Chansons de Geste

Chansons de Geste (French, “songs of great deeds”), a body of about 80 mostly anonymous French epic poems, each thousands of lines long. Of uncertain origin, the chansons are mixtures of legend overlying a core of historical truth. They survive in manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 15th century and were the basis for the more polished late medieval romances.

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 Chanson de Roland (circa 1100), attributed to the Norman poet Turold, is 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 a suicide-like defense of a mountain pass makes him something of a Christian martyr.