What makes the song of roland historically significant

The hero of the epic is Roland who was the nephew of Emperor Charlemagne. He dies during the battle, although the reason of his death is that he bursts his own temple by blowing the oilfant-horn. Baligant is another important character whose help is enlisted by Marsile against Charlemagne. It is unanimously agreed by the scholars that the Song of Roland was written between and The history depicted in Song of Roland, however, extends to the 8th century Battle of Roncevaux which was fought during the reign of Emperor Charlemagne.

The battle was fought between Roland, who was a prefect of Breton March, and the Basques, an indigenous ethnic group in the Basque County region. It took place at Roncevaux Pass, which is a high mountain pass in the Pyrenees located between France and Spain. We cannot say for certain who wrote The Song of Roland, or when, or where, but evidence suggests that it was composed around the beginning of the twelfth century, centuries after Charlemagne's reign.

Urban exhorted all Christendom to fight for the Sepulcher, promising that such war was holy and that fighting in it counted as full penance. It is probable that the Song of Roland was written after this speech, for before this Turpin's militant theology would likely have been considered heretical. The Song of Roland, born during this time, serves the Crusades as a powerful piece of propaganda. It must be remembered that political and ideological motivations do not affect a poem's stature as a poem; The Song of Roland is certainly propaganda, but it does not therefore follow that it is "mere propaganda.

And by that standard, The Song of Roland deserves its place in the canon of medieval literature. By the time that the The Song of Roland was written, more than three centuries after the events it recounts, Charlemagne had become a superhuman figure in the European imagination and a hero of romance; the stories of his exploits assumed the proportions of the fantastic.

He provides an ideal base on which to build enthusiasm for the Crusades. While no one thought of going on a Crusade until centuries after his death, his figure as both a man of God, beatified and in some churches honored as a saint—he was thought to have been in communication with the angels and the direct instrument of God's will on earth—and as fierce a warrior as any made his image an excellent symbol for the spirit of the Crusades. The bits of history that find their way into the The Song of Roland are remolded to fit the crusaders' world-view.

The massacre at Roncesvals becomes much more than a mishap; it becomes a drama of good and evil, a demonstration of the wickedness of betraying the Christian cause. Haidu challenges conventional views in a dense, theory-grounded reading that treats Roland in relation to contemporary socioeconomic and political structures.

Auerbach cited under Structure and Style offers a superb brief introduction for a first-time reader. Cook, Robert F. The Sense of the Song of Roland. Roland is an ideal vassal. La Chanson de Roland. Critical Guides to French Texts This brief introduction to Roland treats the poem sequentially.

Intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, the volume includes an extensive bibliography.

Faral, Edmond. Haidu, Peter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Haidu provides a comprehensive, theoretically dense, contentious, and often scintillating reading of the poem as a political text in the context of 11th- and 12th-century socioeconomic and political structures.

Statue of Roland, symbolizing freedom and justice, in the town hall square of Riga, Latvia. Now that is strange! Image courtesy Patrick Mayon. So, what really happened? Points to consider: The poem is the first of the great French heroic poems known as "chansons de geste" songs of great deeds from the Middle Ages.

These chansons all served as symbols of a newly-developing French national awareness, which was occurring in the High Middle Ages, a process that defined what it meant to be "French" and that culminated during the Hundred Years War with the figure of Joan of Arc maybe. The Song importantly illustrated some of the characteristics of what it meant to be an ideal knight your paper assignment in the service of the King of France even though Charlemagne had never been technically a king of "France".

Another important point to remember is what we could call the "holy war" aspects of the poem. In the Song , the battle that Roland fought was not against Basques but against Muslims. The final version of the poem dates to the time when the Crusades were just beginning to be launched, and thus the final version portrays the duty of the ideal knight as serving not only the king of France but also the church in its battle against Muslim note that Roland fights side-by-side with the bishop in the battle.

Thus, acording to the Song , a major part of the definition of what it meant to be French was to be Christian.