Roland, El Cid, and an Anglo-Saxon Seafarer

More recommendations for medieval poems and their modern translations.

Sep 08, 2024

Today we’ll conclude the Via Mediaevalis introduction to medieval poetry by completing my list of recommended texts. Preceding essays in this series are listed below.

The Song of Roland
About a hundred medieval French epics have survived, but only one is a revered masterpiece familiar to readers from many countries. The Song of Roland, a mysterious blend of history and legend that wondrously poeticizes the eighth-century Battle of Roncevaux Pass, is one of the best ways to breathe the chivalric air of a world that seems immortal in its power to stir our souls and captivate our minds. This is another poem that we do well to read slowly, in a quiet room, and maybe with a candle-hued reading lamp instead of an overpowered bulb whose merciless, probing white light reminds us where we are, and isolates us from where we imagine ourselves to be.

And there is nothing wrong with such imaginings, regardless of one’s age. The imagination need not be a place of wild fantasies or perilous escapes from reality. To imagine, from Latin imago, is simply to form images, and other sensations, inside the mind. With good literature in hand, such images unite us to things that are perfectly real, though usually separated from us by time or space. The wars of the Middle Ages are real, and the warriors who fought in them are human beings like us, just as the war in Ukraine is real, and the warriors who will die today are human beings like us. I have never seen Frankish knights with my own eyes; I have never seen the battlefields of Donbass with my own eyes. I imagine them through literature—poetic for the Franks, journalistic for Donbass. From the former I am separated by over a thousand years, and from the latter by over a thousand miles. But Einstein showed that time and space are interwoven realities, and then the famous mathematician Hermann Minkowski claimed that time and space are actually space-time:

Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between the two will preserve an independent reality.

As I get older, distant parts of the world feel more inaccessible, and news reports feel more like a strange sort of literature that wants to be factual history. And as I get older, the past feels more accessible, and epic poetry feels more like a strange sort of factual history that wants to be literature, yet makes reality far more real than what my eyes could ever see. If I had been at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, I would have seen and heard many things, astounding and terrible things to be sure. Yet amidst the din and gore and turmoil of the battle my soul would fail to behold—to hold deeply and strongly in its spiritual embrace, with wonder, with contemplation—the keen, poetic sense of honor that animated medieval knights:

Now let each man take care to strike great blows,
So that no one can sing a shameful song about us.

Or the chivalric devotion to courage and loyalty against all odds:

Roland replies: “Do not speak of such outrage;
A curse on the heart which cowers in the breast!”
…
For his lord a vassal must suffer great hardship
And endure both great heat and great cold;
He must also part with flesh and blood.

Or the everlasting paradox of war, so often sought and glorified, so often lamented and hated:

The battle is awesome and violent.
The Franks strike with their burnished swords;
You would have seen so much human grief there,
So many men dead, wounded, soaked in blood.

Or medieval culture’s uniquely romantic relationship with death:

Roland looks up at the hills and the mountains.
He sees so many of the Franks lying dead
And mourns them like a noble knight:
“Lord barons, may God have mercy on you;
May he grant all your souls a place in paradise
And let them rest amongst celestial flowers.”

All the quotations above are from the Glyn Burgess translation, which I recommend.

The Song of My Cid
The Castilian word cid, from Arabic sayyid, means “lord” or “commander.” The title was given to Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the hero of a twelfth-century text known as the Poema de Mio Cid or the Cantar de Mio Cid. The Song of My Cid is the national epic of Spain, just as the Song of Roland is the national epic of France, and again like the Song of Roland, it is a rich and enigmatic tapestry of historical facts and mythic fictions. There is much poetic kinship between the two, but the Song of My Cid is by no means a “Spanish version” of the Song of Roland, and overall the Song of My Cid is more likely to defy expectations.

Given the bitter civilizational warfare of the Reconquista and its centrality in the history of Spain, those who haven’t read the Song of My Cid might assume, understandably, that it is above all a story of bloody battles and glorious Spanish victories, with a stark dichotomy of denigrated Moors and lionized Christians. This is not at all the case.

The story begins with El Cid “greatly afflicted” and “grievously weeping” because his Christian king has unjustly exiled him. Later he so endears himself to the inhabitants of a captured Moorish town that the “men and women alike” lament and pray for him when he departs. The battles come and go quickly, with little detail and no strong sense of belonging to a monumental clash between antithetical religions. The poet expresses sincere sympathy for the sufferings of Moors whose city is under siege. And one of El Cid’s allies is a Muslim whose noble conduct contrasts sharply with the shocking cruelty and moral degradation of two Christian aristocrats. Indeed, these two Christian aristocrats—carnal, cowardly, dishonorable men vanquished by fellow Christians in judicial combat—are the principal villains of the story.

Even El Cid himself defies expectations. One moment he is occupied with slaughtering enemies, another with arranging good marriages for his daughters. His morally questionable actions add complexity to his character, as does his unfailing devotion to a king who has temporarily ruined his life. And despite his role as a seemingly invincible warrior and leader of men, his most prominent virtue is not military valor but heroic generosity.

Unfortunately, the Song of My Cid presents special difficulties for English-speaking readers. The language of the poem is direct and unadorned, with almost none of the rhetorical flair that can survive translation well in works like the Iliad or the Divine Comedy. With the Song of My Cid, most of the poetry is in the sounds: Spanish (or more specifically in this case, Old Castilian) is a naturally rhythmical language, and the poet creates a pleasing form of verbal music through extensive use of assonance (similar vowel sounds) at the end of lines. For example:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Afevos todos aquestos      reçiben a Minaya,
e a las duennas e a las ninnas      e a las otras conpannas.
Mando mio Çid      a los que ha en su casa
que guardassen el alcaçar      e las otras torres altas,
e todas las puertas     e las exidas e las entradas.

Translation to English saps the poem of much poetic artistry—rhythm and assonance are lost, and the result is a long and rather prosy text that can be tedious at times. Old Castilian is fairly readable if you know modern Spanish; you’ll definitely want to find a bilingual parallel-text edition and use whatever Spanish proficiency you have to enjoy some of the original’s musicality. You can also get a feeling for the original’s poetic style by reading selections from this online version, which has been translated into modern Spanish.

I highly recommend the translation by W. S. Merwin, which is available as a bilingual edition in print and on Internet Archive. Burton Raffel’s version departs too boldly from the original, and the older translation available on Project Gutenberg is compelling proof that when formal features—in this case, strong iambic meter and rhymed couplets—are not suitable for the literary occasion, they can absolutely kill a poem.

We’ve covered four long masterpieces of medieval poetry, and I think that’s enough for now. (The Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer in general, are in my opinion best left for later.) I do, however, want to include a few shorter poems in this list. There are many to choose from, but since the Via Mediaevalis community is predominantly English-speaking, I am going to recommend some jewels from the treasury of Anglo-Saxon verse. The translations I prefer are not readily available online, but the versions linked below are much better than nothing. The concluding excerpt is from Craig Williamson’s translation of “The Seafarer.”

“Dream of the Rood” (in Old English and modern English)
“The Wanderer” (in Old English and modern English)
“The Seafarer” (Old and modern English in parallel)

The solitary flier screams,
Rousing the quickened heart on the whale-road
Over the stretch of sea.
For me the joys of the Lord
Are keener than the dead life loaned to us on land.
I can never believe that all this worldly wealth
Will last forever. One of three things
Always threatens a man with uncertainty
Before he travels on his final road—
Illness or old age or the sword’s grim edge.