Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Qupperneq 251

237
But they are overtaken by Ogier and have to leave the bodies on the
battlefield (P laisses 219-22, inserted between the O verses 3382 and
3383; T laisses 195-98, and also in the fragments lorrains). This addition
is obviously meant to explain why Charlemagne did not find Roland at
once when he returned to Roncevaux. In CV7 and L, which have omitted
the first Roncevaux scene, there was no need for this addition.
That Oliver is discovered by his otherwise unknown uncle in this
second Roncevaux scene, is partly due to the faet that his body too had
been taken away by the pagans, and partly to the predilection for the
secondary characters shown by the rimeur™. In all these cases the saga
probably has the episode in a more original form.
Naimes plays a very prominent part in this part of the saga, mueh more
prominent than in the earlier chapters. To a certain extent the same is
true of the version rimée, but it is nevertheless Charles himself, not
Naimes, who decides to pray for a miracle. There was scarcely any need
for the rimeur to make changes in this respect, so presumably the remanieur
who produced the immediate source of Kms has wanted to stress the im-
portance of Naimes69. But on the whole I believe that Kms is here, as in
most other cases, a fairly good, if mueh abridged, representative of the
variant version of the Chanson de Roland used by the jongleur who wrote
the MS that was the common source of V4 and the version rimée. I also
think that many of the differences between Kms and the other versions in
this part of the story can be satisfactorily explained.
M. Horrent has pointed out that the original version rimée had two
accounts of the burial of the Christian warriors, one in the original O
passage, and one in the second Roncevaux scene70. There is no need for
the second burial, and this particular trait is not explained by the addi-
tion in P and T mentioned above. The rimeur may have felt that a
fuller treatment of this episode was desirable, but the normal procedure
would then be to add laisses to the original O episode, or, more drastically
to move the whole episode and rewrite it. The adoubement scene (O vv.
1110-51) is a good example of how an episode has been expanded; here
08 Horrent: La Chanson de Roland etc. pp. 350, 355-56 (Démocratisation de la
geste).
" On the inereasing importance of Naimes in the later chansons de geste, vide
G. Moldenhauer: Herzog Naimes im altfranzosischen Epos (Diss. Halle, 1922),
e.g. p. 15.
™ La Chanson de Roland etc., pp. 185-86.