The later date argument rests on the obvious theological drama of the poem. Some favor an early date around the 1030s-1040s while others prefer a later date around the year 1100. The date of the poem’s composition is still debated. The battle of which the poem sings is loosely based on the Battle of Roncevaux Pass where Basque troops ambushed the rearguard of Charlemagne’s forces and annihilated it. Having an alliance with the Baghdad caliphs, Charlemagne, with invitation from pro-Abbasid emirs in northern Spain, invaded the Pyrenees and began a long campaign against the Umayyads. Charlemagne, not yet the emperor of Christendom (though stated to be emperor in the poem), had forged an alliance with the Abbasid Caliphate to afford him a campaign against the breakaway caliphate power in Iberia: the Umayyad Caliphate now centered in Cordoba. The historical situatedness of the poem is the late eighth century in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Tours and the Frankish defeat of Islamic forces that had conquered the Iberian Peninsula and invaded southern France. Though the poem’s author remains anonymous, the poet sets the tale in a historical context (though he certainly aggrandizes aspects of history as all great poets do). The poem manages to combine the Frankish virtues and values of honor, heroism, and fealty with the Christian theology of love, truth, and wisdom in a dazzling tale that truly represents the birth of the literary genus of medieval Christendom: that mixture of the heroic tradition of Frankish-Saxon tribalism and of the theological virtues of Christianity, which eventually culminated in Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered in the sixteenth century.
It is the most well-known chanson de geste (song of heroic deeds) and is an exhilarating and remarkable synthesis of the Frankish heroic and tribal tradition and Christianity. The Song of Roland is a stirring of French medieval poem and classic of medieval literature. The struggle that dominates the core of the poem, the battle between King Marsile and Roland, is not just a battle between Christianity and paganism-it is a battle for the soul of fealty and everything that medieval France would have held so dearly. “The Song of Roland” communicates the values of fealty to lord and land that are combined with duty, heroism, and trustworthiness.
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