Legends of Charlemagne

Summary

Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them. Bulfinch says in his preface that his sources were these poets, the Comte de Tressan's French romances, and certain German collections, and that some chapters are borrowed from Leigh Hunt's translations of the Italian poets. A historical introduction sketches the rise of Islam, the Arab conquest of Spain, Charles Martel's victory near Tours, and the real reign of Charlemagne, before describing how later centuries turned the emperor into the centre of a cycle of romance. The paladins are introduced: Orlando (Roland) with his sword Durindana, his cousin Rinaldo of Montalban with the horse Bayard, the English duke Astolpho, the enchanter Malagigi, Oliver, Namo, and the traitor Gan, or Ganelon, of the house of Maganza. The first chapters follow Boiardo. Angelica, a princess of Cathay, comes to Charlemagne's tournament with her brother and enchants every knight; Orlando and Rinaldo pursue her across the world, and Orlando fights the Tartar king Agrican at the siege of Albracca. The long central section follows Ariosto's Orlando Furioso: the Saracen king Agramant invades France and besieges Paris; the warrior maiden Bradamante loves the Saracen knight Rogero, held back by the enchanter Atlantes and the enchantress Alcina; Astolpho is turned into a myrtle and freed; Angelica, rescued from the sea-monster called the Orc, falls in love with the wounded young soldier Medoro and marries him. When Orlando reads their names carved in the trees, he goes mad, tears up the forest and roams naked through France. Astolpho rides the hippogriff to Abyssinia and is carried by St. John to the moon, where all things lost on earth are kept, and brings back Orlando's wits in a sealed vial; Orlando inhales them and is restored. The war shifts to Africa, Rogero is baptized, and he finally marries Bradamante. The Battle of Roncesvalles follows Pulci: through Gan's treachery the rearguard is ambushed in the Pyrenees; Orlando sounds his horn too late, dies kneeling over the hilt of his sword, and Charlemagne mourns him and punishes Gan. The book closes with three French romances: Rinaldo's long feud with Charlemagne over the horse Bayard, and his death as a humble labourer on a church at Cologne; Huon of Bordeaux, sent to Babylon on an impossible errand and helped by Oberon, king of the fairies; and Ogier the Dane, carried to Avalon by Morgana and returning to France centuries later. A glossary of names closes the volume.

Top Lessons

• Orlando's wits on the moon

  Orlando, the strongest of the paladins, abandons his duty to chase Angelica and loses his reason when he learns she loves another. St. John tells Astolpho that the madness is a punishment, and on the moon Astolpho finds that men's good sense is kept in vials, many of them belonging to people thought wise. Ariosto's comic fable, as Bulfinch retells it, teaches how easily passion and vanity overthrow reason.

• Orlando's horn at Roncesvalles

  Orlando delays sounding his horn and the rearguard is destroyed before Charlemagne can return. At the end he asks Turpin for absolution and dies looking on the hilt of his sword as on a crucifix, and the emperor blesses his whole life. The chapter shows the cost of pride and treachery and the medieval ideal of a Christian knight's good death.

• Rinaldo, Bayard and the humble end

  Rinaldo, the proudest rebel among the paladins, gives up his beloved horse to win pardon for his brothers and later lays down all rank to work as an unknown labourer on a church at Cologne. Bulfinch's source treats his death at the hands of envious workmen as a holy end. The story teaches that greatness can be completed in humility.

• Old stories reused by new poets

  Bulfinch points out that the Siren of Ulysses becomes the Siren of Orlando and that Circe returns as Alcina, and he tells how Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto reshaped old French and Latin tales. Reading these romances teaches how literature is built from earlier literature, and why a reader of Spenser, Shakespeare or Milton needs to know them.

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Medical Lens

The madness of Orlando, retold from Ariosto, is one of the most influential literary portraits of love-madness in European literature, and Bulfinch keeps its sequence: the shock of discovery, sleepless wandering, three days and nights lying insensible, then violent frenzy, nakedness, prodigious strength, indiscriminate eating and forgetfulness of self. The cure is a fable rather than medicine: St. John explains the madness as a three-month punishment for deserting his duty, and Orlando's sense, kept as a volatile liquor in a vial on the moon, is restored by inhalation, after which he wakes as from a nightmare. Renaissance readers placed this beside the old idea of lovesickness as a disease; modern readings that label it as a particular diagnosis are interpretive. The book also has the plague near Cologne stayed by Rinaldo's prayers, the famine of the siege of Montalban, and the wounds and deaths of Roncesvalles.

• Orlando Mad

  Orlando reads Angelica and Medoro's names in the grotto, wanders all night, lies insensible three days and nights, then strips off his armour and rages through the countryside uprooting trees and attacking shepherds and flocks.

• Astolpho in Abyssinia

  St. John explains Orlando's madness as a punishment of fixed duration and leads Astolpho to the moon, where lost wits are kept as liquor in sealed, labelled vials.

• The War in Africa

  Orlando is seized, washed and bound; Astolpho stops his mouth so that he must breathe through his nose and holds the vial beneath his nostrils, and Orlando wakes as if from a terrible dream.

• Death of Rinaldo

  The besieged garrison of Montalban eats its horses; later a pestilence near Cologne is stayed by Rinaldo's prayers.

• The Battle of Roncesvalles

  Orlando, spent with toil and fever, rides to a fountain where his dying horse kneels and falls; he strikes the rock with Durindana, receives Turpin's absolution and dies, and Charlemagne grieves over the field of slain.