The Song of Roland is an 11th-century French epic depicting the events of the battle of Roncevaux, fought in the 8th century, and featuring the defeat of the French rearguard commanded by Roland at the hands of Basques. The song was written much later, inspired by oral stories and legends, and in turn, served as an inspiration to many other works of literary art. The most famous one of them is the Italian Orlando Furioso, which is considered to be one of the longest poems (Cook, 2018). Unlike The Song of Roland, however, it features a much greater scope of events along with a wide presence of magical events and creatures (Cook, 2018). It is also much more drawn out compared to the original piece.
The Song of Roland, unlike many similar tales of heroic sacrifice, does not end with the hero’s death. The story continues, talking about the capturing of Saragossa, the trial of the traitor Ganelon, and the conversion of the wife of Marcile, king of Saracens, into Christianity (Cook, 2018). This crosses the line between an epic retelling of factual events into fiction. Charlemagne never returned to Spain after his defeat at Roncevaux, and Saragossa remained the unconquered capital of the Spanish Emirate until well into the 11th century.
It appears that the Song of Roland exists in a single manuscript currently being kept at Oxford library, dated between 1130 and 1165 (Sunderland, 2013). This manuscript is said to be a copy of the original, with the original having been written by a poet named Turold, who wrote it sometime before the 1100s (Sunderland, 2013). The piece was written in Anglo-Norman, which is considered a dialect of Old French. The most known English translation is that created by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and published in 1921 (Sunderland, 2013). His translation was based on the Oxford copy of the Song and remains one of the most popular versions to date. It is uncertain how much different the translation is from the original, but the consensus is that Moncrieff simplified the storyline a bit and focused more on the battle of Roncevaux.
References
Cook, R. F. (2019). The sense of the Song of Roland. Cornell University Press.
Sunderland, L. (2013). The song of Roland: Translations of the versions in assonance and rhyme of the chanson de Roland. Medium Aevum, 82(2), 372-373.