“In truth and fact,” observes a recent anonymous writer, “the chain can claim one single real legend.  That one, however, is so great, so grand, so dominating,—­it is so immense, so universal, so world-wide,—­that it suffices all alone; it creates a doctrine by itself, it needs no aid, no support, no companions,—­it is the mighty tale of Roland.  The mountain is full of Roland.  His hands, his feet, his horse, his sword, his voice, have left their puissant mark on almost every crest, in almost every glen.  Above Gavarnie, amidst the eternal snow, gapes the slashed fissure hewn by Durandal, his sword; ten miles off in a gorge you see the indents of the hoofs of Bayard on a rock which served as his half-way touching-point when he sprang in two flying bounds from the Breach to the Peak of the Chevalier near St. Sauveur.  At the Pass of Roland, above Cambo, the rock remains split open where the hero stamped and claimed a passage.  The ponds of Vivier Lion, near Lourdes, were dug by the pressure of his foot and knee when Vaillantif, a charger which carried him in his last fight, but who was then unbroken, had the audacity to throw him.  At St. Savin, where the monks had lodged him, he paid his bill by slaying the irreverent giants, Passamont and Alabaster, whose neighborhood, was unpleasant to the convent.  And so on, all about.  His tremendous figure is everywhere, all full of the superbest violence and of the most wondrous acrobatry.  But it is at Roncesvalles that his great name is greatest.  There, where he died, his memory lives in an unfading halo.  In Spain, beneath the Peak of Altabiscar amongst the beech groves, on the 15th of August, 778, perished the astounding paladin.  The Song of Roland tells how he fell, not quite exactly but very amazingly; the story is so intensely interesting that the reader is carried away by it and finds himself for a moment almost able to believe it.  It does not matter that the defeat is attributed to the Saracens, not one of whom was present, (the whole thing having been got up and carried out by the Basques alone;) that error was indispensable to the tale, and gives it much of its strange charm.”

There is an excellent reason why the poem might fail in sharp historical accuracy; it was not formally composed until between three and four hundred years after the battle.  The event itself happened in 778; the first known MS. was made, by a scribe, about 1150.  All during the long interval, ballad-singers and minstrels had been extolling France and Roland; the love of the heroic was as strong as before Homer; the hero’s name had grown:  with his fame into titanic proportions; the actual author, (conjectured to have been one Turoldus or Theurolde, a monk,) had but to take the poetic material ready at his hand and fashion it into the epic.  Time had dimmed and enlarged the details; the Song of Roland deals in mass and massive heroes; in this it is like a book from the Iliad.

It is not a long poem; there are only about 3,500 lines in all, but the Old French in which it is written makes it difficult reading, at least to one not a Frenchman.  The briefest citation will show this: