The Song of Roland is the earliest and most influential epic of medieval France, and one of the foundational works of the European heroic tradition. Composed in the late eleventh century, it records not history as such but the moral and imaginative world of early chivalric epic, where loyalty, honour, and catastrophic fidelity stand at the centre of human action.
This volume presents C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1919 English translation, notable for its disciplined attempt to reproduce the poem’s original metre and assonance, together with the Old French text of the Oxford manuscript in facing-page format. The edition is supported by a full scholarly apparatus, including maps, a glossary of names and places, and a comprehensive bibliography.
A new foreword by R. C. Harding situates The Song of Roland within the broader continuum of heroic epic, from Homeric poetry to the Germanic and the later Christian traditions, clarifying the poem’s distinctive ethical logic and literary significance.
