SOURCE: “The Charlemagne Romances” in The Romance Cycle of Charlemagne and His Peers, David Nutt, 1905, pp. 5-45.

In the following essay Weston describes how the Arthur and Charlemagne cycles differ in their characteristics and asserts that the Charlemagne stories, while superior in content, are stylistically inferior to those about Arthur.

“Ne sont que trois matières à nul home entendant De France, de Bretagne, et de Rome le grant.” 

The Middle Ages were, as we know, the ages of Romance; Romance embodied in Prose—pseudo-historic chronicles, pseudo-biographical accounts of noted heroes; in Poetry—short lais, longer poems (metrical romances as we call them), some independent, the greater number falling into groups round some one central figure, and in their entirety forming what we call cycles of Romance. To the mind of a writer of the twelfth century, whose words are quoted above (Jean Bodel, author of La Chanson des...