SOURCE: “Narrative Interventions: The Key to the Jest of the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne” in Études de Philologie Romane et d’Histoire Littéraire, edited by Jean Marie D’Heur and Nicoletta Cherubini, Belgium, 1980, pp. 47-55.

In the following essay, Caulkins contends that properly interpreting the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne requires understanding the interventions of the narrator and recognizing the juxtaposition of the serious and the ludicrous.

Nothing makes the Middle Ages more lovable than its humor.

Ronald N. Walpole¹

The fundamental problem is to recognize signs wherever they are.

Roland Barthes²

Seldom in the history of medieval literary criticism has there been such a divergence of opinion over a fundamental interpretation of a work as brief as the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, which numbers less than nine hundred lines. Among the diverse categories in which it has been placed are those of “serious,” (Nyrop, etc.)³, “humorous,” (P...