Chansons de Geste

Chansons de Geste (French, “songs of great deeds”), a body of about 80 mostly anonymous French epic poems, on average 8,000 - 10,000 lines long. The chansons are mixtures of legend overlying a core of historical truth but their origin is much debated. Some scholars believe that they were preceded by epic chants, then influenced by Germanic tradition and folklore; other academics believe that the chansons are purely the imaginative inventions of trouvères and jongleurs, based on stories told by monks to pilgrims visiting the shrines of former heroes. They survive in manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 15th century and were the predecessors of the verse romances of Chrétien de Troyes.

The epics deal primarily with heroic events during the reign of Charlemagne and his successors. Strife among noblemen, the alliance between Guillaume d'Orange and Charlemagne's son Louis I (Louis the Pious), and the struggles against the invading Moors are popular subjects. The overriding theme of the earlier epics is that of chivalry; the courtly love tradition was eventually integrated into the later chansons.

The chansons, which were composed by the trouvères to be chanted to musical accompaniment, existed in various versions which were grouped into cycles or gestes. The first cycle is the Geste du roi which includes the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100), attributed to the Norman poet Turold, and the most popular of the epics. It recounts the Battle of Roncesvalles in 778 and the heroic feats of Roland, a knight of Charlemagne's court. Roland's death in an heroic defence of a mountain pass makes him something of a Christian martyr. The second cycle is the Geste de Guillaume, and the third is that of Doon de Mayence. This literary form greatly influenced Spanish heroic poetry as well as Italian and German Renaissance epics.