Heroines of the French Epic

by Newth, Michael A. H. ;

  The Song of Blancheflor relates the misfortunes that befall a lovely Byzantine Princess upon marrying a very old Charlemagne. This virtuous young consort repulses the amorous advances of an evil traitor, Macaire, who takes his revenge upon her by convincing the bewildered monarch that his wife is an adultress. Condemned at first to death, she is subsequently banished and undergoes much trial and tribulation, before, with the help of a woodsman called Varocher, her innocence is finally established. The story-line itself is conventional, even hackneyed for its era (c.1240), as it appears that songs and tales about the adventures of a wife of Charlemagne falsely accused of adultery were already widespread at the start of the thirteenth century, according to the Chronica (c.1350) of Alberic des Trois-Fontaines The contemporary popularity of this particular tale can be deduced, however, from its survival in medieval Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch and English versions, while its enduring value as a social document can be appreciated through the nature and actions of its protagonists. As already stated, the rise in status of the heroine per se in the chansons de geste reflects in part that of women in those sectors of twelfth-century European society that were influenced by the contemporary sacred cult of the Virgin Mary and by the secular ethos of chivalrous woman-service as celebrated in the love-poetry of Provence and in the Breton romances of adventure. The rise of the suffering heroine in particular can be attributed in large extent to the emphasis that developed in thirteenth century Christian worship on the Passion of Christ, to the continuing popularity of hagiography as a means of moral instruction, to the growing appeal of the personal adventure as celebrated in the romans d’aventure, and to the the fading efficacy of the ‘Saracen-other’ to provide a relevant, convincing personification of ever-present evil in the everyday Western world. Blancheflor and Bertha are both spiritual models of constancy, love and self-sacrifice, and flesh-and-blood examples of human virtue strengthened through worldly experience.

  While Bertha is the victim of two women’s unbridled ambition, Blanchflor’s suffering is caused by the base behaviour of a male aristocrat, and relieved by the nobility of a ‘working-class’ hero. The figure of this hero in Blancheflor, called Varocher, is a character-type whose earliest preserved appearance is as Renewart in the Song of William. As an ill-clad, unsophisticated, burly rustic, this peasant figure, or villein, is out of place in the elite company of knights, and his deeds and words in their presence have an inevitably and consciously humorous impact. As a narrative symbol of the ‘noble soul’ incapacitated by the accident of birth, however, this persona demonstrates the heavy aesthetic influence on the genre of both the contemporary rise in prominence of a middle-class – the bourgeoisie – in medieval European society, and that of a more general secular ‘movement of reaction, probably unconscious, against the military caste system based on strict rules of birth and breeding’ (W. Calin, pp.119–20). In the Song of Blancheflor, this ‘poor but honest’ woodsman’s unwavering commitment to the well-being of our fortuitously met heroine unconsciously matches that of the ‘love-service’ practised by the ideal courtly lover towards his chosen lady. Through the increasingly dangerous acts of prowess that Varocher undertakes selflessly for the redemption and augmentation of Blancheflor’s reputation, he reveals to himself and to others the naked splendour of his ill-clad soul. In return he is accorded the undying affection of his ‘mistress’, and the recognition of his inherent courtesy and chivalry by those on whom such qualities have been bestowed through an accident of birth.

  Neither that of the idealised patriarch of the earliest epics, nor that of the lampooned greybeard of several later poems, the character of Charlemagne in Blancheflor is at once a more satisfying literary construct of human strength and weakness, and a conscious artistic articulation of contemporary baronial resentment in regional France to the heavy re-imposition of a centralised royal authority during the reign of the Capetian King Philippe-Auguste (1180–1223). In Blancheflor the great Emperor shows genuine love for his wife, genuine grief at her departure and a genuine desire to be just to all at all times. However, his patronage of the dissembling Macaire, against all reason and all wise advice, leads to personal despair, domestic disintegration, national suffering and a conflict in arms between the Christian West and East.

  It is in his treatment of the traitor Macaire that the unknown author of Blancheflor achieves his most original and enduring success – so much so, in fact, that the poem actually bears this subtle schemer’s name in its only modern French edition, and the appellation has established itself in French culture as that of the archetypal villain. The literary birth of the ubiquitous ‘losengier’ or ‘flattering deceiver’ in Old French epic poems can again trace its cultural generation to power struggles during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries between a centralised monarch and the regional barons in France. The bitter accusations voiced frequently in the ‘Songs of Deeds’ against materially rich but morally bankrupt individuals who ingratiate themselves at the royal court no doubt reflect both the earlier concerns of the provincial feudal barons at the weakness and/or corruptibility of Charlemagne’s successors and their later resentment and jealousy at the continued existence and role of such self-seeking trouble-makers in the centralising policies of the Capetian royal household. The despicable Macaire features in chansons de geste of later and earlier composition than Blancheflor, where he is inevitably introduced as either a kinsman or a friend of the genre’s most notorious traitor, Ganelon (from the Song of Roland), and so is not an original creation here. However, his extended career of evil and its memorable dénouement are unique: the dog belonging to his last victim, as the only witness to his master’s murder, reacts so violently against Macaire in court that King Charlemagne orders a duel between the lord and his canine accuser. The dog wins, Macaire confesses, and is hung straightaway. The immense popularity of this totally fictional judicial combat among its European audience and readership was to inspire countless contemporary visual illustrations and written references. Subsequently the character of Macaire and the legend of his canine comeuppance were themselves to inspire a range of performance-works, from theatrical productions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to movies in the twentieth.

  The compositional techniques exhibited in the Song of Blancheflor demonstrate an interesting mixture of the older ‘oral style’ of chanson de geste and its subsequent adoption of a more consciously ‘literary’ modus operandi. The old jongleur-reciter is still and always present in the written text as an omniscient narrator, who gains and regains the attention of his audience through frequent recapitulations of his story’s key points – a practice resuscitated by many a modern broadcast media presenter – see ll.1527–57, 3149–69 for examples of this ancient rhetorical technique. He establishes a lasting rapport with his public by constantly communicating his own enthusiasm for the tale through praise or censure of its protagonists, and he controls their emotions by frequent interjections of humour, horror and homespun philosophy. In this thirteenth century song the public is addressed both as an (exclusively male) audience and a general readership, however – a subtle generic shift which can be seen, for example, in a comparison of lines 7 and 2840. The old, uneven decasyllabic laisse still furnishes the narrative structure, and the emotive qualities of its systemic, oral-based formulaic language can still be appreciated in the traditional descriptions of warriors, weapons and warfare that are preserved in the shorter stanzas of Blancheflor. There are as many longer verses in the poem, however, where this ‘affective diction’ is replaced by a lexicon that will more adequately reflect the surroundings, occupations and concerns of the contemporary ‘courtly’ lifestyle: examples of this can be seen in the detailed descriptions of luxurious objects, the elaboration of travel sequences, and the pointed illustration of correct and incorrect modes of behaviour. Action itself becomes extenuated as secondary episodes interpose and characters proliferate.

  Bertha Broad-Foot

  ‘But one should read
Berte aus grans piès and the Franco-Italian poem of Macaire to realize what good literary use a skilful poet could make of this contrast between the evil and the good. These poems have all the traits of a modern novel and are marvellously interesting from the psychological point of view.’ ( Comfort, p.77)

  The Song of Bertha Broad-Foot is, without doubt, one of the finest examples of the consciously ‘written’ Old French epic poems to have come down to us today. It is also one of the very few chansons de geste whose authorship does not remain unknown. Adenet (c.1240–c.1300), called ‘Le Roi’, was employed as a minstrel in the courts of the dukes of Brabant for over thirty years, and, apart from the Song of Bertha Broad-Foot is known as the composer of two other chansons de geste (Young Ogier and Buevon de Conmarchis), and a romantic fantasy called Cleomadés. His re-working of this popular tale about Charlemagne’s mother is the best of many to have survived in European manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and presents a fascinating blend of themes from history, legend and folklore, crafted together with a degree of sensitivity, originality and formal artistry far beyond that of any other extant ‘Song of Deeds’.

  The historical figure of Bertrada of Laon (720–783), who married King Pepin the Short, king of the Franks, in 748 – six years after she had given birth to his son Charlemagne – was one to which the qualities of modesty, kindness and wisdom were already attached in Adenet’s time. Also connected to Bertrada, however, was the legend of the historically unfortunate Geneviève de Brabant, a chaste wife falsely accused and repudiated, together with the curious myth of a ‘Queen Goosefoot’, a folkloric figure, whose image – depicting a royal personage with one wide foot, like that of a goose – can still be seen today on the doorways of several cathedrals and abbeys in France. This folkloric figure is thought to have been inspired originally by didactic depictions of the biblical Queen of Sheba, who, although beautiful and wise, being also Pagan, could not be shown as ‘without imperfection’. The cognomen ‘Broad-Foot’ is shared by several other heroines of medieval compositions, however, particularly in saints’ tales, where the same ideal Christian qualities as those ascribed to Bertrada of Laon can be discerned, together with one interesting additional common narrative trait: the goose-footed queens spend some portion of their exiled lives in spinning and weaving a marvellous, inexhaustible distaff of thread. This last detail has led some to suggest that the folkloric figure of Mother Goose, that gentle, wise spinner of tales, whose literary début was made in the Conte de ma mere l’Oye of Charles Perrault in 1695, may have originated in this historical and legendary queen. Indeed, the success of Adenet’s version of Bertha Broad-Foot has even allowed, in some quarters, for the historical Queen Bertrada to claim the dubious honour of possessing the original ownership rights to this striking avian sobriquet.

  The Song of Bertha Broad-Foot illustrates how ‘passive’ virtue may be strengthened enough by the suffering it endures to triumph eventually over the most active evil. Adenet Le Roi alters little the narrative structure that tradition had already built up around his heroine – which itself contains several literary motifs common to many other works of the period, (including the tale of Blancheflor in this collection): a wife betrayed, a husband deceived, a ‘wilderness’ experience of despair and deliverance, both physically and mentally. The original craftsmanship of this refined courtier’s artistic reconstruction of Bertha’s story, however, lies in his sturdier re-assembly and nobler refurbishment of such prefabricated narrative material.

  For this Manichean tale (Bertha = ‘bright’ in Old German) of conflict between the forces of good and evil both around and in us all, Adenet le Roi maintains the epic laisse as his narrative unit, but, like most thirteenth-century re-workers of the chanson de geste replaces the unevenly broken decasyllabic line (4+6) with a symmetrically divided and fully end-rhymed ‘alexandrine’ (twelve-syllable line.) The elegance of this new measure is then enhanced most originally by Adenet through his constant employment of the so-called laisse dérivative, the pairing of two verses, one masculine and one feminine, upon the same end-rhyme. By keeping his verses much shorter than the chapter-length stanzas of most of his chansons de geste contemporaries Adenet still harnesses the latent power of the genre’s ancient formulaic diction, however, to embellish moments of emotional intensity or narrative importance through the old ballad technique of ‘parallel-versing’ – the accumulation and release of short, almost identical verse-waves, driven by the narrative tide to peaks of breaking lyricism. Other stylistic features of the inherited epic tradition to which this courtly poet is prepared to pay homage include the laudatory public recommendation of his ‘apparent’ hero at the beginning of the work (in this case it is the recollection of King Pepin’s famous despatch of a rampaging lion), and the announcement, at the end of his work, of the future exploits of this noble geste (i.e. family). The scion of Pépin’s geste is of course the (historically) bastard-born Charlemagne – whose birth is also carefully ‘rehabilitated’ in Adenet’s tasteful artistic journey ‘back to the future’.

  With the stunning exception of the Song of Roland, the narrative of Bertha Broad-Foot exhibits a unity of tone, a coherence of action, and a credibility of character unmatched by any other surviving chanson de geste. The plot develops logically, in a geographically specific landscape, through the credible actions of a carefully named, small but varied cast of well-drawn characters, whose foibles and feelings are recorded with a penetrative finesse. Although not distinguished as such in the original poem, the well-planned narrative displays a discernible division into four major episodes flanked by a short prologue and epilogue. Each differing scene is described with a poet’s sensitivity to language, a novelist’s eye for detail, a traveller’s love of localised colour, and, most markedly, with a psychologist’s sympathetic insight into human behaviour. One of Adenet’s greatest strengths is his complete empathy with all aspects of his story, achieved partly no doubt through the experiences afforded to him through his long career of work and travel under royal patronage throughout France and well beyond.

  Adenet Le Roi’s finest artistic quality, however, is surely the unusual degree of male insight which he displays in the portrayal of every female character he creates. In that of Bertha Broad-Foot we find one of the first and finest examples of extended character analysis in Western secular literature. Bertha’s arduous physical and mental sojourn in the forest of Maine ‘epically’ transforms her character, and is described at such length by its medieval author precisely because of its central position in achieving this era’s new ideological purpose for ‘epic writing’. For the first time in the chansons de geste, a genre conceived on the battlefield in celebration of physical, male prowess, the poetic labours of Bertha Broad-Foot deliver not a single blow, from hero nor foe – but a brand-new, ‘bright’ and true heroine.

  THE SONG OF BLANCHEFLOR

  Prologue

  I’LL TELL YOU NOW a truly wondrous tale

  Of olden France – but well beyond the day

  When Oliver and Roland had been slain –

  About a Mayence knight, in truth a knave,

  Whose treachery slew many worth the name:

  MACAIRE was his who set this trick in train.

  So listen, lords, remembering again

  That centuries before or since his reign

  There never breathed a monarch half as great

  In all the world as mighty Charlemagne,

  10 Nor one that bore such suffering and pain

  To glorify and guard the Christian Faith.

  He brought to heel the Pagan tribes and made

  His power feared by every other race.

  He never let a fool’s advice prevail,

  And lived beyond two hundred years of age,

  When William and Bertrand took the reins.

  He had a wife of highest rank and rate –

  A princess from that mighty c
ity named

  Constantinople, or so we say today.

  20 Her name was Blancheflor, both fair of face

  And character, and full of wisdom’s grace –

  But hear from me, by John the blessed saint,

  How fair can fall! God help us all, I say!

  1. How Charlemagne held high court in Paris

  KING CHARLEMAGNE, one day, was holding court

  In Paris, in his finest, highest hall,

  And many sons were there of vavasours,

  With princes, counts and noble dukes galore,

  Duke Naimon one, his wisest counsellor.

  30 A better man than he was never born,

  Or one who loved so faithfully his lord,

  Or sacrificed or suffered for him more.

  Exceeding all in heeding duty’s call,

  He gained from God, Who made us each and all,

  In Heaven high his glorious reward.

  To his good wife four gallant sons were born,

  Who all were Peers and Paladins in war –

  And perished all in woe at Roncesvalles

  At Roland’s side, that worthy count of yore,

  40 When Ganelon betrayed them to the Moors