SOURCE: Vance, Eugene. “Formulaic Language and Heroic Warfare.” In Reading the “Song of Roland,” pp. 21-38. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970.

In the following excerpt, Vance explains how the author of The Song of Roland uses traditional verbal formulas while managing to convey contradictions and abstractions in the poem.

The manuscript of the Oxford version of the Song of Roland was produced by an Anglo-Norman scribe sometime during the third quarter of the twelfth century. Its language is basically the dialect spoken in England a century after the Norman conquest (1066);¹ but the actual poem on which the Oxford manuscript is based predates this manuscript by at least a half century, and we cannot be certain whether the poet lived in England or on the continent.

A reader who has even a scant knowledge of French will recognize after brief exposure to the Song of Roland that its poetic...