The chansons de geste
Adam's Notes for November 15, 2023
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The Chansons de Geste
“There are only three subject matters for any discerning man: That of France, that of Britain, and that of great Rome” — from Jean Bodel’s La Chanson des Saisnes
Today and for the next few weeks I want to talk about the chansons de geste, the songs of great deeds, a genre of epic medieval poetry that I’ve come to love. The chansons de geste generally concern the first of Bodel’s three subject matters, the Matter of France.
Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, in his chanson Girart de Vienne, further divides the Matter of France into three cycles: the first cycle is called the Geste du roi, and these poems are generally about the exploits of King Charlemagne and his paladins (if you’re familiar with The Song of Roland, it’s part of this cycle), though on occasion they deal with Charlemagne’s immediate successors or predecessors; the second cycle concerns the Rebel Barons, and its stories usually consist of small scale civil/feudal wars involving knights and vassals who break with Charlemagne or his son Louis the Pious, and they generally end with some sort of reconciliation and return to the fold for the rebels; the third cycle is called the Geste de Garin de Monglane, as most of these stories are about the sons and grandsons of the otherwise obscure Garin de Monglane. The sons and grandsons tend to go out into the world with nothing and win wealth and glory through feats of arms despite the obstinance of their liege lords. Two more cycles of gestes were written later and there are a bunch of gestes that don’t fit any of these categories.
One of the aspects I love most about the chansons de geste is what I think of as the Marvel Team-Up element. It used to be a staple plot in Marvel Comics: Spider-Man (or whoever) goes to investigate a bank robbery and wrestles with a blue mutant he finds at the scene of the crime. Eventually the blue mutant is revealed to be Nightcrawler from the X-Men, and he too was investigating the crime, not perpetrating it. The two heroes team up and take out the real villain. In the chansons de geste the story usually goes like this: Roland (or sometimes his companion Oliver) enters into a duel with an enemy knight, usually but not always a Saracen, and the two combatants gain a mutual respect for the other’s prowess at arms. The combat is interrupted: sometimes by an angel or a divine mist, but more often by the simple darkness of nightfall. The two swear a truce and promise to continue their combat in the morning, but over the course of the night the two become friends and Roland brings the enemy back to Charlemagne as a guest (provided the enemy isn’t secretly mortally wounded) and has him join the team.1
It’s hard to pinpoint what I love about the Marvel Team-Up aspect, but for one thing it complicates the image of medieval Europe as insular, xenophobic, and white. And yet it’s not unproblematic. The enemy-turned-friend is usually a Saracen, a term that usually but not always referred to Muslims, and the trope generally hinges on a conversion to Christianity, with the Saracen knight cursing his old religion and fighting against his former comrades. But even this isn’t straightforward. One of the earliest chansons de geste sees its hero converting to the Saracen faith and cause after being insulted by King Louis. And the stories of Aye of Avignon are about the Christian widow Aye marrying a Saracen king whose conversion is perfunctory at best. King Ganor becomes her champion against the clan of Ganelon (the courtier from The Song of Roland who is synonymous with evil in these poems) and parts of the adventure takes place outside of the realm of Christendom altogether, a change of pace that allows the author to ignore the genre’s dictum that ‘the pagans are wrong and the Christians are right.’
Still, the recurring Othering of the figure of the Saracen is present in probably most of these poems, and makes my enjoyment of them a little less straightforward, especially considering we live in a time of insanely heightened Islamophobia. Sometimes the Saracen is depicted as monstrous, tusked or otherwise animalistic, and this is essentially the start of a tradition that eventually leads to Hieronymous Bosch’s demons and goblins, and to the aliens of Star Wars. More often the Saracen is a figure to be either converted, seduced, or defeated. I think a lot about this line from Aman Nadhiri’s book Saracens and Franks in 12th - 15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature: Perceptions of Self and the Other:
The question of the Other, of “who is Othering whom,” is often fraught with the baggage of historical systemic oppression, and discussions have a tendency to devolve into exercises in censuring or exonerating individuals or groups. Understanding the historical consequences of the utilization of this concept as justification for conquest and exploitation is vitally important; however, it is also important to understand the concept itself, to recognize it as a frame of reference common to all, a corollary to the concept of the Self.
It doesn’t really justify my taking pleasure in this stuff, but it helps me to avoid falling into the trap of simplistic good/bad binaries that you find in pop culture equivalents.
There are about ninety chansons de geste extant, and their reputation is being repaired due to a small academic resurgence of interest that’s bringing a lot of them into English for the first time.
One recent example is Yde et Olive, translated by Mounawar Abbouchi. Yde et Olive is part of the subcycle of stories in the Huon de Bourdeaux tradition, and tells a story about Huon’s granddaughter, Yde.
The story goes like this: Florent, son of Huon de Bourdeaux, returns triumphant to Aragon after his own adventure in a previous geste and is crowned king. His wife dies after giving birth to their daughter, Yde. As Yde comes of age, Florent is overtaken by a horrible, incestuous desire for her, due to her resemblance to his dead wife. Florent’s counsellors are horrified by the king’s intention to marry his own daughter, but they cannot stop him.
Yde escapes from her father’s court disguised as a knight and has various chivalric adventures until she lands in Rome, where she rescues King Oton in battle and becomes his loyal vassal, but without revealing her sex. As a reward, Oton marries Yde to his daughter, Olive, who has fallen in love with Yde from afar. Yde goes along with the marriage for fear of being discovered and sent home to her father. On their wedding night, Yde claims to have a headache preventing her from having sex. Olive accepts this reluctantly, granting Yde a reprieve ‘in everything besides kissing’ for fifteen days, that is, until the wedding guests have left (Olive says she’s afraid of their mocking and ridicule). Olive finds out Yde’s secret eventually, but because she really does love Yde, she promises to keep the secret. But the conversation is overheard and reported to King Oton. He demands that Yde bathe with him, which of course means getting naked and revealing she’s a woman. Otherwise Yde and Olive will both be burned at the stake.
The two girls pray for salvation, and at the last moment an angel descends from heaven and announces that Yde is, in fact, now a man, and that Yde and Olive will conceive their firstborn son tonight, and that Yde’s evil father will die within eight days. The angel also demands that King Oton forgive the gossiping boy who snitched on Yde and Olive. Yde and Olive name their son Croissant, who I always picture as a very buttery baby, and when Croissant grows up he goes on an adventure of his own.
It’s a wild story and you can see how it’s not just a simple tale of knights hitting each other over the heads with swords, as these things are often portrayed. But don’t get me wrong: knights hitting each other over the heads with swords can also be pretty fun stuff. There’s a lot of jousting and gore and after a while you start to recognize formulas to the action, and the ways that the authors manipulate the the formulas to keep the action compelling.
One chanson de geste that hasn’t been translated to English, as far as I can tell, is the Chanson de Hugues Capet. It’s rare in that it tells the story of a much later king than is usually the case, this being Hugh Capet, the first of the Capetian dynasty. It addresses the nasty rumour that Hugh was the child of a lowly butcher, but here it’s a source of pride rather than shame. I’ve taken this summary from Lucia Simpson Shen’s 1982 thesis “The Old-French ‘Enfance’ Epics and their Audience2”:
Hugues Capet’s father is a knight; his mother is the daughter of a wealthy butcher. He is orphaned early in life. As a child he lives so lavishly that in a few years he has spent his inheritance and is deep in debt. He takes refuge in Paris with his mother’s brother, also a butcher; but when his uncle learns of his way of life he is only too glad to keep his own fortune intact by giving Hughes some money and sending him on his way.3 Hugues devotes himself to tournaments and to love affairs in the course of which he begets thirty sons.
Returning to Paris, he finds the city in a grave situation.
King Louis le Debonnaire has been poisoned, and Savari, count of Champagne— suspected of the murder by the people of Paris— is pressing the queen to grant him the hand of her daughter, Louis’ only heir. The queen insists on consulting the peers of France and the bourgeois of the town before making a decision. As bourgeois, Hugues and his uncle promise the queen their support; when Savari appears, Hugues slays him, while the other bourgeois put the count's men to rout. Hugues is praised by the queen, who makes him her champion Paris is soon to be besieged by Savari's brother Fedry, aided by most of the great nobles. Hugues and his thirty sons lead the bourgeoisie in the defense of the city, with such success that the people soon call for Hugues to be king. Both the queen and her daughter Marie are in love with Hugues, but the queen withdraws in favor of Marie. Hugues is knighted and made Duke of Orleans; he marries Marie and is solemnly crowned king. The poet emphasizes that he obtained the crown not from his wife but from the will of the people. A law is enacted excluding women from the succession.
As Hugues is traveling through his kingdom, he is ambushed; escaping with difficulty, he continues his travels disguised as a hermit. Fedry de Champagne announces Hugues' death and demands that Marie be his wife. Hugues is warned in time, and on the wedding day he appears with his followers to put the traitors to death. Henceforth his sovereignty is unquestioned.
In later years he aids Drogon de Venise and Beuve de Targe against the Saracens.
According to the editor, Hugues Capet was written after 1312 (when les Voeux du Paon, mentioned in the poem, was composed), and probably before 1340. The poem capitalizes on a current legend, denounced by men of letters, that Hugh Capet was the descendant of a butcher. Mention is made of this legend in the Divine Comedy. M. de la Grange points out that while Dante wished to insult the ruling house of France—blaming the count of Valois for not having prevented his expulsion from Florence—the composer of Hugues Capet compliments his hero in ascribing a bourgeois origin to him. In his eyes, Hugues' legitimacy as king rests on the popular acclaim which called him to the throne.
Reading
This week I read Love by Hanne Ørstavik and Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris.
Love has a really ingenious structure. It’s about a mother and her almost nine-year-old son, and just about every paragraph switches back and forth between their points of view without warning. It uses very plain language and provides little in the way of context in order to build up a magnificent sense of impending dread.
I found out about Love from the newsletter Plain Pleasures by Marisa Grizenko, which once a month recommends three or four good books. Grizenko said of Love:
Over the course of the night, they travel separately over the town, their trajectories coming frustratingly close to intersecting. The narration hews closely to each character’s perspective—there’s no one to guide or reassure us—so we encounter the world as they do… Each sentence, seemingly straightforward in its simplicity, makes its small contribution to a building sense of dread, the threat of disaster. This snow globe of a novel—small, contained, twinkling within its wintry night—ultimately speaks of vast emotional distances and explores the consequences of where we choose to direct our love.
The tragedy of the ending felt completely inevitable, and I spent the whole novel mentally screaming at these two and thinking about all the times as a kid my parents scolded me about going outside without a jacket.
Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris is about a Mi’kmaq painter who, after the recent death of her father, goes on an artistic retreat to a cabin in a swamp. The swamp is haunted. There’s a lot of fantastic imagery but I especially loved the descriptions of the artist Rita’s paintings. I think this review will give you a better sense of the book than I can.
I’ve also been reading a ton of science fiction short stories, twenty-three at last count, as part of the latest Fusion Fragment submissions period. Preserving, sharing, and altering memories seems to be a common theme this time around.
Pepys Show
Pepys starts the month of November 1660 attending a party at Sir Batten’s, where he’s shown a trick chair that places manacles around whoever sits in it. Among the country gentlemen at the party is an old school mate who reminds everyone that Young Sam was a staunch Roundhead, and that when King Charles I was beheaded Sam was daydreaming about sermons he’d deliver on the King’s wickedness. It’s an awkward topic considering Sam Pepys is now an up-and-comer in King Charles II’s administration, and now it’s the regicides who are being publicly executed.
The King’s mother returns to London after nineteen years of exile. Pepys will meet her eventually, but for now he can’t even catch a glimpse of her.
On November 6, Pepys gets into an argument with his wife because he has locked the dog into the cellar after it kept shitting in the house. At night he has terrible, guilty dreams that his wife is dead. The dog was a gift from her brother Balty, and has been annoying Pepys from the start. Four days after receiving the dog in February, Pepys threatened to fling it out a window if it pissed the house any more.
On November 8, Pepys reports: “going by water to London, and I (unwilling to leave the rest of the officers) went back again to Deptford, and being very much troubled with a sudden looseness, I went into a little alehouse at the end of Ratcliffe, and did give a groat for a pot of ale, and there I did shit.”
On the eleventh, he has “some hog’s pudding of my Lady’s making” and then it’s off to church and “into our new gallery, the first time it was used, and it not being yet quite finished... There being no woman this day, we sat in the foremost pew, and behind us our servants, and I hope it will not always be so, it not being handsome for our servants to sit so equal with us.”
It’s also at this time that he decides to take his sister Pall into the household, not as a sister but as one of the servants. She won’t arrive until January, when Pepys will forbid her from sitting at the table on her very first day. Things don’t work out and by the summer Pepys sends her back to their parents, who have recently retired to Brampton in the countryside. Pall is a city girl and hates it there, and her father doesn’t like having her around much either. Soon Samuel Pepys is trying to marry her off, emphasis on off, and a number of possible husbands are mentioned until she finally ties the knot with John Jackson in 1668. Pepys describes Jackson as, “a plain young man, handsome enough for Pall, one of no education nor discourse, but of few words, and one altogether that, I think, will please me well enough.”
Links
Heistwatch: Four men have been charged over 2019 theft of gold toilet from Blenheim Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Entitled America, the toilet was part of an exhibition by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan and valued at $6m. The toilet, which was installed across the hall from the room Winston Churchill was born in, was fully functional and visitors to the museum could book a three minute appointment to use it. Edward Spencer-Churchill, founder of the Blenheim Art Foundation, previously told the Times: “Firstly, it’s plumbed in; and secondly, a potential thief will have no idea who last used the toilet or what they ate. So no, I don’t plan to be guarding it.” It was seems to have caused some water damage when it was stolen, and police believe the toilet has since been melted down.
More heists: Two tanks of bull semen stolen from the village of Clogher in Northern Ireland. A similar, larger heist happened a year ago near Cologne, Germany. 55,000 rare Japanese Kit-Kat bars hijacked in California. Champagne heist thwarted in France, but robbers escape.
In the LRB, an interesting story about a Ghanian con artist. Apparently the CIA once considered triggering a coup against President Kwame Nkrumah by ‘raiding the Chinese embassy in Accra in blackface’. But in the end they gave into wokeness and did it the old fashioned way, funding disgruntled police and military officers. Kidding about the wokeness part, obviously. Predictably, living standards deteriorated under the new pro-western regime, so the CIA created a myth that Nkrumah took the treasury into exile with him. The CIA eventually admitted that Nkrumah hadn’t even taken bribes while in office, but the damage was done and the con artist at the centre of the story was able to bilk his targets for years by promising access to fictitious Oman Ghana Trust Fund.
I’ve been really enjoying Eric Williams’ blog as he dives into some classic issues of Weird Tales. My favourite so far is probably his review of H.F. Arnold’s The Night Wire, about a Canadian Press journalist receiving updates about an evil fog. Eric has his own short story, Special Delivery, out at Tales to Terrify. I’m looking forward to his review of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry stories, and also to this book he edited, Night Fears: Weird Tales in Translation.
Vajra Chandrasekera used the announcement of his second novel, Rakesfall, to write about the connection between genre fiction and Palestine’s struggle for freedom in the face of Israel’s genocidal actions.
On that note, did you see the Giller Prize for Literature was interrupted by protestors calling for sponsor Scotiabank to divest from Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems? Rick Mercer lost a battle to a piece of paper.
It seems like Mounawar Abbouchi, the translator of Yde et Olive I mentioned above, once interviewed one of my heroes: Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush. “This is your farewell kiss, you dog. This is for the widows and orphans of Iraq,” al-Zaidi said, before launching his second shoe.
Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, especially if you’ve made it this far. This has been Adam’s Notes for November 15, 2023. My name is Adam McPhee, and you can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, and Goodreads.
This summary of Otuel a knight, an anglo-norman adaptation of the Chanson de Otinel, offers a typical example.
An ‘enfance’ is a sort of subgenre within the gestes, these are origin stories involving a knight or a king’s rise to prominence. They follow a lot of the same conventions as movie prequels, such as a preoccupation with how a knight acquired his sword.
Being bad with money is actually considered a knightly virtue in the chansons de geste, and is something of a recurring trope, particularly among orphans, because it’s a class distinction that separates knights from merchants and is usually accompanied by generosity towards vassals and guests.