chansons de geste

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chansons de geste, epic poems in Old French embodying legends which had grown up about earlier historical figures. The earliest extant versions are from the 12th cent. and use the legends to embody problems and difficulties of feudal society: either the stresses within the feudal system itself caused by conflicting loyalties, as in Raoul de Cambrai and Girart de Roussillon; or those caused by the impact of the Crusades on feudalism, as in the Chanson de Guillaume and, above all, in the Chanson de Roland (see Roland). These epics gradually grew into three cycles, first delineated by Bertran de Bar-sur-Aube, a writer of two such poems in the early 13th cent.: firstly, the geste du roi, those dealing with the Charlemagne of legend and his knights; secondly, those dealing with Charlemagne's rebellious vassals, the geste de Doon de Mayence; and thirdly, the William of Orange cycle, the geste de Garin de Monglane. The genre followed the usual development of narrative literature during the Old French period: the earliest poems, the Roland and Gormont and Isembart, are heroic; the 12th-cent. poems, with William of Orange as their hero, are more realistic; the later poems have courtly and marvellous elements in them, and lose the tragic seriousness of the earlier works. Similarly, the later ones become more elaborate in style, while the early poems were written in a simple, formulaic style of great dramatic force. The only parallel English poems are those concerned with Charlemagne, such as the fragmentary Middle English Song of Roland (see Ferumbras and Otuel).

chansons de geste [Fr.,=songs of deeds], a group of epic poems of medieval France written from the 11th through the 13th cent. Varying in length from 1,000 to 20,000 lines, assonanced or (in the 13th cent.) rhymed, the poems were composed by trouvères and were grouped in cycles about some great central figure such as Charlemagne. The origin of the form is disputed, but probably the first chansons were composed after the year 1000 by the joint efforts of wandering clerks and jongleurs (itinerant minstrels) to attract pilgrims to shrines where heroes of the chansons were supposedly buried. Sung by jongleurs to the accompaniment of a primitive viol, they spread to England, Germany, Italy, and Iceland. The earlier chansons—epic, aristocratic, and militantly Christian—passed as real history to their medieval listeners, though much of the material was legendary. Some later chansons utilize fantastic adventure or reflect bourgeois elements. The oldest extant chanson, and also the best and most famous, is the Chanson de Roland, composed c.1098–1100 (see Roland ); others are Raoul de Cambrai, Huon de Bordeaux, Aliscans, and Renaud de Montauban.

Bibliography: See W. C. Calin, The Epic Quest (1966), J. Crosland, The Old French Epic (1971), and N. A. Daniel, Heroes and Saracens: A Reinterpretation of the Chansons de Geste (1983).

chansons de geste (Fr. ‘songs of deed’) Epic poems, written in Old French between the 11th and 14th centuries, generally dealing with the campaigns of Charlemagne. These anonymous narratives, of which some 80 survive, describe semi-fictional events in the lives of Guillaume d'Orange, Girart de Roussillon, Roland and others.