which illustrates a large amount of medieval literature nowhere else can the ways of adapters be observed so conveniently. Each century has its own way of telling the story; the four successive versions are there for comparison. Something positive may be learned from them as to the way in which epic poetry conforms with new fashions; none of the epic poems properly so-called exhibit the stages of transformation so clearly. French Epic. The conjectural history of the early French epic has been worked out with great diligence by a number of scholars.1 The evidence is of different kinds. Latin historians may record adventures that are found long afterwards in Chansons de geste: the death of Roland, the valour of William of Orange, the banishment of Ogier, are all noted in this way. Sometimes the matter has been much altered and the names forgotten; the history of Dagobert has been turned into the epic of Floovent. Sometimes the historians have preserved a fragment or two that proves the existence in their day of things. no longer known in French. Such are the verses in the life of St Faro 2 which roughly imitate the metre and the assonances of French heroic poetry. The schoolboy's Latin prose of the "Hague Fragment," 3 1 Léon Gautier, Les Epopées françaises; G. Paris, Histoire poétique de Charlemagne; Pio Rajna, Le Origini dell' epopea francese; Paulin Paris, in Hist. litt. de la France, xxvi. 2 See above, p. 75. 3 Pertz, Scriptores, iii. p. 708; Gaston Paris, Hist. poét. de Charlemagne, p. 465 sq.; Les Narbonnais, Chanson de geste, ed. Suchier (1898), tome ii. pp. lxvi, 168 sq. as it is technically called, has been shown to be a version from a poem in Latin hexameters on part of the wars of Charlemagne against the Saracens -probably the siege of Narbonne, famous in the Chansons de geste. In the history of French epic, the Latin poem of this siege is like Waltharius in German, and gives the same sort of evidence as to lost originals in the vulgar tongue. Besides Roland, there are two other extant poems belonging to the earlier period of French epic-the The Pilgrimage Voyage of Charlemagne, and Gormond and of Charlemagne. Isembart. An Italian history in the tenth century tells of the expedition of Charlemagne to Jerusalem, and how he bridged the passage between Italy and Greece.1 Liutprand tells about the remarkable furniture of the Imperial house at Constantinople; the rich things there came to be reckoned among the wonders of the world, and gave ideas to many authors of romance. The French poem of the pilgrimage of Charlemagne is not affected by the crusade, and must have been composed before it. The interest of it is largely comic; the enormous boasting of the paladins and their miraculous successes are more like the humour of Morgante and other Italian stories than the heroism of Roland. The Pilgrimage was in all senses a popular story, and was taken over by the Welsh, Norse, and other languages.2 Gormond and Isembart, otherwise known as Le Roi 1 Chron. Benedicti. See Ebert, iii. p. 443. 2 Cf. Gaston Paris, La poésie du moyen âge (1885), p. 119. Louis, is on the same subject as the Rithmus Teutonicus of 881-the victory of the young Le Roi Louis. king Louis over the Normans. The chronicler Hariulf of St Riquier (early twelfth century) speaks of the story as familiar, "every day repeated and sung." Only a fragment is preserved, but the historian Philippe Mousket gives a long abstract of the story from a later version, and a German translation of a lost French poem, Lohier et Mallart, also contains it. The fragment is in octosyllabic lines, not the verse of Roland; these are, however, rhymed in the epic way, in laisses, each with the same assonance. One of the oldest poems on Alexander has the same form. But King Lewis also uses a rhymed refrain :— 'Quant il ot mort les bons vassaus, 66 Ariere enchaça les chevaus: Pois mist avant sun estandart Nem la li baille un tuenart" (i.e., a shield). In this it is impossible to mistake the chant of the ballad chorus; the poem keeps some of the country manners which the later Chansons de geste gave up. It has also another old fashion which was not abandoned in the regular Chansons-the repetition of the same matter with different rhymes. It is one of the commonest devices in ballad poetry—in Sir Patrick Spens, for example; and the Chansons de geste, though they have lost the ballad burden, keep this old trick of repetition, a birthmark of their rustic descent. 1 "Patriensium memoria quotidie recolitur et cantatur."-Chronicle of the Abbey of St Riquier in Ponthieu, ed. F. Lot, iii. p. 20. 2 Ed. Scheler; ed. Heiligbrodt, ap. Böhmer, Romanische Studien, iii. Gaston Paris, in Hist. litt. de la France, xxviii. p. 239 sqq. The story is something more than the simple triumph of the Ludwigslied. In the French epic, the adversary Gormond is visited (at Cirencester) by the traitor Isembart, and brought to war in France with his heathen host of Turks and Persians.1 Gormond is a Saracen, as Julius Cæsar also occasionally was, in mediæval tradition. The matter, much less elaborate than in Roland, is of the same Homeric kind, separate encounters of champions. There are laments over friends and foes. Lewis has regrets for Gormond :"Looïs ad trové Gormunt A l'estendart en sun le mont; Meudre vassal ne fust de vus." The gentleness of this and the extreme simplicity of its expression are purely French of the old school, though something of both survives in later ages: there are many responses in Froissart to this old kind of heroic sentiment. Other more ordinary epic motives may be found in the poem, such as the old appeal to gratitude: "Let us avenge him, for he gave us castles and lands, the ermine, vair and gray." This last phrase is warning that the first great period of the Middle Age has drawn to an end; the "vair and the gray" belong to a newer world. Although many of the French epics deal with simple old 1 "Persuadente id fieri quodam Esimbardo Francigena nobili qui regis Hludogvici animos offenderat, quique genitalis soli proditor gentium barbariem nostros fines visere hortabatur."-Hariulf, loc. cit. Roland. fashioned feuds, like those of the Icelandic sagas, the greater number, Roland among them, are full of new sentiments and ideas. Instead of the old personal motives, there enter the larger conceptions of religious faith and national glory. The song of Roland, though earlier than the First Crusade, is a crusading epic-the poem of Christendom against the infidel. It is also the epic of France, "sweet France"; the honour of the kingdom is constantly remembered, and not merely out of duty, but because it is the spirit and life of the poem, as much as Rome is in the Eneid. Naturally, the grandeur and solemnity of these ruling thoughts make the epic of Roncesvalles very different from most of the Teutonic poems, where the characters have seldom any impersonal cause to fight for, and the heroic moral is restricted. to the bond of loyalty between a lord and his companions. In Roland, and very generally in French epic, there is an envelopment of impersonal thoughts all round the action and the characters. They stand for France and the true religion; and the heroes lose as dramatis persona what they gain as representing grand ideas. Yet with all this anticipation of later modes of thought and later fashions of chivalry, Roland has much of the same spirit as the Teutonic poems. The type of the old French epic is essentially distinct from the narrative forms invented in the Romantic schools of the twelfth century. Though the extant versions are comparatively late, French epic poetry belongs truly to the earlier Middle Ages. In fact, one of the Ꮓ |