I Have to Keep Reminding Myself that They're Monsters

While l0oking over some of the medievalist blogs linked to this one, I came across a classroom anecdote relevant to this course, and particularly relevant, I think, to The Song of Roland. Briefly, in a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a student remarked about the Green Knight, "I have to keep reminding myself he's a monster," which (apparently) prompted further discussion off of the question, "What happens when something occupies the place where a monster should go but isn't in fact that monstrous?"

I think this connects to Roland insofar as in this text, the "Paynims" occupy the place where a monster should go but aren't, to some extent, that "monstrous," that is, that unfamiliar and profoundly differentiated. I, for one, often had to remind myself that they are meant to be effectively monsters; what is more, the poet also has to periodically remind himself of this fact.

Another way of possibly getting at this is via Beowulf (sorry to be continually getting ahead of our reading list in this post...). In that poem, Beowulf, and the Geats and Danes generally, confront two classes of enemies: supernatural opponents like Grendel, his mother, and the dragon, who are very definitely monstrous and almost otherworldly, and merely human opponents, rival tribes like the Swedes or the Heathobards, who part of the same culture and society.

Roland telescopes these two classes of "other" into one. Obviously, the Saracens take on a monstrous role: they are the postulated enemies of God, diametrically opposed to the Christian French in that sense. The poet attributes to them an extravagantly demonic religion that periodically acquires associations of Satanism and dark sorcery. Some of their champions get explicitly labeled as evil, followers of sin and vice as an apparent moral imperative: "Then first rides out a Saracen, Abisme..../ Better he loves murder and treachery / Than all the gold that is in Galicie" (108). From time to time, something like a racial differentiation appears; Abisme is "black...as melted pitch," and the "accursed tribesmen" from "Ethiope, a land accursed and vile" who swarm up against the last French survivors are likewise "Negro tribes," "black as ink from head to foot" (125). In such instances, the poem marks its oppositional figures as a different order of humanity, if not almost entirely inhuman.

And yet, while being in certain instances so profoundly "othered," the Paynims simultaneously participate in the same social context as the French. If in some ways they are more weird and demonic than real 11th-century Muslims would have been, in other ways they are far closer to the French and have more in common with them. They share the same feudal codes and institutions, the same tactics, weaponry, and conventions of battle, and many of the same standards of behavior. For every near-monstrous Saracen peer, there is at least another who is "a good knight and gallant" (114). More than once, the poet has to near-audibly stifle his explicit admiration and avowal of kinship with these Paynim foes and remind himself that they are "monsters": "Were he but Christian, right knightly he'd appear" (87), or, as the poet says of Baligant, Charlemagne's double as the leader and exemplar of the entire Saracen world, "Were he but Christian, God! what a warrior" (172).

I think it's safe to say, then, that this dynamic of mingled "othering" and commonality with the "Paynims" problematizes Roland considerably, or (a better way to put it) makes it a lot more interesting. In reading about the Crusades, for example, I have come across the idea that the Franks persistently made Islam out to be such a bizarre, polytheistic demonic mishmash (even after they had been living in the Middle East for some time and could no longer plead ignorance in the way that the poet of Roland presumably could) in order to outwardly project their own awareness of some of the polytheistic aspects of Christianity as they practiced it- the Trinity, the cult of the saints, and so forth. (On that note, it's interesting, as Dorothy Sayers points out in her introduction, that Roland depicts a rather austere Christianity in which the saints or the Virgin are relatively downplayed and characters, even layman like Roland, speak to God directly, without mediation or intercession.) We "other" or project outwards aspects of ourselves with which we are uneasy or cannot come to terms. The question I want to ask, then, is whether (in what ways, or in what degree) the Paynims in Roland act as a mirror to 11th-century French society , embodying both the aspects of that society that its members wished to celebrate and those that they wanted to deny or obscure?