Compare and Contrast the Lais of Marie De France to the Song of Roland

¶ … Lais of Marie de France and the Song of Roland -- Epic Expressions of Romantic Cultural Imagination and a Romantic Epic of National Identity

Both The Lais of Marie de France and The Song of Roland are early works of medieval verse. The Lais hail from France, The Song from England. Both are stories that depict an area of history now lost to most readers. However, there the similarities between the two tales seem to effectively end, stylistically and thematically. The Song of Roland is an epic tale of the reign of the Great Emperor Charlemagne. Thus, The Song of Roland, for all of its use of medieval and fantastic narrative tropes, such as a woman who dies for love and the healing and miraculous value of prayer, has its basis in an historical and national French reality. In contrast, the Lais are short stories that are relatively self-enclosed and a historical in style. If they are set in history, it is the history of fairy tales once upon a time, not in any specific battle or date

To understand the background of The Song of Roland, it behooves a reader to know that the historical Charlemagne was born in 742, about 300 years before The Song of Roland was first recorded in any discernable manuscript. The Song was written in Anglo-Norman, while Marie's tales are written in an early form of French, notable according to the translator for its beautiful simplicity and its difficulty for being translated into literary English. (Hanning & Ferrante 25) Marie's language thus is colloquial, while The Song of Roland's is epic and national in its language and tone, as it fuses the language as well as the culture of the Angles and Saxons into a tale of Christian superiority.

The Song's climax revolves around a decisive battle in Spain, between Charlemagne and his Christian forces and the Saracens infidels. The Saracens outnumbered the French but Charlemagne emerged triumphant. The structure of the poem clearly shows this to be not a simply and accidental tale of military prowess, but a triumph of the values of the Christians over the pagans.

In contrast, The Lais of Marie de France revolve around mythological and religious tales that are significant thematically, in terms of what they say about Early French cultural values, rather than the historical personages they revolve around. Rather than a historical reality or tale known by all listeners and readers, the Lais evolve from the character development. Some of the most striking aspects about The Lais of Marie de France, even to a modern reader, are how these narrative works of poetry so intensely personal, in the ways that they revolve around the theme of courtly love. Yet these poetic expressions are nationalistic, albeit not the same way that The Song of Roland is.

This is because Marie's poems espouse a general doctrine common to the society in which Marie dwelt -- namely the ideal of the unreachable, untouchable love object (usually a female stand-in for the Virgin Mary) that a knight was forbidden to access because of his feudal and faithful connection to his lord. The cultural values of Christianity for Marie are assumed, rather than depicted in a difficult triumph as for the anonymous author of the song. However, given that Marie wrote from a society where Christianity was a comfortably accepted norm, rather than a relatively recent establishment over the 'infidel' forces, or the divided society of the Angles and the Saxons that had been uncomfortably fused, Marie as a poet perhaps had more comfort to express moral ambiguity in her roles.

Also, Marie's Lais take the form of twelve disconnected and relatively short stories vs. The lengthy and seamless but meandering Song of Roland. The nature of their disconnection also allows the author to experiment with how different stories, to varying degrees, function and express different aspects of romantic ideology and the triumph of personal over all odds. "Marie's mastery of plot, characterization, and diction, while the woman's point-of-view she brings to her material further distinguishes the Lais from the longer narratives of love and adventure." (1) In contrast, Roland shows the triumph of Christianity, and glorifies the willingness of the hero to sacrifice his personal life and physical life for a larger cause. While it is true that the fact that the heroine of Roland dies by her own desire, calling out that she does not wish to live without her beloved, the seeming resonance with this act and some of the heroines of Marie is only superficial. This act reaffirms the importance of the national and collective over the personal, while Marie's focus is always on how issues of religious and national significance affect the microcosm of the world of her specific characters, rather than setting their personal traumas on a larger side.

Unlike the romance that is only one facet of The Song of Roland, it is the character of the individuals in the stories of Marie that are always the most important aspect of the tales. In the early Lais "Guiegemar," when a knight carelessly kills a hind, "Then she spoke, in this fashion:/"Alas! I'm dying! / And you vassal, who wounded me, this be your destiny: may you never get medicine for your wound! Neither herb nor root neither physical nor potion, / will cure you / of that wound in your thigh, until a woman heals you..." (33) The knight's excellence in valor is less important than his emotional and character development -- what he does as a military man is less significant than what he feels, things, and believes as a human being.

This grounding in the personal is reflected even in the structure of the poems themselves, which Marie introduces from an 'I' or first-person perspective as a poet. Again, this may be contrasted with The Song of Roland, which begins in its narrative with a collective cry: "The king our emperor." (Emphasis inserted) The poet of The Song of Roland takes on the voice of his people, rather than assuming the less ostentatious voice of an individual poet. Despite the fact that the author of The Song of Roland is unknown and is called 'anonymous' to history he takes upon the collective burden of narrating a national epic of religious and military formulation, in contrast to the Lais' self-consciously personal works of individual poetic expression, penned by a woman who is known by name and to history quite specifically as "Marie," and in the words of her own voice as a poet, in the words she self-consciously narrates in prologue form, in almost all of the tales. The Lais are short narratives revolving around emotional and personal experiences while the Song tells the tale of a forging of a national history and sense of identity.