What's a Roland?
He's not a what, he's a who.
Roland is a semi-fictional character that has been with us for over a thousand years. The “semi” in there is hanging by a thread: the only documentary mention of a Roland is a passing one in historian Einhard's Vita Karoli Magni (Life of Charlemagne). Einhard describes an ambush upon Charlemagne's men by the Basques, in the Pyrenees, in 778. This was a devastating loss for the Franks; many people died. Among them was a count Hruodlandus, captain of the Breton March.
Dealing with devastating losses, whether a millennium ago or now, prompts art. About Roland's entrance into the French epic lore, we know two things. One: the storytelling culture of Europe was largely oral during the centuries following Charlemagne's reign. Two: we have several extant manuscripts of the Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) dating from somewhere between 1095 and 1099, in which an ambush upon Charlemagne's rearguard in the Pyrenees is described. (Granted, some key details are changed — for example, the attackers are no longer the Basques but the treacherous “Pagans”. This is unsurprising, given that Charlemagne's principal claim to fame is spreading Christianity throughout most of Europe and being crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor by the pope.)
So, even though some three hundred years passed between Hruodlandus' death and the earliest Song of Roland manuscript we have, it is clear that the epic poem was kept alive in the interim by way of oral storytelling.
As I've said in just about every paper I've given on Roland, he has not left us since. The character has been appropriated by most European cultures, and has even made his way into North America. Stories, rock songs, comics, films, operettas and all manner of visual arts (sculptures, stone carvings, paintings, drawings) about him have been more or less continuously created in different parts of the West for the last thousand years or so.
For more information on Roland's provenance and dispersal, please see the archive of critical essays from my Master's thesis, below.
In addition, there are a few posts in the “rolantht” category on my blog.
Dissertation abstract
A substantial body of work was inspired by, and spun off from, the Roland legend which originated in France sometime between the eighth and the eleventh centuries. These works span many genres and forms—theatre, live and puppet; poetry; prose (novels); children's literature; cinema; sculpture; painting; drawing; music; comics; hypermedia. They form a corpus, which has to date not been studied as a whole. This dissertation defines the Roland corpus and electronically traces the themes, motifs and imagery common to its constituent works. The result is a semantically-encoded hypertext written in XML and ported to HTML. In it, passages drawn from corpus objects are interlinked and navigable through a Web browser. The semantic encoding allows for indexing, semantic searching, and the creation of visualization tools for the corpus.
RolandHT is aimed at an audience of Roland scholars, medievalists, students of literary corpora, and computing humanists. Once defined, the corpus will be opened for discussion by the scholarly communities as a whole; its electronic form foresees easy dissemination and inclusionary participation by interested parties.
Interface: The next generation
I've recently (late January 2007) put up the latest version of RolandHT. This is a collaboration with Ethan Fremen, which began in 2004. It can only be viewed with (freely available) Firefox or another XSLT-aware browser — Nick Montfort reports that Opera works too. Using Mozilla's built-in XSLT engine made the design much easier; we figured, if we had to constrain you to a browser, a free, open-source one is as benign as it gets. If you know of other software with which the work can be viewed, please let me know both the browser and the operating system(s) on which you've used it.
The site definitely needs a help section, and some more intuitive navigation. For now, a few usage notes:
– The links up top don't do anything yet.
– Pick an excerpt from the list on the left. Mouseover themes/characters/imagery that show up over the sword, and see what happens. Then click on a theme or character or image, and see what happens now.
– Click on the red "reset" at top right to return to initial state.
– For three other nifty features, find the excerpt named "Missionary Work." Click on the "i" beside the name of the work; click on the quill in the second stanza; mouseover any underlined word.
– Check out also the excerpt, near the very bottom, titled "Battle Near Saragossa." Click on the image.
– If something seems aesthetically or functionally wrong, it would be lovely if you emailed me to let me know.
– This is a work in progress. If you see the word "check" where you expect information, I'm working on it.
What went before
The first iteration of the project, which became my Master's thesis, is archived here. Before you click on the link, beware: this one is only viewable using Internet Explorer 5.0+ on a machine running Windows. Your browser also needs to allow popups (there'll be only one, two if you click on the question mark which opens up a little help file).
I know, I know. Such narrow platform compatibility, and infuriatingly tethered to Windows at that. Why did I do this? Because it was a quick patch that fixed a slew of problems. Once the corpus I'm working with is completely assembled and encoded (working on that now), I'll be using the next-generation interface outlined above. Since the new interface is a wholly different design, redesigning the old version is impractical.
Master's thesis archive of critical essays
Because the above is not universally accessible, I have archived here re-formatted versions of the critical portion of the thesis. The remainder is wholly incorporated into the the new RHT interface discussed above.