A Creole Epic

Colonizing the Epic

Bédier’s engagements with Roland constitute an extended effort to address the social and psychological ruptures of a creole migration. All of this work—editing, criticism, translation—grapples with conflicts between continuity and rupture, individuality and collectivity, home and elsewhere. In editing, Bédier negotiated these conflicts by focusing on the oldest manuscript to the exclusion of all others and by respecting the manuscript’s Anglo–Norman forms; this philological labor revisits the form of the poem Bédier first read in Saint-Denis while also discarding that precedent (see chapter 4). In his literary criticism, Bédier resolves conflicts by insisting on the poem’s complete devotion to France. Finally, through translation, Bédier acts as both reader and writer of the poem’s imperial message. By rewriting Roland, Bédier brings French colonialism to bear on the medieval epic. In the process, he bolsters the purity of Roland’s French identity by resisting some of its portrayals of cross-cultural interaction.

Most of Bédier’s literary criticism serves primarily to support his philological arguments. He generally follows the established tradition that “nationalized” Roland’s cultural diversity (multiethnic army, imperial home in Aachen) by focusing on Roland himself. This process began with the conventional title (not attested in the Oxford manuscript). Gautier confirmed the national import of Roland’s character when he stated succinctly: “ Roland is France made man.”11 Bédier’s version of this argument highlights the debate between Roland and his companion Olivier over calling for Charles’s help against the Saracen army. Many critics have tried to explain the apparent opposition between Roland’s “prowess” (he refuses to call for help) and Olivier’s “wisdom” (he counsels requesting reinforcements).12 Bédier considered this conflict central to the poem’s meaning and clearly took Roland’s side, firmly separating the superlative Roland from all others.

Bédier’s comments on language further nationalize the poem by treating the medieval text as virtually synonymous with modern French—the language of a fully developed imperial nation. In characterizing his translation, Bédier emphasizes continuity over change: his modern text is a “transcription” into “today’s language [langage], a ‘translation.’”13 Placing translation under erasure in scare quotes, Bédier casts modern French as identical to Anglo-Norman, itself faithfully “transcribed” from the manuscript. In this sequence of equivalences, Bédier facilitates connection with the past by avoiding “recent words,” selecting instead only those with “very old titles.”14 Here, continuity functions as an aristocratic quality. Bédier claims a particular affinity for the author’s “aristocratic bearing”—“the proud carriage, very refined, of an ingenious, nuanced, determined language, and which reveals a constant care to distinguish common usage [usage vulgaire] from proper usage [bon usage].15 Bédier admires, in other words, the absence of stylistic or social “mixing.” His translation aims specifically to safeguard this pure aristocratic style—the “sovereign quality of the old master.”16 This goal is difficult to achieve, according to Bédier, because so many words are no longer in use, “or, which is worse, survive, but diverted from their original meaning, weakened or demeaned!” Change, then, is worse than death, while true nobility survives untainted across the centuries. Bédier thus designs his translation, like Roland as he understood it, to resist the ravages of time.17 His modern text enacts continuity just like the edition (with its careful reproduction of manuscript forms) and the dedication (with its devotion to the colonial homeland). Bédier thereby endows France’s national epic with a purified linguistic heritage, akin to his own colonial values.

Bédier’s “aristocratic” translation protects national purity further by reinforcing differences between the valorous “French” and everyone else. Most broadly, he turns the ethnically ambiguous “Francs” into the clearly national “Français.”18 He also minimizes the application of positive terms to the Saracens while turning neutral terms for them into negative ones.19 Elsewhere, Bédier reinforces distinctions between the opposing sides: Roland’s observation of the great “loss” of his fellows becomes a “massacre”; the “conquering” Roland becomes the “victor”; a general description of battlefield deaths gains oppositional force with the naming the two sides (“French” and “pagans”).20 Bédier reinforces Christian identity when he specifies the Saracen Bramimonde’s knowledge of “holy law.”21 France itself becomes “saintly” (rather than merely “free” or “sovereign”).22 These translations all amplify the poem’s tendency to encourage the reader, as Stephen Nichols puts it, “to take sides with and against the characters and their positions.”23 Blocking readers’ access to certain nuances and ambiguities, they translate historical complexities into ideological simplicities.

Bédier’s most powerfully nationalizing translation may be La terre des aïeux (Land of the Ancestors) for terre majur, one of the terms used to designate Charles’s land.24 Bédier explains that the phrase derives either from a Latin adjective (“great land”) or genitive plural (“land of the fathers”): justifying his choice of the latter, he concludes with the utmost mystification: “Forced to choose . . . I put ‘Land of the Ancestors,’ por ço que plus bel seit.”25 Bédier relies here on aesthetics (“because it’s more beautiful”) rather than on any specific philological reasoning, a procedure that reads modern French values into the medieval epic.26 “La terre des aïeux” is more beautiful precisely because, like the “diis patriis” of Bédier’s dedication, it conjoins disparate spaces under the unifying concept of “ancestral lands” (even such spaces as Bourbon and France). Bédier expresses his modern judgment in medieval French—adopting it as his native language.27 And yet, this assertion of identification with the medieval text actually reinstates ambiguity: the phrase “por ço que plus bel seit” occurs only once in Roland—describing the Saracens ’ desire to embellish their entry into battle (l. 1004). Bédier thus silently (inadvertently?) adopts the “other’s” perspective as guarantor of “France’s” purity.28 “La terre des aïeux” thereby excludes certain “families” from the nation even as it points toward their centrality. Bédier’s proclamation of national community thus contains its own challenge: the aesthetic preference is both “native” and “foreign,” transcendent and contingent, modern and medieval.

Despite these entanglements, Bédier endeavors to conflate “terre majur” (a kind of medieval “greater France”) with France itself. In the Légendes épiques, he embraced Roland’s “sweet France” as “precisely ours”—with a diversity of peoples (Lorrains, Gascons, Normands, Provençals) but also a fundamental unity: “the poet witnesses for us the simplicity with which French unity was made.”29 Later, Bédier makes the identity of “France” with “terre majur” explicit:

And what the poet celebrates in the name of “sweet France” or “Terre majur” (l. 600), which is terra majorum, which is “homeland” [patrie] is not the vague empire of the Carolingians, or the narrow domain of the Capetians, it’s not a delimited territory, it’s a spiritual being [personne morale].30

This French legal term personifies “France” without reference to geography or genealogy; it echoes Renan’s “conscience morale.”31 Bédier uses the same term in a later article identifying the eleventh century as the moment when France gained consciousness “of its spiritual unity, felt itself a conceptual being.”32 Emphasizing the nation’s notional autonomy, these definitions make “Frenchness” an identity available to all who answer to the nation’s laws (medieval or modern, creole or metropolitan). In this vision, there is no east or west, south or north, only a transcendent “French” that knows no bounds. This abstract collectivity recuperates geographic and historical differences into the timelessness of national belonging. The fact that Bédier’s interpretation of “terre majur” has frequently been repeated, and without comment, keeps this tendentious national narrative circulating.33

Bédier’s insistence on ancestors—on a racial basis for landed identity— converges on the well-established national debate over Franco–German identities, which intensified in the aftermath of 1870 and remained alive after 1918. Most interestingly, Bédier’s comments on “terre majur” echo both Fustel de Coulanges and Barrès writing about Alsace and Lorraine. Fustel, critiquing German historians’ patriotic approach to history in 1872, grudgingly admired their commitment to ancestor worship:

The Germans all have the cult of the homeland [patrie], and they understand the word homeland in its true sense: it’s the Fatherland [Vaterland], the land of the father [terra patrum], the land of the ancestors [terre des ancêtres], it’s the country [pays] as the ancestors had it and made it. They love this past, above all they respect it. They only speak of it as one speaks of a holy thing [chose sainte].34

Fustel’s “terra patrum” corresponds to Bédier’s interpretation of “terre majur,” his “terre des ancêtres” to a less formal version of “terre des aïeux,” his “chose sainte” to the sanctified patriotism of “France la sainte.” All of these terms echo Bédier’s dedication, “diis patriis.” Bédier thus performs through translation the national historiography of ancestor worship that Fustel imagined.

In Bédier’s era, Fustel’s “terre des ancêtres” became a powerful concept for reactionary patriotism, codified by Barrès as “la terre et la mort.”35 Not surprisingly, members of the Action Française claimed Fustel’s legacy as vigorously as they did Bédier’s.36 For Barrès, as for Bédier, secure rootedness in a distinct local culture supported the greater project of the nation. According to Barrès, the loss of identification with this native land—the story of ill-fated “déracinés” [uprooted ones]—marked the beginning of national decay. For Bédier, medievalism provided a direct path “back to the roots,” a cure for individual and national indirection. He lived with an impressive expression of this deep genealogy in his own adopted homeland, the Dauphiné: on the outskirts of the village of Le Grand-Serre, where Bédier frequently vacationed at his wife’s family home, stands an old stone cross engraved: “NOTRE TERE / QUI ETES AUX AIEUX / QUE VOTRE NOM / SOIT SANCTIFIE” [our land who belongs to the ancestors, may your name be sanctified]. Here, “France la sainte” and “la terre des aïeux” coincide to place the “petite patrie” on the path to national trascendence.

Bédier’s patriotic musings on “terre majur” exclude a third etymological possibility, first proposed by Bédier’s student Prosper Boissonade—that it translates an Arabic term for the European continent, al-’ar al-kabîra. This etymology has gained a certain acceptance, with a detailed argument in support by Roger M. Walker.37 Walker demonstrates that the only characters who use the expression “terre majur” are Ganelon and the Saracens, concluding that all of the “traitors” adopt an oppositional, Arabic usage; he suggests that the one time the narrator uses the term, it probably does mean “Land of the Ancestors.”38 To imagine that both the Latin and Arabic explanations of “terre majur” are correct, as Walker does, is to imagine a text traversed by multiple knowledges, shaped by cultural contacts, resistant to the singular desires of any individual—precisely the kind of text that Bédier found unimaginable.

For his part, Bédier maintained that little knowledge of Arabic culture informed Roland. In considering the date of the Oxford poem, he casts doubt on its direct debts to the Crusades. Instead, he emphasizes the formative role of French incursions into Spain—locating the poem’s genesis in efforts to eradicate Islamic dominion in Europe (which opened the pilgrimage route to Compestela that Bédier considered foundational for epic narrative).39 Most specifically, Bédier asserts that none of the poem’s Saracen names have Arabic etymologies.40 Etymology remains a controversial subject, but Bédier’s complete dismissal of the topic has as much to do with an ideological resistance to foreign influences (manifest throughout the Fabliaux, Tristan et Iseut, and Légendes épiques) as it does with philological evidence. Bédier did credit Boissonade with developing the best picture of the eleventh-century French wars in northern Spain (crucial to Bédier’s own thesis), and had ample opportunity to at least mention Boissonade’s theory about “terre majur.”41 Boissonade’s effort to tie Roland directly to the Spanish expeditions of Rotrou du Perche certainly has its share of flaws.42 But beyond the theory’s inherent weaknesses, it also “contaminated” the epic lineage that Bédier saw as so purely French. By denying possible Arabic influences, Bédier made “terre majur” a uniquely French source of national geography.

Bédier’s resistance to the history of French contacts with Arabs and Islam also speaks to the pressures of the modern empire. Just as the conquest of Algeria in 1830 impinged on the earliest interpretations of Roland,43 so new conflicts in the 1920s provide a revealing context for Bédier’s edition. Soon after the book went into circulation, the Institut Musulman de la Mosquée de Paris opened in Bédier’s own 5th Arrondissement, down the hill from the Panthéon. The mosque made the importance of French–Muslim relations patently visible in the capital; Roland seemed to underscore their length as well as France’s rights of dominance. The epic and the mosque, however, also witness the participation of Arabs and Islam in the formation of “France.” And both speak to broader colonial interests—Bédier’s book to Bourbon and the mosque to Franco–German rivalries in northern Africa. During the war of 1914–18, Germany sought to establish itself as the defender of global Islam and France as an infidel invader; France sent Muslim soldiers from its colonies to fight Germans on the continent. General Lyautey, who presided at the groundbreaking for the mosque in 1922, brought together these various colonial strands: he had overseen the colonization of Madagascar, been the commander in Morocco during the crises of 1904–5, and helped elect Bédier to the Académie Française in 1920.44 Lyautey’s speech at the groundbreaking proclaimed the successful integration of Islam in France, while masking the government’s actual practice of segregating Arab migrants.45 Roland, by contrast, masks histories of contact while proclaiming cultural segregation between Christians and “pagans.” In both cases, a simplified ideology takes the place of more complex experiences. In both cases, nationalist imperialism overwrites emerging creolizations.

Creole Empires

For much of Roland’s modern history, criticism has followed the interpretative lines solidified by Bédier: the “good French Christians” secure their cohesion through the inexorable exclusion of the “bad infidel Saracens”; even similarities between the two groups redound to the greater glory of the “French.”46 More recently, however, new assessments of the very concepts of “difference” and “resemblance” have shifted critics’ understanding. The poem’s binary logic instead seems to conceal the fragility of distinctions between Franks and Saracens, or the threat of divisions within Frankish society itself.47 These kinds of interpretations open Roland toward diversity, syncretism, and métissage. The poem comes to reveal processes of exchange and substitution that undermine its aspirations for permanent differences. As R. Howard Bloch has noted, the epic “represents from its inception the disruption of an essentially continuous past.”48 Cast in terms of creolization, Roland illustrates the mutual generation of “rootedness” [racine] and “wandering” [errance]. The creole epic recalls and promises the dissolution of the immutable community that it constructs and mourns.

Within the poem, divine intervention secures the integrity of a Frankish imperium.49 By insisting on the holiness of the Franks’ mission, Roland diverts attention from the many exchanges and substitutions that also drive the action. Roland thus projects an ideology of absolute differences (Roland is unique; pagans are “wrong”) against a background of shared histories (Franks wearing Islamic silk; Saracens with blond hair). Stark differences support the dream of group cohesion, while resemblances witness ever changing alliances. The ideology of difference aligns the Franks with a timeless transcendence, while the facts of similarity ground them (and everyone else) in troubled histories and uncertain futures. While transcendence promises a durable empire, contingencies suggests improvisation and unexpected outcomes. This kind of refracted reading challenges the tradition of nationalist interpretation, and complicates Bédier’s own relation to the epic.

Challenges to the Frankish Christian vision of autonomous transcendence come from various sources, including their own internecine conflicts, the structures of the feudal economy, and the paradoxes of the Christian empire. The Franks do not in fact function as a self-sufficient community but rather depend on “others” for military labor, religious converts, and material goods. I focus here on the latter, drawing out Roland’s relations with multiplicity and errance through literal and metaphoric exchanges. As objects transit from one place or person to another, they carry historical traces while accumulating new associations; they can also lose connections along the way. They thus provide particularly rich terrain for observing the creolizations that lie within and derive from ideologies of singularity.

Objects have attracted much critical attention in the study of Roland, especially prestige objects (like Roland’s sword Durendal) and their symbolically charged movements (like the angel receiving Roland’s glove). These scenes tend to promote the poem’s investments in transcendent differences. By contrast, objects that appear incidental to the main action—silk cloths, fur coats, ivory chairs—open perspectives on contingent relations and unpredictable convergences. While undeniably luxurious, these objects are not unique personal talismans like Durendal. Roland’s other personal object—the ivory horn that lies at the center of the drama at Roncevaux—actually connects Frankish univocality to the ambiguities of other ivory objects. Not only does ivory, like silk and fur, appear in the possession of both Franks and Saracens, but all three materials have more than one possible source and thus more than one possible meaning. These materials cover the full extent of European global trade from the eighth to the twelfth century (from the time of Charles to the inscription of the Oxford manuscript). They traverse the many historical moments that have left their traces in the text.

When viewed from what seems like the background, Roland reveals its ideological labors. The presence among the Franks of goods also used by the Saracens belies the oppositional logic that motivates Christian aggression. The casual familiarity with which these goods circulate testifies further to Frankish desires at odds with the poem’s more strident moral claims. Instead, these materials imply shared histories of trade, diplomacy, and conquest. These interactions move objects through cultures in multiple directions; the nature of the interactions partially creates the objects’ meaning.50 In Roland, we only occasionally witness the transaction, and never the complete trajectory from manufacture to final use. Interpretation must then account simultaneously for multiple material sources along with the sometimes conflicting implications of gifts, commodities, and contraband. When objects defy precise localization, they purvey ambiguities that unsettle categories of difference. Even as the narrator and various Franks reject the Saracen “other,” Roland opens toward mutuality and reciprocity with the “enemy.”51 As such, Roland portrays “creolization” as foundational to Frankish culture. Woven like silk threads through the fabric of the Frankish empire, ambiguous materials tie together the episodes that shape the Roland’s most pressing ethical and political dilemmas.

Roland begins with a striking set of parallels between Charles and his enemy Marsile: both are seated, under trees, surrounded by counselors (ll. 10–13, 103–16). Their difference seems equally obvious: Marsile declares his army powerless while Charles has just captured another city (ll. 18–19, 96–97). The décor of Charles’s camp, however, suggests a third kind of relationship—one of shared material resources. The booty from the captured city, for example, includes “costly equipment” [guarnemenz chers] (l. 100)—Saracen resources to support Charles’s army. Meanwhile, Charles’s troops take comfort and pleasure from other Saracen goods: “On white silks [palies] the knights sit, they play at tables [backgammon] to amuse themselves and the wisest and elders at chess” (ll. 110–12). Silk and chess both testify to luxury values shared by both Franks and Saracens. The Franks’ cloths could have come from anywhere in the vast trade network that stretched across the Mediterranean basin and beyond.52 They represent direct or mediated interactions with Islamic artisans, or with the Christian East; the Franks could have brought their palies with them (perhaps from their conquest of Constantinople, l. 2329) or acquired them during their seven years in Spain.53 The Franks’ cloths are thus potentially both “native” and “foreign”—close-woven fabrics that unravel the security of their own allegiances. Chess, meanwhile, came to Europe from “Saracen” lands, becoming widely known in the course of the eleventh century; legend held that Charlemagne received chess pieces from the Caliph Haroun al-Rashîd.54 Chess thus manifests Frankish appreciation for the refinement of Arabic culture. From first sight, then, Roland associates Charles with the transfer of objects and knowledge toward northern Europe, and with deeply ambiguous material histories.

When Ganelon arrives in Saragossa as Charles’s messenger, he encounters another scene both familiar and foreign: under a pine tree, Marsile sits on a “faldestoed” (l. 407), just like Charles (l. 114–15)—that is, on a “folding seat.”55 While Charles’s seat is made of gold (l. 115), Marsile’s is covered in Alexandrian silk (l. 407). This fabric links Marsile not only to his enemy Charles (whose men lounge on white silk) and to his lord Baligant (who later embarks from Alexandria, l. 2626–27), but directly to Ganelon, who arrives wearing a coat “covered in an Alexandrian silk” (l. 463). Juxtaposed with Marsile’s silk, Ganelon’s marks his pending complicity with the Frank’s enemy (he seems to receive new silks after agreeing to help Marsile, ll. 845–47). Yet similar silks later envelope the martyred hearts of Roland and Olivier (“un palie galazin,” l. 2973).56 With the same material covering Ganelon’s traitorous shoulders, Marsile’s pagan seat, and Roland’s sacred heart, the poem’s edifice of secure differences crumbles. The silks defy ethical interpretation.

Underneath the silk, Ganelon’s coat is made of sable fur (l. 462)—another ambiguous material. One of the most luxurious furs, sable came almost exclusively from Russia and Scandinavia. Like silk, it circulated broadly among different ethnic and religious groups, as Roland attests: Marsile soon offers Ganelon new sable pelts if he will stay to talk (l. 515). The fact that both men possess the same kind of fur testifies to their shared commerce in fine ornament, a point of contact (like Alexandrian silk) that contravenes their differences and conveys their readiness to reach agreement. Sable in fact materialized deep European entanglements with “Saracens,” since the northern taste for luxury furs developed partly from Arabic influences dating from the ninth century and peaking in the eleventh.57 Charlemagne’s contemporary, the Caliph Haroun al-Rashîd, reportedly had four thousand fur-lined robes in his treasury when he died in 809.58 Later, Saragossa (and al-Andalus in general) exported sable fur garments to eastern Islamic regions (newly dubbed knights in the romance Galeran de Bretagne wear coats trimmed with fur, cut from silk from “the land of the Moors”; Arab chroniclers describe similar garments).59 Sable, like silk, thus witnesses relations between Franks and Saracens that precede Charles’s war in Spain. Perhaps they have traded with each other or with the same merchants in contact with craftsmen from Moscow to Alexandria; perhaps Ganelon acquired his fur coat before coming to Spain or adopted “the fashion of the Moors” more recently. In any event, this coat stitches together southern and northern cultural connotations, setting the scene for shifting alliances.

The scene of Marsile and Ganelon’s pact against Roland introduces a third ambiguous material—ivory: Marsile’s oath takes place with a “faldestoed made of an olifant” (l. 609). Olifant can refer to ivory used for any purpose and of any dentine source—elephant (and therefore from Africa or India), buffalo, walrus, etc. Ivory carving, moreover, was practiced both in Spain under the Umayyad dynasty (eighth to eleventh centuries) and at the Carolingian court.60 Ivory seats like Marsile’s are attested in both northern Europe and the far East.61 Marsile’s faldestoed, then, evokes a “foreign” art consistent with his “Saracen” status as well as “domestic” art perfectly familiar to the Franks. The ivory seat, like Ganelon’s silk-covered furs, could originate in the north, south, or east; it defies any single cultural signification. Even within the poem’s dominant Christian ideology, ivory remains ambiguous: it connotes both purity and falsity.62 Finally, the paratactic structure of the laisse [stanza] leaves unclear whether the seat supports Marsile, Ganelon, or the book on which Marsile swears his oath. In any of these roles, ivory supports treachery. The scene’s indeterminacy, however, underscores ivory’s own multiplicity.

The conclusion of the pact illustrates how “foreign” objects enter Frankish culture through diplomacy: Ganelon accepts a sword, a helm, and two necklaces (for his wife) (ll. 620, 629, 637). Armor, jewels, silk, sable, and ivory thus decorate the scene from beginning to end. Whatever the origins of these objects, their seemingly universal desirability challenges the value structure that opposes Franks and Saracens, Christians and pagans, foreign and domestic. External markers of identity prove thoroughly unreliable if everyone wears the same thing. All of these objects point to cross-cultural traffic in precious goods—precisely the kind of traffic denied by the poem’s surface ideology of irreconcilable differences. From this perspective, Ganelon and Marsile do not have to travel very far to recognize each other—and not only because the poem defines Ganelon from the beginning as a “traitor” and Marsile as the “enemy.”

In the scenes of battle preparation that follow the pact against Roland, the ambiguities surrounding material culture seep into the direct confrontation of Franks and Saracens. Just before the battle begins, the narrator admires the brilliant colors and shimmering reflections of the Saracens’ equipment, noting in conclusion that “They blow a thousand trumpets [grailles] so that it will be more beautiful [por ço que plus bel seit]: great is the noise, and so the French heard it” (ll. 1004–5). Mingling past and present tense, this passage performs the inextricability of Saracen and Frankish perspectives: everyone hears the sound [noise] and appreciates its aesthetic beauty63 (including Bédier, who adopts the phrase as his own). The trumpets’ call, by its nature, defines a community that exceeds ethnicity, religion, or political allegiance: it reaches all who hear, shading gradually into silence with no definite boundary; it can signify differently to each listener. The term noise itself includes the connotation of “dispute,” and so the trumpets’ harmonies also include dissonance. Noise thus participates in the ambiguities that attach to material artifacts like silk, fur, and ivory.

These ambiguities merge dramatically in Roland’s own trumpet—the olifant that will answer the Saracen grailles while echoing the material of Marsile’s faldestoed. Immediately following the eruption of the Saracens’ noise, Roland tries to establish clarity:

It is good that we are here for our king. For one’s lord a man must suffer distress and endure both great heat and great cold, a man must lose both hide and hair. Now take care that each one [of you] gives great blows, so that no bad song be sung about us! Pagans are wrong and Christians are right. A bad example will never be made of me. (ll. 1009–16)

Roland makes defense of one’s lord and of Christian rectitude the basis of Frankish identity.64 Failure to fulfill these obligations would set a bad example, which future generations would learn through commemorative songs (Roland clearly believes in the power of oral transmission). As Roland states again once he recognizes Ganelon’s treason: “A bad song should not be sung about this” (l. 1466). By casting himself as an object of potential admiration,65 Roland turns his actions into a message to posterity: his story, and his ideology, should shape the imperial community. This laisse, which begins with the image and sounds of the Saracens approaching battle, concludes with Roland’s hope for a lasting song of righteous deeds. By even considering the possibility of a “bad song,” however, Roland reveals the fragility of the Frankish community.

Roland and Olivier proceed to enact this fragility with their argument over whether to call for reinforcements from Charles. Both seek to protect the integrity of the Frankish empire, but their disagreement over the method suggests that they have already failed. Olivier focuses on the primacy of Charles (the only phrase repeated in each laisse is “Charles will hear it” [ll. 1060, 1052, 1071]). Roland, however, insists that only silence will honor the Franks: “May it not please God . . . that it be said by any living man that for pagans I was ever blowing [my horn]!” (ll. 1073–75). This sentiment echoes his previous desire to avoid bad songs as well as his demand that Olivier be silent about Ganelon (ll. 1026–27). Roland’s own silence also concerns Ganelon. Not only does he avoid calling back the lord to whom he previously declared his self-sufficiency,66 he protects the honor of his family and the nation (mi parent [l. 1076], France [l. 1090]). Calling for Charles will reveal to both that they harbor a traitor. For Roland, family, France, and emperor are all one.67 Ironically, the poem later tells exactly what Roland hoped would never be told, thereby including Ganelon’s noise as an integral part of Roland’s song [cançun]. In this way, Roland tells several conflicting stories, impeding Roland’s stated desire to honor France.

In the course of this argument, Olivier names Roland’s horn for the first time in the poem.68 In opposing Roland, he thus seems to join the traitors: olifant recalls Marsile’s faldestoed as easily as it does Charles’s army. Roland’s oliphant, long considered essential to understanding the poem as a whole,69 signifies within this larger network of ambiguous artifacts that perturb monolithic ideologies. It embodies the same traces of shared material culture as silks and furs, a sharing that belies the Saracens’ utter “wrongness.” In addition to the connotations already evoked by Marsile’s seat (tusk of any animal from the north, south, or east; luxury; purity; falsity), the ivory horn suggests specific cross-cultural traffic. Surviving oliphants date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries—the same period in which Roland was probably composed. More than one such horn was subsequently labeled “Roland’s” (see chapter 2); legend holds that Charlemagne received an oliphant from the Caliph Haroun al-Rashîd.70 Surviving oliphants often depict hunting scenes and Islamic-style décor, produced by a craft industry that stretched across the Mediterranean and included Muslim artists; the name itself may have an Arabic etymology.71 This geographic breadth impedes any effort to make material “origins” correspond to cultural “differences.”72 Style also witnesses the malleability of “difference”: the “Cluny horn,” for example, includes both fine Fatimid style carvings and rougher Christian-themed images in a Byzantine style.73 Bearing traces of these “foreign” origins, oliphants performed a number of functions integral to Christian feudalism—warfare, hunting, conveyance of land tenure, storing relics, and replacing church bells at the end of Holy Week.74 Nearly all of these functions appear in Roland.75 As a geographically and materially indeterminate object,76 the horn defies the poem’s oppositional geography (east versus west, north versus south). If elephantine, it further documents Frankish participation in a luxury trade based on multicultural syncretism.

Roland and Olivier’s second argument over the horn deepens the fissures opened by the first. Not only do they disagree on how best to serve the Frankish community, they now reverse their previous arguments (laisses 117, 127–32). Roland even begins by repeating exactly Olivier’s earlier conclusion: “Charles will hear it, who is moving through the passes” (ll. 1071, 1703). Ironically, Roland defends absolute differences by changing his position—undermining his own ideology. He ultimately defines the empire’s value through his own singular achievements (evident in his later forceful repetition of the first-person pronoun jo, ll. 2339–54). Olivier, by contrast, values social continuity irrespective of particular individuals. He reveals this principle when he threatens to deprive Roland of his fiancée Aude (ll. 1719–21): treating his sister as an object of exchange, Olivier imagines disrupted genealogy as a persuasive fear.77 Roland repeatedly stages this conflict between exchange (Olivier’s dominant view) and singularity (Roland’s dominant view), all the way to the last line. This conflict concerns the nature of the Frankish community: is “dulce France” reaching its end, or only beginning to emerge? Roland and Olivier argue in effect over community formation itself—that is, the relative value of individuals versus groups, rupture versus continuity, racine versus errance. As such, Roland speaks to the nature of national belonging across the ages.

Roland’s ivory horn and Marsile’s ivory seat are both deeply implicated in Ganelon’s maneuvers against the rearguard: the chair marks the site of the pact; when Olivier understands that they have been entrapped, he calls for Roland to sound the horn; when the horn does sound, Charles finds Ganelon immediately guilty. In each case, ivory channels the message of false dealings. In the end, though, the oliphant moves toward sacralized transcendence. Roland’s horn blast suggests the trumpets of the Last Judgment, as do the earthquakes and thunder that accompany the first indication of Roland’s pending death.78 By sounding the horn, Roland combines a signal to Charles with submission to the divine. This submission is simultaneously an entry into history: if Roland’s “bloody stigmata” (the ruptured temple and bleeding mouth that result from his effort) indicate a movement toward sacralization, they also mark the beginning of his end—the wounds from which he will eventually die.79 Transcendence and historical contingency thus combine in the process of Roland’s death, encapsulating tensions that traverse the entire poem.

The scene of Roland’s death merges the hero and the horn, encasing historical limits within redemptive transcendence (and vice versa). As Roland composes his body for death, it becomes the oliphant’s reliquary. After Turpin takes the oliphant to bring back water for the mortally wounded Roland (l. 2225), Roland finds him dead and takes care to recover the horn: “He took the oliphant, so there would be no reproach about it, and Durendal his sword in the other hand” (ll. 2263–64). Critics have occasionally puzzled over what sort of “reproach” Roland seeks to avoid. Like Durendal, the oliphant symbolizes Roland’s obligations to Charles:80 the oliphant’s loss (or worse, passage into Saracen hands) would signify a dereliction tantamount to treason. Roland thus seeks to maintain his impeccable service record. The parallel between the oliphant and Durendal (symbol of the sanctified imperial mission) solidifies when Roland feels his sword being taken: “[The Saracen] seized Roland’s body and his weapons, and said one thing: ‘Charles’s nephew is vanquished! I will carry this sword to Arabia’” (ll. 2280–82). Until now, the poem has portrayed various objects traveling into Frankish society: here, Roland resists the counterflow of Christian Frankish objects toward Arabia by defending the sword with the oliphant (l. 2287). He kills the Saracen, but damages his beloved horn: “The mouth of my oliphant is split [fenduz], the crystal and gold have fallen off” (ll. 2295–96). The oliphant is now infirmed like Roland (“each has been ruptured by the other”); having “spoken” for Roland against the Saracen’s boast, the horn itself is now “speechless” (fendre; nearly always fatal).81 The broken oliphant commemorates Roland’s effort to maintain an absolute difference between himself and the enemy, and to prevent a separation between himself and the sword that symbolizes his ties to Charles and God (filled as it is with precious relics, ll. 2345–48). The fractured horn also commemorates the fissure wrought by history in Roland’s vision of singularity. With the fatal horn blast, the ideology of transcendent community meets its own dissolution: the static singular (racine) remains in the company of the mobile multiple (errance).

Roland turns immediately to create a similar breach in Durendal, striking it against a rock in the hope of preserving it from unworthy hands (ll. 2301–36). The idea to break the sword seems to come from the broken oliphant: their functions are similar (both can even be used as weapons) as are the consequences of their misuse. In seeking to destroy the sword, Roland intends its “death” to coincide with his own. Roland privileges his individual relationship to the object while overlooking its irrevocable ties to the divine (could a relic-laden sword really “serve” Saracens? [l. 2349]). The marks that Durendal leaves on the rock become durable traces of Roland’s contradictory acts [gestes].82 Committed to his own singularity and unable to destroy the holy blade, Roland covers it and the horn with his soon dead body (l. 2359). Roland becomes both relic and reliquary, encasing the symbols of his chivalric service in a last effort to compose his monumentality. This is the site to which Charles has been called to pray, the border he has been called to defend.83 When Charles arrives and reads the composition of Roland’s now historical body and the signs inscribed by the sword on the rock (ll. 2864–76), he becomes the first “singer” of the song of superlative service that Roland has imagined since the beginning.84 In order to defend this epic narrative, however, Charles will undermine the singularity so cherished by Roland.

Soon after Roland’s death, Baligant arrives from Alexandria to aid Marsile. His arrival echoes the poem’s beginning, with a near repetition of the first lines (ll. 2609–10) and the deployment of familiar furnishings: “a white silk cloth” (l. 2652) and “a faldestoed made of olifan ” (l. 2653). Baligant’s accoutrements conjure conflicting associations, from the falsity of Marsile’s ivory to the faithful service of Roland’s, from exotic origins to familiar Frankish décor, from the “enemy” Marsile to the holy emperor Charles. Surrounded by the white of both silk and ivory, Baligant confounds simplistic moralization (of purity and majesty) as well as the mapping of the poem’s binaries onto colors (black versus white). Indeed, his trusted messenger is Syrian (ll. 3131, 3191)—a probable Christian who reveals an empire of multiple religious identities. It is worth noting how Bédier’s translation resists these interminglings: in modern French, Baligant and Marsile’s ivoire does not communicate directly with Roland’s olifant; their chairs become mere “seats” [sièges] while the other faldestoeds become “thrones” [trônes].85 These translations “demote” the ivory seats (along with their Saracen owners), introducing a series of distinctions unknown to the medieval text and diminishing ambiguity.

Baligant’s arrival provokes a new battle and a new opportunity to sing the praises of Frankish “right” against Saracen “wrong.” Yet before this triumph can be secured, Charles’s handling of the oliphant engages a logic of exchange that destabilizes Roland’s bold claim of immutable differences. Just before the new battle, Charles arranges to replace the heroes previously presented as irreplaceable: he tells Rabel and Guineman to take the places of Olivier and Roland, one carrying “the sword and the other the oliphant” (ll. 3014–17). Charles does not specify which new hero receives which object, nor even which sword is meant (Olivier’s or Roland’s). These imprecisions, along with the gesture of substitution itself, overturn the ideology of differences proclaimed by Roland and embraced by Charles when he lamented after leaving Roland in the rearguard: “If I lose him, I’ll never have another in exchange [escange]” (l. 840). On one level, this overturning represents the advent of a postfeudal monarchy.86 Yet Roland himself considered substitution inevitable: “If I die, he who will have [Durendal] can say that it belonged to a noble vassal” (ll. 1122–23). Roland, then, easily imagines his seemingly singular role filled by another. Indeed, when he presented himself as an “example” (l. 1016), he cast himself as a locus of historical transfer—a relay between past and future. Critics have generally understood Roland to reject such views on the necessity of contingency and exchange, which other characters accept.87 And yet, these values are “something already there”88—and they are not limited to the final episodes (or to traitors). Ultimately, Roland even equivocates on “right and wrong,” refusing to pass judgment on the Saracen who tried to steal his sword: “how did you ever dare to seize me, rightly or wrongly?” (ll. 2291–92).89 Dismissing categorical judgment, Roland comes to embody a France understood in “creole” terms—a France that includes multiplicity within its own singular imperatives.

Charles’s other battle preparations witness further acceptances of exchange. The barons of France (l. 3084), for example, carry both French and Spanish swords (l. 3089). These “foreign” swords—whether purchased, traded, gifted, or taken as booty—once again collapse the visual and technological differences between the opposing sides. Their appropriation, moreover, indicates a Frankish acceptance of their equal (if not superior) value. This same laisse concludes with the description of Charles’s standard, the oriflamme that has changed name from “Romaine” to “Munjoie.” This “eschange” (l. 3095), like French swords for Spanish ones, or Roland for Rabel or Guineman, testifies to interchangeability both within the Frankish empire and between the empire and its enemies. Earlier, Archbishop Turpin rode into battle alongside Roland on a Danish horse (l. 1489), a detail that underscores the conquering army’s material promiscuity. The very mechanism of empire—conquest—means that collective identity is constantly under revision, the boundary between “us” and “them” constantly moving.90 Charles recognizes the primacy of his relations with “others” when he imagines having to answer for Roland’s death to “the foreign men” [hume estrange] (l. 2911). This dependence on “others” interferes with the ideology of a self-contained Frankish culture while also making it possible.

During the battle, the oliphant performs these ideological contradictions. On the one hand, it stands out as a singular voice uniquely identified with Frankish prowess (ll. 3118–19, 3193, 3301–2, 3309–10). And yet, it is also an infirmed instrument (fenduz).91 The oliphant’s robust blasts defy the “split” created by Roland as he defended the difference between Frankish Christians and Arabian Saracens. In a sense, the “split” has been “healed” through substitution. The broken horn’s superlative performance enacts the desire to heal the ideological conflict between the value of differences (splits) and the value of exchange. It is itself a multiply split object: physically damaged and whole, foreign and domestic, as aligned with Roland as with Olivier, Ganelon, and Marsile. Conveyed to substitute heroes, its previous damage forgotten, the horn becomes the instrument of a history without end, a monument to perpetual becoming. Indeed, on one level the oliphant’s audibility in this second battle signals a beginning of “France”: a scene of foundational violence has been “forgotten” so that the Franks can continue to recognize themselves as partisans of the same community, unified in their resistance to a common enemy.

As Charles’s reuse of the oliphant gestures toward collective amnesia, the substitute heroes themselves quickly fade from view. While Rabel and Guineman enter the battle first, and swiftly kill the first Saracens they meet (ll. 3345–68), Baligant soon kills Guineman (ll. 3463–68) and Rabel is never mentioned again. Accordingly, Charles abandons the philosophy of substitution and returns to absolutes: acting once again as the head of a consecrated community, he returns to the oliphant: “On the altar of Saint Sernin the baron, he places the oliphant full of gold and Saracen coins [manguns]: the pilgrims see it who go there” (ll. 3685–87). On the altar, the oliphant signifies both sacralization and the conveyance of tenure (historically, oliphants probably entered ecclesiastical treasuries as instruments of land tenure, later converted to reliquaries).92 Charles thus reconveys to God the lands Roland conquered on His behalf. Charles also transfers the horn to monumental time, where (the poem implies in the present tense) it remains just as Charles left it. “Translated” to relic status, the oliphant leaves history behind, “healed” of its many divided (split) associations. And yet “l’oliphan” cannot sever itself completely from the ivory seat around which Ganelon and Marsile agreed to plot Roland’s death. Even in this moment of transcendent symbolism, the ivory horn remains entangled in multiplicities that resist the univocal monumentality that Charles seeks with the sacral transfer.

The horn’s contents on the altar also convey multiplicity. Mangun refers most probably to a kind of coin: Christians in Al-Andalus in the tenth and eleventh centuries used the term mancuso to refer to Islamic coins.93 Whether the term itself derives from Arabic or Latin, previous appearances of mangun in Roland associate it clearly with the passage of Saracen wealth into Frankish hands and specifically with the pact against the rearguard that led to Roland’s death. The sword Valdabron gives Ganelon contains, or is worth, “a thousand manguns” (l. 621); the narrator refers to Valdabron as the one who gave Ganelon a sword “and a thousand manguns” (l. 1570). Filling the oliphant with manguns, then, can signify the “containment” of Saracen forces by a triumphant Christianity (Saint Sernin, fittingly, was a Christian bishop martyred by pagans). Yet the fact that Charles may have received these manguns from Marsile (just as Ganelon did from Valdabron) maintains the memory of exchange. And if mangun refers specifically to coinage from Spain, the pieces would bear the indelible marks of their Arabic origins. The oliphant on the altar, then, does preserve memories of Roland and his heroic defense of the empire (as many critics have emphasized)94 but it also speaks to the successes of his enemies. Given the conflicting associations of both the horn and its contents, Charles places the category of ambiguity itself on the altar in a gesture aimed at forestalling its troubling consequences for Christian hegemony. Sacralized container of tainted riches, the oliphant embodies one of Roland’s most basic lessons: differences are fragile, purity a fiction.

Returning to the seat of the Frankish empire, Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), Charles confronts directly the dilemmas posed to imperial ideology by relations with exchange and substitution: Aude’s marriage, Ganelon’s trial, Bramimonde’s conversion, and the ongoing holy war itself. Each of these events engages the conflicts that have traversed Roland from the beginning; their very narration performs entanglement, as their beginnings and endings overlap. At stake is the possible role of “foreign” elements within a Christian empire that can only fulfill its aspirations through conversion. While Aude ultimately upholds the poem’s surface ideology of absolutes and homogeneity, the other concluding events expose the failures of that ideology. In the final moments, the poem resists definitive conclusion partly by representing the Franks once again relying on material goods from “Arabia.” Ultimately, Roland depicts the unpredictable diversions of collective becoming.

Arriving “home,” Charles returns to the logic of substitution that led him to transfer the oliphant from Roland to Rabel or Guineman: he greets Aude with a proposal to “exchange” Roland for his own son, Louis (ll. 3713–15). Aude, however, remains faithful to the ideology of absolutes: declaring Charles’s words “estrange” [strange and foreign], she drops dead (ll.3717–21). Aude’s sudden death demonstrates her rejection of substitution and her unequivocal allegiance to the logic of singularity. In this sense, she is “preux” like Roland rather than “sage” like Olivier.95 She underscores her role as Roland’s ideological double when she declares that he had sworn to take her as his per [peer] (l. 3710). She treats Roland as he (mostly) treated himself—as unique and irreplaceable, in a world that functions on conversion and substitution (where one per, even Roland, can be replaced by another). The disjunction between Aude’s and Charles’s reactions to Roland’s death mirrors the disjunction between these two value systems.96 The difference between Charles and Aude is not so much between the male and female experience of feudalism, but between an ideology of immutable differences (voiced by Aude and Roland) and a practice of multiple exchanges (proposed by Charles). This division, moreover, has run through the entire poem, and indeed through the characters themselves. Aude’s death, then, marks not a dramatic change in political values but a dramatic repetition of the ideological conflict that permeates the narrative.

Charles works both sides of this conflict during Ganelon’s trial. In the course of these complex proceedings, it becomes impossible to align exchange with “right” or “wrong” since nearly everyone involved relies (inconsistently) on its powers in the pursuit of conflicting goals. Even God’s role in the conclusion remains uncertain—a claim asserted by the interested parties rather than a supernatural manifestation (like the halted sun that allows Charles to catch up to the fleeing Saracens).97 The drama derives from unpredictable shifts among different definitions of truth. The trial preparations, for example, begin at the end of a laisse that begins with Bramimonde’s transfer to Aix-la-Chapelle and includes the disposition of the relics of Roncevaux (the oliphant, the hearts of Roland and Olivier): this laisse reminds us that Charles traffics as easily in exchange (conversion, lending the oliphant to another knight) as he does in absolutes (sacralizing the oliphant on an altar, judging Ganelon’s guilt before the trial, ll. 3750–56). Meanwhile, the narrator reminds us repeatedly of Ganelon’s guilt, asserted since his first appearance (ll. 178, 1406–11, 3735, 3748, 3764). According to Roland’s dominant ideology, Ganelon must die as the archtraitor that the narrator has judged him to be from the beginning. In pursuing Ganelon’s death, Charles aligns himself with these absolute values; his methods, however, deftly manage several levels of exchange.

Charles’s case rests on the assumption that his men act uniquely as his representatives (substituting for his personal presence). Ganelon’s defense, meanwhile, rests on the idea that Roland and the others exist autonomously. He can thus legitimately claim, following impeccable feudal logic, that he avenged himself through private warfare of specific wrongs committed by Roland as an individual: “I avenged myself, but there was no treason” (ll. 3757–78). This distinction between vengeance and treason depends on the interpretation of exchange values: does Roland only take Charles’s place, or did Ganelon’s public warning (ll. 300–1, 322–26) establish a separate horizontal relation between the two knights? At the time, Ganelon himself claimed to represent Charles and denied that Roland could take his own place on the mission to Marsile (ll. 296–99). The manipulation of feudal logic by all parties reveals the social system’s inherent instability: Ganelon, who previously lied about the danger facing Roland (ll. 1769–84), presents a truthful defense; Charles justly accuses him of plotting Roland’s death (while falsely claiming that he did so solely for financial gain, l. 3756). The trial itself functions as a referendum on the social principles that underlie these claims. As Peter Haidu notes, “It is in the trial scene that the latent conflicts we have traced at the margins of the text come to the surface.”98 In the end, though, these conflicts remain unresolved. While Charles certainly does assert his powers over those of his barons, he does not secure a stable polity.

The trial’s political volatility surfaces immediately in the barons’ deliberations over how to judge Ganelon: rather than discuss the charges, they propose setting them aside [laisum le plait] (l. 3799). In effect, they refuse to rule on Charles’s case. They also deny the validity of the substitutive logic that underlies Charles’s demand for vengeance: “Roland is dead; you’ll never see him again; he will not be recovered for gold nor for riches” (ll. 3802–3). Since nothing can compensate for the specific loss of Roland, the barons propose reconciliation with Ganelon, which will permit the empire, and the family, to consign Roncevaux to the harmless past: “let’s pray the king to declare Ganelon quit this time; let him serve him with love and faith” (ll. 3800–1). The barons’ request to Charles states even more explicitly their perception that vengeance is beside the point:

Sire, we pray you to proclaim the count Ganelon quit, that he then serve you with faith and love. Let him live, for he is a fine man. His death will not bring compensation, nor will we recover anything from monetary payments. (ll. 3808–13)

Making no judgment of Charles’s complaint or Ganelon’s defense, the barons call for Charles’s personal clemency. They refuse the very idea of exchange as articulated by Charles (following in some ways Aude’s example).99 Instead, they favor a collective amnesia that sidesteps the ideological conflicts that drive the poem. Indeed, their phrasing repeats exactly Ganelon’s own description of his status prior to Roncevaux: “I served [Charles] with faith and love” (l. 3770).100 In short, the barons propose to proceed as if Roncevaux never happened. Here, we find another beginning of “France”—the personne morale that Bédier championed: the barons gesture toward national consolidation and peace, founding the Frankish community on the willful “forgetting” of traumatic violence. The Franks would henceforth “share” a history that included neither treason nor debilitating military defeat.

The barons’ proposal is aberrant in that it asks for forgetting and for a nonviolent resolution to Charles’s demand for lethal vengeance. Their reasoning abounds in irony: they hew to a logic of absolutes that mirrors Roland’s in order to reconcile with Ganelon; they substitute one process for another (personal forgiveness for judicial procedure) in order to establish a polity immune to substitution. Charles himself claims the absolute right to demand substitutive justice. Despite all the claims of “right” and “wrong” that traverse these proceedings, moral distinctions repeatedly dissolve. At different moments, in different ways, for different reasons, Charles and the barons both rely on the logic of exchange; at others, they rely on absolutes. When the barons try to reason outside of these dichotomies by recommending clemency, Charles declares them traitors: “Vos estes mi felun” (l. 3814). The phrasing here emphasizes the individual nature of the affront (mi), aligning Charles most directly with Ganelon (who claimed a private relationship with Roland). In refusing the barons’ proposal, Charles discards the judicial process, which had developed to replace blood vendetta with law, divine intervention with human judgment.101 And yet, arguably, the barons themselves did not follow a judicial process: rather than rendering a verdict, they dismissed the very categories of guilt and innocence.

Charles is rescued from this judicial impasse by Thierry, who refocuses the accusation on Ganelon’s relation to Charles, pronouncing the judgment that the barons avoided:

Even if Roland wronged Ganelon, his service to you should have guaranteed him. Ganelon is a felon for betraying; toward you he has committed perjury and broken his oath. For this reason I judge that he be hanged and die and his body treated as one who has committed a felony. If there are any kinsmen who would like to contradict me, with this sword, that I have girded on here, I will guarantee my judgment at once. (ll. 3827–37)

These charges repeat Charles’s own initial claim that Ganelon has wronged him by contributing to Roland’s death—and rebuff Ganelon’s effort to claim a direct conflict with Roland that did not involve Charles. According to Thierry, Ganelon’s obligations to Charles trump all private matters between his subjects, who exist primarily as extensions of their lord and only secondarily as independent actors.102 In promising to defend his judgment with his sword, Thierry dismisses verbal inquest in favor of trial by combat. By limiting legitimate challenge to family members, moreover, he follows the “feudal” logic of substitution and private warfare (even as he upholds the monarchical perspective).103 Indeed, when asked by Ganelon’s kinsman Pinabel to reconsider reconciliation, Thierry pointedly rejects the very principle of verbal exchange: “I will not hold counsel about it” (l. 3896). Thierry’s refusal of cunseill directly overturns the mode of political decision making (by both Charles and Marsile) that dominates the poem’s early episodes and instigates the fatal conflict that lies behind the trial.

Pinabel answers Thierry’s challenge with what sounds like a reprimand to Charles: “Lord, this is your trial, so order that there not be such noise! I see Thierry here, who has made a judgment. And so I deny him; I will fight with him about it” (ll. 3841–44). Like Thierry and Charles himself, Pinabel recognizes Charles’s unique and personal responsibility for the proceedings. His call to stop the noise could refer to the loud sound of the Franks’ response to Thierry’s challenge (l. 3837) (most translators render noise as bruit in French or noise in English). But noise also refers to verbal quarrels and even insults, as in the modern French expression chercher noise [to seek out a quarrel]. Pinabel thus casts Thierry’s accusation as unnecessarily quarrelsome and verbose. In the context of absolute “rights” and “wrongs,” the exchange of words is meaningless, and Ganelon’s guilt only rumor [noise] until proven in physical combat. Tellingly, Pinabel notes that he sees Thierry (the only fact required to proceed with resolution by combat): he has no interest in hearing further about the dispute. Pinabel thus suggests that Thierry is mixing the protocols of two mutually exclusive judicial procedures (inquest, combat), and reminds Charles that he alone is in charge of the process. Pinabel has hoped to liberate Ganelon through combat from the beginning, even before the first council of barons (ll. 3789–91)—while the barons sought to avoid combat by not addressing the charges: “He would be most senseless who would fight about this” (l. 3804). Whether the barons imply that the defender would necessarily loose, or that it would be foolish to try to determine “right” [dreit], they clearly considered both inquest and combat undesirable. Only forgetting will protect the integrity of “France.”

In a judicial duel, two knights serve as substitutes for the interested parties and rely on God to reveal justice through the physical contest. With the outcome secured by transcendent authority and the process by substitution, the judicium dei performs succinctly the ideological paradox that runs through Roland and that structures the Christian imperium: an affront to any Christian offends God; Charles must take vengeance because he serves this God; Christian service (war and conversion) depends on exchange (one death or religion for another); these exchanges take place in the name of transcendence. When Thierry prevails over the larger and stronger Pinabel, God seems to uphold Charles’s own absolutist claims—at least, the Franks attribute the victory to God (l. 3931). Yet exchange has also been validated (Roland’s life for Pinabel’s, Ganelon’s, and thirty others’, ll. 3947–74). The judicial combat does not resolve the fundamental ideological conflict; indeed, the narrator calls the outcome both “vengeance” and “justice” (ll. 3975, 3988). The result here is a sacrificial violence that endlessly defers actual resolution.104 And the moment that seemingly distances Charles most securely from his Saracen enemies actually illustrates their similarities: just as Charles (following no judicial precedent) sacrifices Ganelon’s thirty relatives (ll. 3947–59), Marsile readily sent twenty of his own young nobles as hostages to Charles, knowing they would die (ll. 40–46, 57–60, 143–50, 646, 679). Both of these group sacrifices aim to preserve the integrity of a polity (Spain, France). Through identical actions, each leader seeks to secure his difference from the other.

Equivocations between differences and similarities permeate the smallest details of the judicial duel, undermining its apparent determination of absolute “right” and “wrong.” Pinabel (substitute for Ganelon) echoes Roland when he defends the right to fight for his family’s good reputation (ll. 3907–9).105 Meanwhile, Thierry (substitute for Charles) looks rather like a Saracen, with “black hair and a rather brown face” (l. 3821).106 Most revealingly, he is brought back triumphantly to Aix-la-Chapelle on “an Arabian mule” (l. 3943). At the very moment in which “right” and “wrong” have supposedly been divinely reestablished, an animal from the “wrong” side carries the brown skinned representative of “right”—apparently as a sign of how richly “right” he is. Indeed, superficially, Thierry looks very much like the messengers sent on “white mules” by Marsile to trick Charles into leaving Spain (ll. 89–92), or like Marsile’s nephew riding up to request the first blow against Roland (l. 861). Thierry’s Arabian mule also reminds us that 400 similar mules (along with 700 camels) were previously sent to Aix-la-Chapelle carrying gold and silver from Marsile (ll. 31–32, 127–33, 645) and that Ganelon received ten such mules from Marsile as payment for his cooperation against Roland (ll. 652, 847). All this traffic in quality pack animals represents yet another dimension of material culture shared between the Franks and Saracens.

The Arabian mule recalls also the possibly Arabian connections of the marten fur with which Charles wipes Thierry’s face after the duel (l. 3940): Ganelon also wore marten when Roland designated him as messenger to Marsile (l. 281).107 Charles’s fur thus recalls the scene that launched the conflict addressed by the duel Thierry has just fought. Martre also distinguishes the scene of “betrayal” (in which Ganelon wears sable) from the scene of “resolution” (in which Charles wears marten). Because marten and sable come from the same species, and Ganelon may in fact wear the same coat when he speaks to Roland as when he speaks to Marsile, the furs also bind together these three key scenes. The furs remind audiences of the commonalities that draw together actors fulfilling widely divergent roles (Roland, Ganelon, Marsile, Charles, Thierry). Tellingly, Charles discards his soiled pelts and dons fresh ones after cleaning Thierry’s face (ll. 3940–41)—a casual sign of his intimate relations with exchange values. The occasional difficulty of distinguishing martre from sable only adds to the ambiguities of material culture implied in the fur trade itself. In these final moments of judicial resolution, these fleeting but telltale signs of cross-cultural commerce signify the fragility of claims of “difference”—especially now that Aix-la-Chapelle and Saragossa are both Christian.

The completion of Saracen conversion comes with Bramimonde’s baptism (ll. 3975–87). In contrast to Aude’s absolutism, Bramimonde embodies exchange values.108 Her conversion sets the scene for the unresolved entanglements of the poem’s final lines. Although Charles would prefer to end the sequence of endlessly renewed obligations—indeed, to die (ll. 2929, 2936)—he moves on, by divine order, to another battle against pagans (ll. 3995–98). He thus continues to live split between the two ideologies that are in conflict throughout the poem. In his desire to end his painful life, he resembles both Aude (who does die) and Bramimonde (who wished to, l. 2723); in accepting the new mission, he resembles both Bramimonde (who converted) and Roland (who declared total war on all pagans); in the “pain” of his “punishment” [si penuse est ma vie] (l. 4000), he even recalls Ganelon.109 The poem does not end with the “resolutions” offered by any of these other figures, but with Charles—a figure “characterized throughout by ambivalence, by ambiguity, by duality of value and meaning.”110

Despite Roland’s various claims to the contrary, Charles’s new obligations expose the battle of Roncevaux as nothing more than an episode among others in an eternal quest for greater Christian dominion. Even Bédier had to conclude as much, despite his devotion to the poem’s foundational status: “Thus it appears that the day of Roncevaux is only an episode in the long crusade in Spain, which itself is only an episode in the endless crusade of the two-hundred-year-old pilgrim [Charles].”111 Presumably someone else will now take Guineman’s place alongside Rabel, who themselves took the place of Roland and Olivier; someone else may carry their swords; new horns will be required to ensure communication. Charles’s army will pay its way in part with Saracen gold, carrying Islamic silks atop Arabian mules, perhaps even accompanied by camels. These are some of the tools that will support ongoing Frankish efforts to enforce cultural and religious differences. Their ambiguities ensure that Roland does not move toward any single point of resolution. Instead, it remains suspended among competing possibilities—a monument to creolization. Roland’s greatest ideological accomplishment, in the end, is not the establishment of any given model but rather the exposure of ideology itself as a category of ongoing social, political, and poetic struggle.

The ambiguities of material culture in Roland encode tensions between the desire for stable differences and the experience of shared desires. These objects that, for the most part, form the poem’s background décor engage the ideological conflicts that openly occupy the foreground. The Franks’ manifest lack of anxiety around the adoption of “foreign” materials only serves to highlight the strenuous labor required to sustain claims of “difference.” The poem’s narrative structures encourage audiences to “hear” these claims as timeless verities, while diverting attention away from more complex histories. The poem minimizes, in other words, the presence of the “other” per se while maximizing the “message” of absolute truth and divine sanction. As such, it fulfills its “epic” role as a foundational text, defining a new community by establishing lines of exclusion. And yet, the peaceful homeland promised by this foundation eludes the Franks: the poem opens when they have already been in Spain for seven years; Charles accepts a peace proposal because he and his army long for home; the poem ends with Charles in tears as he leaves home again to defend Christian interests. The great heroic event at the center of the poem—the battle of Roncevaux—leaves France “empty” [deserte] (l. 2928). In this narrative arc, the Frankish community looses more than it gains.

The “French nation” that so many observers, including Bédier, have found in Roland certainly does occupy the poem. Beyond the enticingly familiar and frequent name “France,” the nation begins to emerge in moments of forgetting—the broken oliphant that still plays, the barons’ refusal to judge Ganelon. These two moments overlook dramatic ruptures in favor of seamless continuities (the Franks’ always triumphed, no one ever betrayed Charles). Roland, though, does not recount the victorious accomplishment of this national being [personne morale] but the suspension of its becoming: in both cases, Charles insists on remembering (the oliphant rests on an altar, Ganelon dies a traitor). By remembering, Charles keeps “France” from consolidating into a stable and unified nation; he forestalls the institutionalization of Roland’s ideology. To read Roland as a French national epic, then, means forgetting what Charles remembered. It is this second order forgetting that turns the medieval epic into an instrument of modern nationalism. Roland does portray glimpses of a cohesive national community, but it also exposes the dangers and oppressions of collective amnesia. It captures moments of creolization, as well as their obsolescence. The poem, as it survives, because it survives, resists forgetting; it commemorates traumas alongside the desire to overlook them. It is no small wonder that it turned a young “creole” from Réunion into a medievalist.