The Song Of Roland was very important. It was to urge the people of Islam to not start another crusade, and to not go and fight Christians. They were trying to tell Muslims to stop fighting the the Christians. This was a poem of peace and offering to the people of Islam to stop fighting and killing. It became extremely popular among the middle ages, and many people grew to love it. It was exciting to them. Almost like a movie. However, the Song itself is quite sad. The poem discusses war and the brutality’s of it. It showed people what the fighting was really like. While most of it was exaggerated it showed the brutality of war and religious fighting. The Poem itself is about Roland and Oliver. Two generals under Charlemagne’s army.
As said before, it is based off of the Fighting of Roland and Oliver. One fought for honor and religion, the other fought to win. These two have been discussed before here on the blog. While much of the poem was fanatics, it was based on the real events of these two. The reason the poem grew so popular was because it was filled with action, betrayal, and sadness. Everything that they said in it roughly followed some chain of events during the crusades. There are many discrepancies throughout much of the poem that people didn’t pick up on. Circling back to the question, “Do you think the typical listener to a recitation of this poem would have spotted the discrepancies?” I do not think so. During that time so many people were barley literate, I don’t many people understood much of what was going on in the poem. additionally, the writers style was confusing to many, so it would have been close to impossible to pick up all the hiccups.
While in today’s world, a modern reader can read it over and over and over again, and pickup all the problems. It is always there for us to find and read and look at. People in the middle ages did not have this chance. Reading a poem to yourself could be extremely useful. Not only can you read it at a comfortable speed, you can also very easily back track. As many times as you want. No one is telling you what to do. Modern reading is different from classical reciting, that we easily pick up on dicrepices, it would take years of listening to try to pick them up.
As stated previously, the Song of Roland is a powerful Poem that shows what war is really about. It was also written to be apeace letter to the Islamic faith. The poem gained massive popularity and grew all through the middle ages. For people back then, they had to listen to someone talk the poem out. While that way is fine, it would be hard to discover all the dicrepencies throughout te whole poem. A modern reader today might be able to fish out a few problems, listening to it, it would be hard to do so.
JBSchool 