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.

Aggression and Love in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain

 

miniature from the Roman de Lancelot

      Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain has all the trappings associated with medieval romance: valiant knights, lovely ladies, and a measure of magic.  The poem is exemplary as well in its episodic structure, propounding and manipulating plot elements in part for the abstract beauty of the patterns so created, in part to mirror the dialectics of lived experience.  The poem embodies many of the commonest conventions of romances, yet, at critical moments, Chrétien opposes the fundamental passions of aggression and love in a tense ambivalence.  Though Yvain’s character and actions in many ways conform to heroic expectations, his story also indicates the knight’s need for the female other, for love and selflessness.   

     The principal theme of Yvain is announced clearly to be love at the outset.  Chrétien tells a tale of King Arthur’s court because he feels that love has suffered a decline since those days of glory when Amor was “dolz et buens” (17).  True love has since, he says, all but vanished since, dwindled to a mere “fable” (24), its devotees gone (19-20).  Moderns may imitate, however, the legendary times of Arthur by telling stories of great lives, just as those in earlier times had done.

Li un recontoient noveles,

Li autre parlaient d’Amors

Des angoisses et des dolors

Et des granz biens qu’orent souvant

                              (12-15)  

Earlier heroic epics such as Beowulf or the Song of Roland including early Arthurian stories such as those in the Geoffrey of Monmouth Wace’s Roman de Brut and Layamon's Brut likewise focused on war and derring-do rather than romantic love, but Yvain announces the paramount importance of love at the outset.

     While the glittering world of King Arthur’s court might seem at first charmed in its perfection, before long the reader encounter Sir Kex (Kay) who is anything but courtly, and Sir Qualogrenant (Calogrenant) who at the queen’s urging reluctantly relates the story of his defeat by a mighty and mysterious knight.  When the king emerges, he declares that he and anyone willing to join his entourage will investigate the unknown knight in two weeks.  Yvain, however outstanding in behavior generally, wishes to avenge his cousin Sir Qualogrenant and steals off in the night to confront the challenge himself.  Already King Arthur’s court has been shown to include a failure at arms, a rude mocker, and a hero who acts surreptitiously contrary to his ruler’s plan due to his ego.  A woman sets the narrative in motion.

     Yvain proves victor in the struggle with Esclados le Ros, but his success as a fighter, far from advancing his cause as his widow Laudine’s lover, makes his approach to her all but impossible as he is her husband’s killer.  However, her maid Lunete (Lunette) assists him and, though a combination of hiding the knight and advocating for him, succeeds in introducing him to her mistress.  She must use considerable argumentation to convince Laudine that he is honorable and without blame in Esclados’ death.

     Already the simplest heroic paradigm has been violated numerous times.  The fallibility of Arthur’s court is demonstrated by Qualogrenant’s failure.  Yvain himself has transgressed feudal propriety by acting on his own and, while he does defeat his foe, he could not have won Laudine without the help of Lunete, whose selfless devotion to his interests is unexplained but consistent.

     After his marriage Yvain lives happily for a time until Gauvain (Gawain) convinces him to compete in tournaments.  Gauvain specifically opposes such competitive masculine accomplishments with love which he thinks is likely to weaken a man (2484-2489).  His companionship and the challenge of competition so successfully distracts Yvain who wishes to win renown through such sports that he fails to return to his wife after the agreed year had passed, causing her to then reject him, and causing her husband what might be called a nervous breakdown. 

     He recovers from this low point only through the intervention of another lady who uses a medicine provided her by Morgue le Sage (Morgan le Fay) (2949).  Once he is physically and mentally restored he proceeds to rehabilitate himself, not by appealing directly to his estranged wife, but by further adventures, now motivated no longer by a thirst for fame but rather by the desire to practice love, not for the time romantic love, but love of others, of community, of humanity.  He undertakes a series of combats, each more altruistic than the competitions he had entered with Gauvain for the satisfaction of his ego.  Practicing disinterested love-service, he repays the lady of Norison (Noroison) who had nursed him in his recovery defeating the Count of Alier. 

     During that fight he was described as like a lion hunting deer (3198-3199), an image which is to be dramatically enacted when he next encounters a lion set upon by a snake.  “Pity” urges him to enter the fray (3369) on behalf of the lion whom he considers noble and great-hearted (“gentil et franche,” 3371), characteristics he reinforces in himself by his selfless combat.  The lion is an exemplar not only of valor and generosity but also of loyalty to the point that he contemplates suicide when he thinks Yvain may be dead.  Though Yvain regularly tells the lion not to intervene in his combats, the lion’s help is in fact critical to his success more than once.  The animal represents the nobility of disinterested courage.

     Yvain then assists Gauvain’s brother-in-law against Harpin of the Mountain as well ss Lunette who was to be executed because of her helping him.  He frees the unwilling laborers of the Castle of Misfortune and restores the inheritance of the younger daughter of the lord of blackthorn Noire Espine.  Each of these acts is in service to others and by such selfless acts he eventually gains readmittance to his marriage. 

     His deeds alone, however, would not have brought him victory.  Though Yvain is an outstanding warrior, he could not succeed with the aid of others.  Not only is the lion his invaluable companion who assists him even when directed to stand apart, but he relies also on a series of wise women.  From his rescue from Esclados’ men to the remedy originating from Morgan le Fay and provided him by another lady to Lunette’s tricking Laudine in the end, his own prowess is insufficient to bring him his victories; he requires alliances. 

     Though the poem is not assertively Christian at one point Yvain acknowledges the need to ask for divine help (3760). The aid of the lion and Yvain’s female allies parallels the Christian dogma of sanctifying grace, which is always undeserved.  The hero’s pushy egotism, so closely linked to his martial aggression and to the pride of original sin, is insufficient to win him what he wants; indeed, his desire for the sort of fame the Greeks called κλέος, renown derived from  both combat and tournaments, is what led him to disobey his king, lose his wife, and sink to a state of madness.  Unregulated by a female psyche, his aggression may prove destructive.  Yet, his match with Laudine is presented as ideal, and the poem concludes with the promise of continued balance in which the flourishing of love guarantees country-wide as well as personal harmony.

     The profound ambivalence at the heart of Yvain arises from the assumption that men can best distinguish themselves by valor, yet courage alone will be insufficient unless moderated and controlled by love.  The one is ego-aggrandizing; the other, selfless.  Yvain is an elegantly structured romance in which the nice aesthetic discernment of the artist authenticates the salutary integration of love and death, altruism and aggression in the hero’s progress to maturation. 

Icelandic Antinomies in the Grettis Saga

Parenthetic references are to chapters in the Grettis saga. Bracketed numbers are footnotes.


     Many critics have commented on the singular phenomenon of the Icelandic sagas, an exceedingly rich body of literature from a small and poor land on the margin of civilization. To one translator the Icelanders “were and had been, for a thousand years, the most literary nation on earth.” [1] Though the sagas share some characteristics with Beowulf, for example, and indeed in a broader sense with heroic narratives from many lands, they have as well unique characteristics. Though many modern readers find the sagas of the highest literary value, they are in a sense highly local in their concerns, recording the legendary history of the leading families of the land with many specific details and place names. The Icelanders’ values are, like everyone’s, shaped by the specific conditions of their lives, in particular by tensions and contradictions they must resolve. The fundamental antinomies of the culture generate the form and content of classic Icelandic literature.
     Grettir, the leading figure of the thirteenth century saga named after him, is a hero of decidedly ambiguous character. [2] Like Gilgamesh before him, Grettir is, even within this heroic culture, too wild. His energy, valor, and ego overflow in such excess that he finds himself outlawed and then outlawed again. People respect him and even admire him, but all agree that he is hot-headed and thus presents a danger of useless violence at all times. He is overweening, arrogant, and rude at the best of times, his impulsive unpredictability always a threat. The best man to have at one’s side in a fight, he is an undesirable house guest. Though he subscribes to the values of his people and appeals through legal channels to plead his case, he is constantly on the lam or accepting hospitality from more solid citizens. Through much of the action of the story he is either abroad or isolated in the barren central portion of Iceland. Is Grettir a hero or an anti-hero? In his own nature he straddles the gap between a masculine ideal and a feared villain.
     Though Grettir never marries, female figures do play a significant role in his life. In general in a heroic narrative like the Grettis Saga values are hypermasculinized, leaving women in the shadows and on the margins, vulnerable things requiring male guardianship, hardly mentioned. [3] Yet, in the precisely structured world of this saga, the female gets her due both as a positive and a negative archetype. Eros plays no role in either.
     Grettis’ life is saved by Thorbjorn, “the mistress of Vatnsfjord,” after he had been disgracefully captured by a troop of farmers. (LII) She is described as “a person of great magnificence” and “tremendously wise,” and she makes a judicious decision in this case, later seconded by her husband. On the other hand, it is Thurid, a sorceress, who finally is able to do Grettir in when the strongest of warriors could not. (LXXVIII) He can wound her but he is defenseless against her spells.
     This depiction of the sexes, consistent throughout, is what makes the adventitious conclusion with its echoes of Tristan so discordant. The seductive Sera’s sexual aggressiveness is as out of place as is its counterpart, her turn toward asceticism when she feels her life is nearing a close. Suddenly at the end an anachronistic antinomy appears, palpably foreign to the structures of the rest of the story.
     In earlier times a person’s identity derived from family and ancestry to an extent scarcely imaginable today. The ancient Greeks and Hebrews took pride in tracing their descent from ancient heroes whom they believed to be historical; this interest lies behind passages that may strike the modern reader as tiresome such as the catalogue of the ships in the Iliad and the family trees of Abraham and Noah in the Torah. The Old Norse author can seem to a modern reader compulsive about providing details of ancestry; indeed, the early sagas are sometimes called “family sagas.” Hardly an individual is mentioned without providing data on his family for several generations with perhaps some information on his wife and cousins as well.
     The sagas are, to begin with, far more based in the facts of relatively recent history than the Iliad and Odyssey, and the odd details of wars and kings, while rarely the center of the plot, both enable and lend significance to genealogical detail. Since the country was settled by a small band of Norse exiles and then was largely isolated until recent times (the country is today one of the most popular travel destinations) it was in fact possible to trace one’s lineage to the early settlers. The information in the sagas constituted an earlier form of the cell phone apps that Icelandic youth use to discern how closely they are related to those they might date. [4]
     The interest in everyone’s ancestry since all in a sense are descended from heroes is reflected in a dialectic between the individual and the social. Since Iceland was established essentially to escape the rule of Harald as overlord, a potent individualistic ethos arose in which each landowner had very nearly absolute power over those in his domain. The sagas barely mention thralls and karls except for an occasional villain. Though each landowner was in law autonomous, to avoid wasteful bloodshed and constant conflict, a social order was established to mediate relations among the bondis. The All-Thing was a highly democratic and legalistic institution at a time when much rule was by fiat. (The Grettis saga makes it clear that the democracy was always imperfect. Such meetings were subject to force of numbers and influence at all times and the Thing did eventually approach more closely to the conventional feudal structure.)
     Religion, which in theory might claim absolute judgements, is likewise presented in an ambivalent light. The characters are almost all nominally Christians, but they make no reference to Christ nor do they live according to Christian precepts. Had Grettis been written before the conversion to Christianity, it would have made little difference. Trolls and ghosts do occur, but they are equivalent to extraordinarily daunting human opponents, endowed with power but liable, too, to defeat when challenged by a great fighter. When Thorarine excludes Grettis from Baldi’s expedition, saying he is ill-fated, one might think of the pagan Wyrd [5], but the fact is he might as well have said Grettir is obnoxious and unstable.
     Surely the monstrous afterlife of Glam as a troll is associated with his spurning Christianity (XXXII), yet the Christian priest who assists Grettir putting a ladder into the lair of the giant proves faithless and cowardly, deserving only obloquy in a heroic context. (LXVI) The text neither protests the prevailing religion nor allows it to influence his world-view, while conceding that potency may be seen in both the old and the new way.
     The story includes the accession of Olaf Haraldsson (XXXVII) to the throne, but, rather than mentioning his policy of forced conversion (itself a self-contradictory testament of Christianity), the author praises him, saying “he took into favour all men who were skilled in any way and made them his followers.”
     Analogous bipolar structures underlie the most significant rhetorical strategies of the saga.  
The simple fact that they are prose, though interlarded with many short poems, is unusual. In the Elder Edda, as in most mythic texts, the form of poetry indicates that the action unfolds in a realm far removed from the ordinary. Prose is the conventional medium for folk stories, which may include plenty of magic, but which do not define the fundamental terms of existence as myth does. Not only tales of gods, but those of legendary and semi-historical heroes such as the Mahabharata, the Iliad, and the Cantico de mio Cid are generally related in poetry.
     Poetry is included in Icelandic sagas such as Grettis, but it is set off by a prose background. The verses, in highly artificial language, typically occur when a character wishes to either signal dominance, such as by insulting an antagonist, or to boast after a victory. [7] The author marks such high points of ego expression by marking them linguistically as distinguished from the language of everyday life. The hero is different from others, not divine - indeed, his vulnerable humanity is what makes true heroism possible for both Njal and Achilles. The individual with powers beyond his fellows is glorified by the very language he uses. Thus the structural distinction between prose and verse serves a dramatically expressive role, heightening the heroic personality beyond that of his fellows while the prose narrative maintains the action in the historical past rather than a mythic realm.
     For instance, when Grettir is quarreling with Bjorn (XXII) he improvises verses several times, ultimately brags and then challenges his antagonist with an insulting poem.


Time was when the bear was slain by my hand;
My cloak in tatters was torn.
A rascally knave was the cause of it all
But now he shall make me amends.


     The Grettis Saga is also full of proverbs, making it a repository of normative community wisdom. Frequently such adages have a riddle-like or paradoxical aspect. For instance “Ale is another man.” (XIX) could be the solution to the question, “When is a man not himself?” Similarly, a surmise may be fact: “The guess of the wise is truth.” (XXXI); and solitude may include company: “ Oft in the woods is a listener nigh.” (LIX)
     Like other old Germanic authors, the saga writer makes liberal use of litotes, a rhetorical figure that typically involves the contradiction of an assertion to express its opposite. The simplest form may be illustrated by Grettir’s prediction when he is convinced against his better judgement to swim to fetch fire: “no good will come to me.” (XXXVIII) The use of such expression, common in Old Norse and Old English compositions suggests the laconic resignation so characteristic of the Germanic world-view, with its harsh weather, perils of sailing and warfare, and the metaphysical prospect of Ragnarok.
     Not all examples of litotes involve negations. Potentially lethal fighting is repeatedly described as “playing.” (e.g. Thorbjorn in LXXVI) Understatement may be used to great dramatic advantage such as when Atli Asmundsson, Grettir’s brother, demonstrates heroic nonchalance as he comments while dying “They use broad spear-blades these days.” (XLV)
     By using figures that may be described as “allegorical” in the broadest possible definition (that is, meaning, saying something other than the explicit message), the author implies two radical propositions. Using language in an indirect, suggestive, associative manner highlights the gap between signified and signifier, thus questioning the ordinary acceptance of words as an adequate representation of reality. The reader may ultimately winder whether even the artful words of aesthetic language with its elaborate socially constructed interpretive codes can convey accurate meaning. In the phrasing of the sagas, such considerations run consistently, if just below the surface.
     Tightly organized oppositions provide the plot’s motive energy: valor and arrogance, individual and family, law and anarchy, Christianity and paganism. Its rhetorical dynamism arises from analogous formal polarities: prose and poetry, what is said and what is meant.
     The Grettis saga moves forward, like all narratives, through conflict and tension. In this story the action is generated by the dualities central to the Old Norse culture: the individual and society, male and female, paganism and Christianity, prose and poetry. Neither is wholly privileged and neither wholly denied. Valor carried too far is arrogance. It is a man’s world, but the skills are women must be recognized. Everyone may be Christian but the old ways retain power. Neither prose nor poetry suits every utterance.
     As Saussure recognized, it is in expressions of difference that meaning arises. We think in dualities and dramatic action can arise only in conflict. Grettis represents one proposal, the working out of a series of oppositions resulting in one version of how to be human. If it does not entirely fit, if incongruities leak from every side of the polarities, this apparent weakness is in fact the inevitable result of imitating the experience of life. Sufficient erratic and unpredictable energies exist to propel the individual to the next hour, the reader to the next tale, and culture to formulations ever new.




1. Introduction by George Ainslie Hight, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, vii. This version, a 1914 Everyman volume translated by George Ainslie Hight, is the source of my quotations in this essay. Iceland today is often called the most literate nation on earth. Ben Myers in ”The Icelandic Sagas: Europe's most important book?” in the Guardian (Oct 3, 2008) notes that the average Icelander reads four books a year and that one in ten has written a book.

2. In Icelandic sometimes called Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. Translations into English have been titled Grettla, Grettir's Saga, and The Saga of Grettir the Strong. William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon published a translation called The Tale of Grettir the Strong.

3. See Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” which brilliantly analyzes Homeric violence.

4. See the AP story for Apr 18, 2013 appearing in numerous newspapers.

5. Wyrd is the Old English goddess of fate. The Norse cognate is Urðr or Urd, personified as one of the Norns.

7. Note the common use in African American writing and culture generally of “signifying,” the artful use of language, often employed for boasting or insulting.