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Aymeri de Narbonne is a legendary hero of Old French chansons de geste and the Matter of France. In the legendary material, as elaborated and expanded in various medieval texts, Aymeri is a knight in the time of Charlemagne's wars with the Saracens after the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. He is son of Hernaut and the grandson of Garin de Monglane. He conquers the city of Narbonne, marries a princess named Hermengarde or Hermenjart, and fathers seven sons, the most famous being Guillaume d'Orange, the hero of several popular chansons de geste.
Prise d'Orange is a mid-12th century chanson de geste written in Old French. Its fictional story follows the hero Guillaume as he captures the walled city of Orange from Saracens and marries Orable, its queen. Other characters include Arragon, the king of Orange, and Tibaut, Orable's erstwhile husband and Arragon's father. The anonymously written poem, part of a larger cycle about Guillaume called La Geste de Garin de Monglane, consists of 1,888 decasyllable verses in laisses. It combines motifs of courtly love with an epic story of military conquest. The narrative is humorous and parodies the tropes of epic poetry.
The Four Sons of Aymon, sometimes also referred to as Renaud de Montauban is a medieval tale spun around the four sons of Duke Aymon: the knight Renaud de Montauban, his brothers Guichard, Allard and Richardet, their magical horse Bayard, their adventures and revolt against the emperor Charlemagne. The story had a European success and echoes of the story are still found today in certain folklore traditions.
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Huon d'Auvergne is an early modern romance-epic written in Franco-Italian, a hybrid literary language. Huon d'Auvergne has remained largely unedited, with only selected segments appearing in print. Far better known is the Tuscan prose version by Andrea da Barberino, dated to the early fifteenth century. One of the first, if not the first, work to incorporate Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy with direct quotes from Hell, the romance-epic's language has kept it from wide appreciation. The poetic form, language, and narrative content of the four extant witnesses demonstrate how a synoptic, or simultaneous, online edition of the multiple manuscripts can fulfill the need for reliable texts as well as research about the tradition and trajectory of its exemplars. An edition project is underway as of January 2013.
The Geste du roi is the title of one of the literary cycles that compose the Chansons de Geste. In the Chansons of the Geste du roi, the chief character is usually Charlemagne or one of his immediate successors. A pervasive theme is the King's role as champion of Christianity. This cycle contains the first of the chansons to be written down, the Chanson de Roland or The Song of Roland.
References
- ↑ Les Prouesses et Faicts du Trespreux Noble et Vaillant Huon de Bordeaux, pair de France, et duc de Guyenne (in French). B. Rigaud (Lyon). 1587.
- ↑ Bourchier, Lord Berners, John (1887). Lee, S.L. (ed.). The Book of Huon de Bordeaux (PDF) (Critical ed.). Early English Text Society.
- ↑ Raby, ix-xvii.
- ↑ "Auberon". www.chanson-de-geste.com. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
- ↑ Raby, xviii.
- ↑ Raby, xx-xxi.
- ↑ Raby, xxi-xxii.
- ↑ Raby, xxiv.
- ↑ Lewis, p. 152
- ↑ Julien Bellarbre, "La « nation » aquitaine dans l’historiographie monastique du sud de la Loire (VIIIe–XIIe siècles)", Revue de l'IFHA, 6 (2014), retrieved 21 May 2018.
