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Friday, August 1, 2025

An Undercurrent of Pacifism in the Song of Roland

 

     During the Vietnam War, while I was yet an undergraduate, protected for the time by a student deferment, I recall speaking with a visiting lecturer, a British professor who specialized in Celtic and Old Norse literature.  Current events had brought him to a new view of the subject matter to which he had devoted his career.  “I realize now,” he said with soft regret, “virtually everything I have been studying glorifies war.”  He might have made his objection much broader: since the development of writing, martial valor has indeed been the touchstone for male excellence, as beauty has been for female. 

     Possible responses to this scholar’s anxiety might include the reminder that artistic representation of an action by no means entails endorsing what the fictional characters do.  Even if the persona explicitly expresses values other than the reader’s, this hardly justifies rejecting the text.  One need not accept Platonic Forms to profit from reading Plato, nor must one be a Roman Catholic to value Dante.  Finally, of course, people who have never participated in war are nonetheless certain to have had challenging experiences of other sorts for which military ventures make a fitting analogue or figure of speech.

     In an  interview conducted at about the same time as my conversation with the medievalist , with perhaps similar concerns in mind, Kenneth Rexroth maintained that every heroic poem contains, along with praise for the courageous warrior, “a profound condemnation of war” [1] as well.  In general, literature itself blossoms when employed to articulate ambiguities and ambivalences, and evidence is not lacking for Rexroth’s sweeping claim.  When Andromache pleads with Hector to avoid the hazards of fighting, he responds that his reputation demands that he put himself at risk.  Though he envisions her being forced into slavery, as indeed happened following the fall of Troy, her husband cannot turn from his duty.  This, of course, is a woman’s objection, but when Odysseus summons Achilles’ shade from the Underworld in the Odyssey and praises him for his distinguished career, noting that even in death he rules [2], the principal hero of the Trojan War tells his former comrade-in-arms he would rather be a poor but living man than lord over all the dead.  Here is a sharp critique of the pursuit of fame through combat.  Similarly, amid the heroics of Prince Hal and Harry Hotspur, Falstaff punctures the illusion of the glory of combat with a perspective closer to that of Mauldin’s hard-pressed Willie and Joe.

 

There’s honor for you. Here’s no vanity. I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me; I need no more weight than mine own bowels. I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered. There’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s end, to beg during life.  [3]

                                      

      A similar moment occurs in the Song of Roland, in the very conclusion where it might best influence the listener or reader’s impression of the whole.  Summoned to yet another combat, Charlemagne reacts with weary resignation.

 

Li empereur n’y volsît aller mie:

“Dieu,” dit le Roi, si peineuse est ma vie

Pleure des yeux, sa barbe blanche tire.” (ll. 4261-4263)

 

[“The emperor did not want to go.  “Oh, god,” the king said, “how painful is my life,” as with weeping eyes, he tugs on his white beard.”]

 

     While the placement of this image at the poem’s end increases its weight of significance, it is hardly the first anti-heroic passage.  Throughout the poem Charlemagne has been regularly depicted in such thoughtful moods.  Indeed, the beard-stroking is a leitmotif, the visible signification of his pensive attitudes, associated in general with his authority and wisdom, but numerous time the gesture accompanies distressed reflections of the suffering of war [4]. 

     What should the reader make of Roland the hero, given that Charlemagne, the most sagacious figure in the story, feels such ambivalence?  Roland’s judgement is far from unerring; his decisions are sometimes clouded by vainglory and impulsiveness (resembling in this the most courageous of fighters both on and off the printed page).  His nomination of his treacherous stepfather, who is also Charlemagne’s brother-in-law, for the mission to Marsile, which Ganelon takes as an attempt to do him in, is the origin of the story’s crisis, so Roland might be seen as inviting his fate.  Even in strictly military terms, Roland’s gallantry verges on hubris when he long refuses to blow the trumpet out of concern for appearing cowardly. 

      In the genre of chansons de geste Roland embodies a rashness in the face of death the very seriousness of which validates the hero’s indifference to consequences while Charlemagne represents the more mature judgement that peace, while less glorious, makes more sense.  I am reminded of Shel Silverstein’s 1973 country music song “The Winner” (performed by Bobby Bare) in which Tiger Man McCool resists a needless fistfight, recounting how his body has been battered by a lifetime of brawls and readily conceding “Well okay I quit I lose you're the winner.”  This leads his challenger, to whom he says, “you remind me a lot of my younger days,” to the realization that since “my eyes still see and my nose still works and my teeth're still in my mouth,” “I guess that makes me the winner.”  Machismo and sensible self-preservation are directly opposed, but only the elder’s cooler head can ignore the impulse to fight.    The tension between aggression and survival instinct is perennial and will continue to be enacted on the world stage as well as in song as long as rash youths like Roland pursue fame through violence.

  

 

1.  See Rexroth, Kenneth, "On Peace" (1966). Special Collections: Oregon Public Speakers. 34.  Rexroth is not alone in this claim.  See, for instance, Caroline Alexander’s introduction to her translation of the Iliad, the first by a woman.

2.  XI, 485.

3.  (Henry IV, part 1, Act V, scene iii, ll. 35 ff.)

4.  See for examples, lines 215, 2930, 2943, 2982, and 3712.

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