SOURCE: Benton, John F. “‘Nostre Franceis n'unt talent de füir’: The Song of Roland and the Enculturation of a Warrior Class.” Olifant 6, nos. 3 and 4 (Spring and Summer 1979): 237-58.

In the following essay, Benton examines how the treatment of war in The Song of Roland inspired soldiers in the twelfth and twentieth centuries.

During the German siege of Paris in December 1870, a learned and patriotic medievalist, Gaston Paris, delivered a set of lectures at the Collège de France on La Chanson de Roland et la nationalité française.¹ It would now be timely for a specialist in contemporary history and literature to prepare another study on the Song of Roland and modern nationalism, particularly in the period of World War I. Influential historians have blamed the newspapers and the popular press for inflaming public opinion on the eve of the Great War.² That “yellow journalism” helped to...