Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 265
251
Gealwer, de sa victoire finale.” But when he prefers the end of the poem
as it is in the saga89 to that of O, I cannot share his opinion. O is entirely
satisfactory; Charlemagne must continually fight against the enemies of
God, and when the angel comes to him and commands him to go to the
rescue of the Christians in another part of the world, he must obey, but
it is natural that after the grievous losses he has just suffered, he exclaims
Si penuse est ma vie! This can scarcely mean that he does not, in the end,
obey, as M. Aebischer seems to imply; it is rather, as M. Horrent puts
it, that “l’énigmatique laisse finale n’est ni l’annonce ni l’évocation d’une
aventure future de Charlemagne-------, c’est une maniére concréte de mani-
fester son découragement present, sa lassitude désespérée-”90. M. Aebi-
scher thinks that a short sketch of the batties the emperor will have to
fight would be natural in this connection, but the proof of the pudding is
in the eating, and the Ywan episode of D is a very poor and unimaginative
tale, which is probably due to the same pedantic and prosaic jongleur who
changed the description of Ganelon’s trial. He used the information given
in the last laisse of O, and concocted a story where the only new detail is
that the pagan king who is besieging Vivien in Bire is given a name,
Gealwer, an otherwise completely unknown person. The emperor is of
course victorious, and Ogier is his principal general now that Roland is
dead, but these are facts that even the least imaginative of scribes might
invent, or rather infer from the last verses of O. If this last episode was
known to the author of the version rimée, he at least had the good sense
to omit it, but it is even possible that this addition belongs to a later stage
in the development of the Kms version, i.e. to a MS somewhere between
the variant version known to the author of the later French poem (<* *)
and the MS used by the translator of the saga.
88 “Et c’est lå aprés tout une idée plus belle, plus grande---que celle d’un em-
pereur anéanti par la douleur, pleurant et “recreant”.” Rol. Bor. pp. 249-50. M.
Aebischer is thinking of the Ywan and the “Bollewin” episodes, but the argument
would presumably be the same in the case of the Ywan episode alone.
*0 La Chanson de Roland etc., p. 205.