Song of Roland Warfare Quotes

Roland advocates total war instead of bargains with Marsile. The only way to respond to the deaths of the Frankish messengers is with violence towards Marsile and the whole city.

To Blancandrin, who is using all his cunning to get peace in Spain, Roland's infatuation with warfare is insane and dangerous. He can't understand the Franks' imperialism, their desire to conquer any country within reach. Ganelon also makes it sound like Roland's personal love of fighting is behind it all. The Franks fight for him because they love him.

Charlemagne is also a huge fan of fighting, but Ganelon believes that Roland is the engine propelling the Frankish war machine. If he died, Charlemagne might go on a war-free diet.

According to Roland's ideal of duty, warfare is central. If you're not willing to fight wicked pagans, even when the odds are totally against you, then you might as well unbuckle your sword and start robbing monasteries because you are no better than a villain.

Although Oliver fights with the best of them, he provides a powerful anti-war voice as well—at least, anti-stupid-war. As long as the odds are even, he's all for massacring pagans. But when 100,000 Spanish knights are just rounding the bend, his reasoning takes him to the logical conclusion: don't fight without help. Roland, on the other hand, is even more excited to fight when he's the underdog.

Does this passage seem familiar? Maybe because you've read a variation of it about a hundred times. This is the poet's classic formula for fighting scenes: the knight rides up on a horse, cleaves his enemy down the center of his body, splits the saddle and the spine of the horse, and then tosses him dead to the ground. Even small touches like the description of fancy armor or the fact that Frankish knights never need to cut horse spines through a joint but can just sever them at random are repeated all the time.

Also, notice how juicy with action this is, using simple sentences with lots of violent active verbs like "he bares," "he spurs," "he smashes," "he hacks," and "he throws." Our attention never wavers from Roland's powerful hand wielding his powerful sword.

If only he'd been alive to protest in the 60's. Oliver gives the best anti-war argument of anyone in the poem. Of course, in a poem this saturated in pagan blood, that's pretty faint praise, but still, Oliver seems to be the only guy articulating an actual reason for not fighting sometimes. Maybe not all war is a good idea. Maybe instead of recklessly allowing 20,000 Franks to perish at the hands of 100,000 Turks, we should have used some common sense—and the oliphant.

Is anyone else uncomfortable when Roland starts talking to his sword like it's his teddy bear? A lot of knights in the Song of Roland fetishize their swords, seeing them as the symbols of their manhood and knightliness and Christian faith. In this sense, the sword both embodies the glorification of war and also humanizes it. Oh, hey there wicked pagan, this isn't a sharpened metal blade cleaving your skull, it's just my best friend Durendal!

Contrast this battle with the battle of Roncevaux: Roland's rearguard was taken by surprise and cut off from the rest of the army in a treacherous mountain pass. Now the war is out in the open with nothing to hide or hinder anyone. This is a more evenly matched conflict: good faces off with evil, no treachery involved.

For a man who loves war Charlemagne is oddly upset when Gabriel commands him to do more. Could Ganelon be right when he says that Roland is the only reason the Franks keep fighting? Or is this the tantrum of an old man who just wants to get a good night's rest?