as they went into battle at Hastings, inspired by William the Conqueror’s jongleur, Taillefer:

Taillefer qui muet bien chantont
Sor un cheval qui tost alout
Devant le duc alout chantant
De Karlemaigne e de Rollant
E d’Oliver e des vassals
Qui morurent en Rencevals.

(Wace, Roman de Rou)

Taillefer who was famed for song,
Mounted on a charger strong,
Rode on before the Duke, and sang
Of Roland and of Charlemagne,
Oliver and the vassals all
Who fell in fight at Roncevals.

(tr. Henry Adams)

There are extant more than eighty chansons de geste, that is, French narrative poems treating a subject of French or Provençal history usually connected in fact or imagination with Charlemagne, written in stanzas of varying length (from 1800 to 18,000 lines) but nearly all composed of strophes or laisses of ten-syllabled lines, each ending with the same rhyme or assonance. The twelfth century was the high period of composition, though some were composed in the thirteenth century. All purport to tell factual history, usually of Charlemagne’s crusades against the “paynim” Saracens.

Needless to say, the amount of true history in the chansons is infinitesimal. They tell not of the eighth century but of their own times. How the stories grew, we cannot know, but we can compare with Roland the historical record of Einhard: “As the army moved along, drawn out into a thin column because of the narrow passes, the Gascons, having lain in ambush on a mountain top (for the spot is especially favorable for ambush because the dense forests hide the view), attacked the last part of the baggage train and those who had been detailed to guard it, and hurled them into the ravine below. In the struggle they killed every one and, stealing the baggage, dispersed from the spot under the benificent cover of night with all speed . . . In this battle Eggihard the king’s steward, Anselm the Count Palatine, and Hrouland the Prefect of the March of Brittany were slain along with many others. Nor could this deed be avenged at the time, because the enemy scattered so quickly that no clew to their whereabouts could be discovered.” (Vita Karoli, ix). Two other virtually contemporary records yield no additional information. A comparatively obscure skirmish in the Pyrenees became, in three centuries, a great battle between Christian and Mohammedan worlds.

The poem consists of 4001 lines and falls into three episodes: (1) Ganelon’s treachery, (2) the battle at Roncevals, (3) Charlemagne’s revenge. The third part, satisfying though it may have been to French sensibilities, is an excrescence and is not represented in the selections below. Parts one and two are a moving whole, detailing at once the results of pride and feudal loyalty. We have already seen the central problem of feudalism developed in two languages — in Walter of Aquitaine and The Lay of the Nibelungs. We can imagine that all truly moving secular literature of the tenth and eleventh centuries must have treated the problem. In the tenth century the author of Walter could not settle his problem. In the eleventh century, the Song of Roland seems, despite our love of Oliver and exasperation with Roland, to say that honor and vassalage are measured in terms of greatest sacrifice, not greatest reason. In the twelfth century, the poet of the Nibelungenlied counts the age of vassalage as waning.

During the 1930’s a beautiful edition and commentary on all the Roland material was prepared in eleven volumes by Raoul Mortier.

THE SONG OF ROLAND

Anonymous (12th cent.)

PART I

GANELON’S TREACHERY

Charles the King, our great Emperor, has been for seven long years in Spain; he has conquered all the high land down to the sea; not a castle holds out a...