CHANSONS DE GESTE. — Bertran de Bur-sur-Aube, an epic poet of the thirteenth century, proposed dividing the French “chansons de geste” into three groups: the geste of the king; the geste of Garin de Monglane (or of Guillaume d'Orange); and the geste of Doon de Mayence. The geste of the king celebrates above all Charlemagne and his successors (or predecessors); that of Garin sings of the valiant and faithful Guillaume d'Orange and his companions; that of Doon has as protagonists various equally valiant feudal lords who rebel against their king, among the most illustrious of whom are Hugues de Bordeaux, Girard de Roussillon, Renaud de Montauban, etc., and among the most infamous Ganelon de Mayence, the prototype of traitors.
These three groups do not, however, exhaust the whole “matter of France,” and other classifications have been attempted (chronological, dynastic, etc.), but they have always been scarcely satisfactory: one must bear in mind that this is a complex of approximately 80–90 poems (besides those that have been lost), among which the points of contact, intersections, overlapping, and confusions of characters are so numerous and extensive as to make it impossible to construct a clear and precise scheme.
But ultimately the problem of classification is secondary; what is important, and is still the subject of debate, is the origin of these epic songs, that is, of a “genre” which, from its flowering to its decline, filled approximately three centuries (from the twelfth to the fourteenth) and was a living part of the culture, art, and religious, civic, and chivalric ideals of that age. It has rightly been observed that to investigate the origin of the French epic means, to a great extent, investigating the origin of the first epic song, namely the Chanson de Roland (v.), and this is why the principal investigations on the subject take their starting point from it and refer back to II. These investigations, from the first hypotheses of the German and French Romantics of the last century to the recent labors of numerous editors and commentators on the texts, constitute one of the most fruitful chapters in European culture: from them, in fact, there has emerged a renewed conception of the Middle Ages and of the origins of the Romance languages. Here only a brief account will be given of this intense critical work, recalling how, once the Romantic myth of a popular, primitive, naïve poetry had faded, attention has today turned to seeking in the C. d. g. themselves (and naturally above all in the finest and most homogeneous ones) the artistic personality of the author, interpreting the data offered to us by tradition at their proper value, that is, as cultural premises of an eminently literary and artistic phenomenon. Thus one may speak, as appropriate, of elements drawn from the Germanic or Latin world, whether classical or medieval; dynastic and feudal aims and influences may be posited; and, guided by some of the C. d. g. themselves, one may retrace the routes of the great medieval pilgrimages, identifying in the churches and monasteries that abounded along them, and in the crowds of pilgrims, monks, soldiers, and jongleurs who frequented them, the settings and people best suited to encourage the flowering and dissemination of those C. d. g. These hypotheses all certainly contain something true, and boast one or more distinguished supporters, from Paris to Rajna and Bédier, from Paul Meyer to Tavernier and Willmott, and from Gabotto to Viscardi; but those hypotheses are more accurate which, while taking account of the elements and possibilities mentioned above, recognize in the C. d. g. a fruit of the age in which they arose. This does not mean denying every historical antecedent (many of the characters and events celebrated are in fact historical) or disregarding a process of formation that may in some cases have begun with songs of greater or lesser length, transmitted orally or in writing. But the French C. d. g. now embody the spirit of the society amid which and for which they were created: a spirit that, in its secular aspect, is feudal and chivalric, and, religiously, that of the Crusades. Love of country, attachment to one's sovereign, and above all the struggle for the triumph of the faith: these are the features that make the C. d. g. the great historical novel of medieval France and Europe, and one of the most significant cultural and artistic phenomena of the new Romance literatures.
Ruggero M. Ruggieri