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lukerik's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
fast-paced
5.0
Bitterly Gilgamesh wept for his friend Enkidu; he wandered over the wilderness as a hunter, he roamed over the plains; in his bitterness he cried, ‘How can I rest, how can I be at peace? Despair is in my heart. What my brother is now, that shall I be when I am dead. Because I am afraid of death I will go as best I can to find Utnapishtim whom they call the Faraway, for he has entered the assembly of the gods.’
--Gilgamesh
Now Roland see that his friend is dead,
Lying face down, his head on the ground.
He began to mourn him in tender fashion:
‘Lord companion, how sad that you were so bold:
We have been together for days and years.
You have caused me no harm and I have not wronged you.
Now that you are dead, it grieves me to remain alive.’
--Roland
There are also remarkable similarities to the Iliad.
Many of the laisses, the verses, in Roland are structured in this way. A character is introduced, performs an action and then speaks. I suppose it helps the performer remember and is also clearer for the audience, slightly drunk in a noisy hall. But there’s a kind of cumulative effect to them. It’s like the character is stepping into their archetype and doing the deeds that must be done and intoning the words that must be said.
Like the Iliad, the themes are the folly of man, played out against a backdrop of war. Charlemagne has been successfully campaigning in Spain for some time. You might think he has some kind of religious motivation, but when the Muslims offer him a huge amount of money to please fuck off, he accepts it. His greed induces him to literally turn his back on his enemy. The situation is worsened by Ganelon. His flaw is treachery. The outcome could be saved by Roland, but he’s held back by pride.
The poet isn’t one-eyed about all this, which leads to another theme of the right structuring of society, and the reciprocal behaviour of lord and vassal. We might think that the only good king is a dead one, but despite his tragic flaw, Charlemagne does fulfil many of the things people looked for in a king, like having a magnificent white beard. Roland may be proud, but he is also brave. His companion Oliver does have common sense. He gives good advice to Roland but is stuck in the vassal’s trap of only following orders. He could easily avert the catastrophe by blowing Roland’s horn or sending a messenger to Charlemagne, but fails to act. I think a lot of the poem’s greatness stems from its ambiguities.
Another thing that impressed me were the linkages than run throughout the poem. Some of these are quite obvious. Charlemagne has a magic sword which he gives to Roland and Roland is described literally as Charlemagne’s right arm. Marsile wants to cut off Charlemagne’s right arm, but ends up have his own cut off by Roland. There are lots of these chains, some of them quite subtle.
There’s an interesting use of the one-liner. At the start of the first battle there’s a series of laisses like this:
Duke Samson goes to strike the almaçor.
He broke his shield wrought with gold and flowers;
His fine hauberk offers him no protection.
He pierces his heart, his liver and his lungs,
Flinging him dead, no matter whom it grieves.
The archbishop said: ‘This is a baron’s blow!’
Burgess (the translator) has made ‘no attempt to reproduce the poetic qualities of the text’. We’re going line by line here. I suppose what were getting is as if James Bond’s one-liners were dubbed literally into another language with no attempt at dynamic equivalence. I have no idea if we’re supposed to groan or smile wryly. I amused myself by imagining that scene in Austin Powers were the guard is eaten by the mutated sea bass and Austin’s series of one-liners get progressively worse.
There’s another parallel to action films, but in this case only cheap ones. You know when the baddie’s trying to parallel park, but bumps the curb and the car immediately explodes, but they could only afford the one explosion so they shoot it from multiple angles and edit each shot in so you get the entire explosion repeatedly from beginning to end? At critical points the poet will repeat the same events over two or three laisses. I can’t find the place in the text now, but I think we get three together when it’s stressed that Charlemagne is greedy. They’re not exact repetitions, but parallelism on a structural level. If you’re in to parallelism you’re in for a treat.
The poem’s full of the crusading spirit. One of the combatants is Archbishop Turpin, just as bloody-thirsty as the rest. Here he is before the battle:
‘Lord barons, Charles has left us here;
For our king we must be prepared to die.
Help us now to sustain the Christian faith.
You will have to engage in battle, as you well know;
For you see the Saracens with your own eyes.
Confess your sins, pray for the grace of God;
To save your souls I shall absolve you all.
If you die, you will be blessed martyrs
And take your place in paradise on high.’
The Franks dismount and kneel upon the ground;
In God’s name the archbishop blessed them.
As penance he orders them to strike.
It’s the brutality of that ‘as penance he orders them to strike’ that I think really brings home to you what a twisted extremist ideology it was that had scarred Europe. The poet has two eyes open even here as later we get the comment from Turpin, in which only the poet seems to see the irony:
‘You act very well.
A knight should have such valour,
Who bears arms and sits astride a good horse.
In battle he should be strong and fierce,
Or else he is not worth four pence.
He ought rather to be a monk in one of those monasteries
And pray all day long for our sins!’
However, if you look at the poet’s depiction of the Muslims you can hardly fail to see where he stands on the question of to kill or not to kill. All the ambiguities disappear as the poet moves towards certainty. As Roland says, ‘the pagans are wrong and the Christians are right.’ I suppose we can only be glad that all these people are dead and that no one today is going to be carrying out millenarian campaigns in the Middle East. Seriously though, their enemies may have been as innovative and resourceful as they were, they may never have stopped thinking about new ways to harm their countries and their people, but neither did the Christians. In the end sequence at Ganelon’s trial by combat I think the poet is stressing that violence death shouldn’t just be inflicted on Muslims but on Christians too; that God’s will can be revealed through the use of violence, and that death should be spread about via human sacrifice to anyone associated to those who break feudal norms. Well, I suppose that’s one way to bring balance to the Force.
--Gilgamesh
Now Roland see that his friend is dead,
Lying face down, his head on the ground.
He began to mourn him in tender fashion:
‘Lord companion, how sad that you were so bold:
We have been together for days and years.
You have caused me no harm and I have not wronged you.
Now that you are dead, it grieves me to remain alive.’
--Roland
There are also remarkable similarities to the Iliad.
Many of the laisses, the verses, in Roland are structured in this way. A character is introduced, performs an action and then speaks. I suppose it helps the performer remember and is also clearer for the audience, slightly drunk in a noisy hall. But there’s a kind of cumulative effect to them. It’s like the character is stepping into their archetype and doing the deeds that must be done and intoning the words that must be said.
Like the Iliad, the themes are the folly of man, played out against a backdrop of war. Charlemagne has been successfully campaigning in Spain for some time. You might think he has some kind of religious motivation, but when the Muslims offer him a huge amount of money to please fuck off, he accepts it. His greed induces him to literally turn his back on his enemy. The situation is worsened by Ganelon. His flaw is treachery. The outcome could be saved by Roland, but he’s held back by pride.
The poet isn’t one-eyed about all this, which leads to another theme of the right structuring of society, and the reciprocal behaviour of lord and vassal. We might think that the only good king is a dead one, but despite his tragic flaw, Charlemagne does fulfil many of the things people looked for in a king, like having a magnificent white beard. Roland may be proud, but he is also brave. His companion Oliver does have common sense. He gives good advice to Roland but is stuck in the vassal’s trap of only following orders. He could easily avert the catastrophe by blowing Roland’s horn or sending a messenger to Charlemagne, but fails to act. I think a lot of the poem’s greatness stems from its ambiguities.
Another thing that impressed me were the linkages than run throughout the poem. Some of these are quite obvious. Charlemagne has a magic sword which he gives to Roland and Roland is described literally as Charlemagne’s right arm. Marsile wants to cut off Charlemagne’s right arm, but ends up have his own cut off by Roland. There are lots of these chains, some of them quite subtle.
There’s an interesting use of the one-liner. At the start of the first battle there’s a series of laisses like this:
Duke Samson goes to strike the almaçor.
He broke his shield wrought with gold and flowers;
His fine hauberk offers him no protection.
He pierces his heart, his liver and his lungs,
Flinging him dead, no matter whom it grieves.
The archbishop said: ‘This is a baron’s blow!’
Burgess (the translator) has made ‘no attempt to reproduce the poetic qualities of the text’. We’re going line by line here. I suppose what were getting is as if James Bond’s one-liners were dubbed literally into another language with no attempt at dynamic equivalence. I have no idea if we’re supposed to groan or smile wryly. I amused myself by imagining that scene in Austin Powers were the guard is eaten by the mutated sea bass and Austin’s series of one-liners get progressively worse.
There’s another parallel to action films, but in this case only cheap ones. You know when the baddie’s trying to parallel park, but bumps the curb and the car immediately explodes, but they could only afford the one explosion so they shoot it from multiple angles and edit each shot in so you get the entire explosion repeatedly from beginning to end? At critical points the poet will repeat the same events over two or three laisses. I can’t find the place in the text now, but I think we get three together when it’s stressed that Charlemagne is greedy. They’re not exact repetitions, but parallelism on a structural level. If you’re in to parallelism you’re in for a treat.
The poem’s full of the crusading spirit. One of the combatants is Archbishop Turpin, just as bloody-thirsty as the rest. Here he is before the battle:
‘Lord barons, Charles has left us here;
For our king we must be prepared to die.
Help us now to sustain the Christian faith.
You will have to engage in battle, as you well know;
For you see the Saracens with your own eyes.
Confess your sins, pray for the grace of God;
To save your souls I shall absolve you all.
If you die, you will be blessed martyrs
And take your place in paradise on high.’
The Franks dismount and kneel upon the ground;
In God’s name the archbishop blessed them.
As penance he orders them to strike.
It’s the brutality of that ‘as penance he orders them to strike’ that I think really brings home to you what a twisted extremist ideology it was that had scarred Europe. The poet has two eyes open even here as later we get the comment from Turpin, in which only the poet seems to see the irony:
‘You act very well.
A knight should have such valour,
Who bears arms and sits astride a good horse.
In battle he should be strong and fierce,
Or else he is not worth four pence.
He ought rather to be a monk in one of those monasteries
And pray all day long for our sins!’
However, if you look at the poet’s depiction of the Muslims you can hardly fail to see where he stands on the question of to kill or not to kill. All the ambiguities disappear as the poet moves towards certainty. As Roland says, ‘the pagans are wrong and the Christians are right.’ I suppose we can only be glad that all these people are dead and that no one today is going to be carrying out millenarian campaigns in the Middle East. Seriously though, their enemies may have been as innovative and resourceful as they were, they may never have stopped thinking about new ways to harm their countries and their people, but neither did the Christians. In the end sequence at Ganelon’s trial by combat I think the poet is stressing that violence death shouldn’t just be inflicted on Muslims but on Christians too; that God’s will can be revealed through the use of violence, and that death should be spread about via human sacrifice to anyone associated to those who break feudal norms. Well, I suppose that’s one way to bring balance to the Force.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Islamophobia, War, Animal cruelty, Gore, Xenophobia, Blood, Death, Religious bigotry, Torture, Injury/Injury detail, Animal death, and Violence
schellenbergk's review against another edition
challenging
dark
fast-paced
4.25
Sayers’ intro is masterful. She clearly conveys the context, characters, themes without spoiling the book. I would not have enjoyed the book as much without it.
The book contains - however - extreme graphic violence.
The book contains - however - extreme graphic violence.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, War, Injury/Injury detail, Torture, and Death
thebibliobibuli's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Injury/Injury detail, Blood, Body horror, Gore, Murder, Religious bigotry, Violence, and War
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