ROLAND 



765 



Roland is a figure in history as well as in poetry 

 and fable, though it cannot be said that the 

 place he occupies as a historical personage is 

 an imposing one. All that we know of him is 

 contained in one line of Eginhard's Vita Karoli, 

 chap, ix., and that simply records his name, 

 Hruodlandus, his rank of prefect or warden of the 

 march of Brittany, and his death at the hands of 

 the Gascons in a valley of the Pyrenees. Such is 

 the acorn from which a whole forest of romance has 

 sprung up. According to the Annals (commonly 

 attributed to Eginhard, but by some to Angilbert, 

 who died fifteen years before they end ), Charlemagne 

 Wiis invited in 777 to take possession of Saragossa 

 and other cities in Spain by Ibn al Arabi, leader of 

 the revolt against the Kliulif Abd-er-Rahman, and 

 in 778 crossed the Pyrenees into the territory of 

 the Gascons, attacked and took Pamplona, the 

 stronghold of the Navarrese, and advanced to Sara- 

 eossa, and having received the submission of 

 Ibn al Arabi and liis friends, and taken hostages 

 of them, returned the way he came. According to 

 other accounts the Saracens played him false, and 

 a rising of the Saxons compelled him to hasten 

 home. Al Makkari merely says that after warring 

 for some time with Abd-er-Rahman he sent him 

 an embassy proposing an alliance and friendship, 

 and that peace was concluded between them. At 

 any rate it is certain that Charles made but a short 

 stay in Spain, that on his way back he levelled the 

 walls of Pamplona to the ground, and that about 

 25 miles north-east of it the rearguard of his army 

 was annihilated by the Gascons. ' Roscida Vallis," 

 the common etymology of Roncesvalles, the scene 

 of the disaster, is, of course, like all such ety- 

 mologies, nonsense. In its oldest known form the 

 name is Rencesvals, and there can be no doubt 

 that it is Basque. Whatever may be the true 

 reading of the first syllable, the last two are clearly 

 a corruption of zabal or zaval, a word which enters 

 into the composition of perhaps a hundred place- 

 names in Navarre iind the Basque provinces, 

 always indicating a flat, level space, which exactly 

 describes the battlefield. It is a small oval plain, 

 evidently an old lake-bed, shut in all round, except 

 on the south where the waters escaped, by steep 

 mountain-ridges clothed from base to summit with 

 thick beech woods. To the north there is a slight 

 depression where, by the Col of Ibaiieta, a path 

 crosses the crest of the Pyrenees and descends the 

 Val Carlos to St Jean-Pied-de-Port. The features 

 of the spot, and the facts of the catastrophe, no 

 doubt, also, are faithfully given in a few words by 

 Eginhard, who in his youth must have often heard 

 them spoken of by Charlemagne's old soldiers. As 

 the army, by reason of the narrowness of the place, 

 was marching in extended order, the Gascons, who, 

 profiting by the denseness of the woods that abound 

 there, had posted themselves in ambush on the 

 heights, rushing upon those guarding the rear, 

 hurled them into the valley beneath, and there 

 glew them to a man ; and having seized the baggage, 

 dispersed under cover of the night in all directions, 

 o that there was no finding them to take vengeance 

 upon them. Roncesvalles is in fact a natural trap, 

 and it says little for Charles as a general that he 

 should have ventured into it without first securing 

 the heights and scouring the woods ; for when 

 Roland, in the Chnnson, thinks of it, it is too late. 

 He was in a hostile country, made so by his own acts. 

 It may be to put him in the most favourable light 

 that he was compelled by military necessity to 

 invade Navarre, that resistance forced him to take 

 Pamplona, that levelling its walls, though it looks 

 awkwardly like xpite, was a precaution in view of 

 a future campaign, anil that, in short, be 'simply 

 used military license upon the country.' But this, 

 as Major Dalgetty observes, ' excites no benevolence 



in those who sustain injury,' and the Basques of 

 Navarre had good reason to resent their treatment 

 at his hands. They were not semi-savage moun- 

 taineers, as most French writers try to make them 

 out, but a gallant little Christian state holding their 

 own stoutly, after the fashion of Pelayo, against 

 the common foe ; and yet this pillar of the church, 

 this pious champion of Christianity, hot from the 

 conversion of the Saxons, comes down upon them, 

 for his own ends treats them as if they were 

 Saracens, or worse, takes away from them their 

 armour wherein they trusted, their walls, next to 

 their mountains their best reliance, and leaves them 

 naked to their enemies. Eginhard may talk of the 

 perfidy of the Gascons, and poets sentimentalise 

 over the dolorosa rotta, but history and justice will 

 call it a merited retribution for overbearing mili- 

 tarism, and the proper punishment of insolent con- 

 tempt for a weak adversary. 



Naturally, the tragic character of the disaster, and 

 the reverse to the mighty king of the Franks at the 

 close of what was looKeu upon as a holy war, made 

 a deep and wide-spread impression. Upon himself 

 the effect, the Annals say, was that it clouded the 

 success of his expedition, and there can be no doubt 

 that already in his lifetime it was a theme with the 

 popular minstrels far and wide. In the middle of the 

 9th century the biographer of Louis held it needless 

 to mention the names of those who fell, quia vulgata 

 sunt. In course of time the story underwent modi- 

 fications in the hands of the poets. Everything in 

 it was magnified. The expedition became a cam- 

 paign lasting twice as many years as it had 

 occupied months ; the disaster was made a defeat 

 of vast proportions, which, as a matter of course, 

 was accounted for by treachery, the traitor Ganelon 

 being invented for that purpose ; the Basques were 

 turned into Saracens ; and for further dramatic 

 effect Charlemagne, who was but thirty-six, was 

 represented as a venerable old man with a snow- 

 white beard, and Roland as his nephew. And here 

 it may be asked, how came Roland to be set up as 

 hero? Eginhard mentions two others as having 

 fallen, Anselm and Eggihard, both of them persons 

 of at least equal rank, and more immediately con- 

 nected with the sovereign ; but nothing more is 

 heard of either. The only explanation is that, if they 

 were left unwept, unhonoured, and unsung, it was be- 

 cause the jongleurs could not conveniently sing their 

 names, while Rodland, Rotland, Rollanz, Roland 

 lent itself to song as if made on purpose. ' An old 

 song ' is held to mark the zero of importance, but 

 it is one of the most potent of agencies. It lurks 

 amon<j the roots of history, dispensing immortality 

 at will, and conferring renown irrespective of deeds 

 or merits. Roland, for aught we know, was only 

 an ordinary Breton country-gentleman, but old 

 songs have made him the equal of Achilles, Hector, 

 Alexander the Great, and Arthur of Britain. Of 

 these old songs we know little or nothing beyond 

 the fact of their existence. If the barbara carmhia 

 taken down by Charlemagne's orders were of the 

 same sort, they were probably the only ones of the 

 kind ever committed to writing. Nor do we know 

 much more of their relation to the earliest written 

 lays. M. Leon Gautier, who has made the subject 

 the study of his life, at first held that the chansons 

 de geste were little more than the primitive songs 

 strung together, but he now thinks that they were 

 merely inspired by them, and borrowed only their 

 legendary and traditional elements. The truth 

 probably lies between the two views. It is more 

 likely that there is no hard and fast line to be 

 drawn between the songs and the chansons de 

 yeste, and that the latter were of very gradual 

 growth. The jongleurs in singing the songs, can- 

 tilente, or ballads, as we should call them, re- 

 lating to an event like the Roucesvalles disaster, 



