The Song of Roland | Style

The Song of Roland Style

The Song of Roland comes to the present in many varied hand-copied manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Each manuscript alters the story slightly and uses a somewhat different literary technique or style. Most modern editions of the epic are taken from the manuscript called Digby 23, housed in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

Poetic Form and Rhyme

The Song of Roland is written in poetic form. The verse paragraphs are called laisses, and they are of varying length. The rhyming scheme is assonance, meaning that only the final stressed vowels are identical. Most lines have 10 syllables, with a break, or caesura, after the fourth syllable.

Language

The author of the Digby 23 manuscript penned this epic in Anglo-Norman. This was a form of French spoken in the region that is now England about 100 years after the Norman invasion of 1066. The story existed in oral form long before this, and...
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