Book Journal WR: Song of Roland

My days of no-touch-manuscript are filled with mini writing exercises and a crap ton of "research readings," if you will. Most of this writing research--hence the WR in the title--is me continuing my career of being a dilettante, trying to pinpoint names, places, connections, inspirations, and overall thematics for the many, many worlds I've got to become familiar with. And a crap ton of chicken scrawls in margins of a ton of looseleaf papers I only marginally have a grasp on.

Anyway I read The Song of Roland over my Seabrook vacation. I'd never read it in high school and took to it pretty easily. I had some Penguin version (I think, and I misplaced my copy of it while I was cleaning so I can't confirm, especially now that I don't think it was actually a Penguin version at all) and the translation was pretty good. It's sort of the same as most medieval and pre-medieval epic poems--a lot of battles, a lot of cool men doing brave things, and a lot of sludge you have to sift through to get to the action.

Song of Roland by French Folklore

I'm a fan of these epic old poems and I've read most of them, even if I can't remember exactly what happens in each of them, and most of my memory is extracurricular fantasy (i.e. Beowulf, Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, et. al.). Song of Roland will likely fall into that category eventually but for me, it isn't the details about those stories that are worthwhile. It's really easy to get swept into them because you have to instantly become an audience for those poems--that is, when you read them, you are suddenly an individual of that time--in this case, a young French woman during Charlemagne's rule. And you have to think of context: the Crusades (or the precursor to them) against the Saracens, the good ol' swords that are all-powerful, and the single-minded bravery (or jealously) that is deemed so powerful a motivation. In a modern era of literature that is very introspective, very character-driven and oftentimes very dark, it can be very refreshing to harken back to the hero's journey in one of its earlier forms, and recognize how much we all love to experience that journey with those characters. Look at what are the most popular books, movies, and video games, and tell me they all aren't, ultimately, a quintessential "hero's journey."

Update: it was a Penguin version.

8/10