introduction to the Song of Roland

The Song of Roland (by which we mean the poem of the Oxford manuscript) is France's national epic. At 4,000 lines, it's much longer than any older French work.

Discovered by Francisque Michel in the Bodleian Library in 1835,  it contains the oldest known attestations of hundreds of words.

It is loosely based on the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.

Plot summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son...

The French Wikisource has a lot of media on this subject: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Cha...

Erratum: the Voyage de saint Brandan manuscript referred to is the British Library one, not Oxford Bodleian. Also, I think my pronunciation of 'Bodleian' is actually slightly wrong.