God the Father, as feudal seigneur, absorbs the Trinity, and, what is more significant, absorbs or excludes also the Virgin, who is not mentioned in the prayer.  To this seigneur, Roland in dying, proffered (puroffrit) his right-hand gauntlet.  Death was an act of homage.  God sent down his Archangel Gabriel as his representative to accept the homage and receive the glove.  To Duke William and his barons nothing could seem more natural and correct.  God was not farther away than Charlemagne.

Correct as the law may have been, the religion even at that time must have seemed to the monks to need professional advice.  Roland’s life was not exemplary.  The “Chanson” had taken pains to show that the disaster at Roncesvalles was due to Roland’s headstrong folly and temper.  In dying, Roland had not once thought of these faults, or repented of his worldly ambitions, or mentioned the name of Alda, his betrothed.  He had clung to the memory of his wars and conquests, his lineage, his earthly seigneur Charlemagne, and of “douce France.”  He had forgotten to give so much as an allusion to Christ.  The poet regarded all these matters as the affair of the Church; all the warrior cared for was courage, loyalty, and prowess.

The interest of these details lies not in the scholarship or the historical truth or even the local colour, so much as in the art.  The naivete of the thought is repeated by the simplicity of the verse.  Word and thought are equally monosyllabic.  Nothing ever matched it.  The words bubble like a stream in the woods:—­

Co sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus.

Try and put them into modern French, and see what will happen:—­

Que jo ai fait des l’ure que nez fui.

The words may remain exactly the same, but the poetry will have gone out of them.  Five hundred years later, even the English critics had so far lost their sense for military poetry that they professed to be shocked by Milton’s monosyllables:—­

Whereat he inly raged, and, as they talked,
 Smote him into the midriff with a stone
 That beat out life.

Milton’s language was indeed more or less archaic and Biblical; it was a Puritan affectation; but the “Chanson” in the refectory actually reflected, repeated, echoed, the piers and arches of the Abbey Church just rising above.  The verse is built up.  The qualities of the architecture reproduce themselves in the song:  the same directness, simplicity, absence of self-consciousness; the same intensity of purpose; even the same material; the prayer is granite:—­

Guaris de mei l’anme de tuz perils Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie fisi

The action of dying is felt, like the dropping of a keystone into the vault, and if the Romanesque arches in the church, which are within hearing, could speak, they would describe what they are doing in the precise words of the poem:—­

Desur sun braz teneit Ie chief enclin Juintes ses mains est alez a sa fin.