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The Song of Roland Paperback – Import, December 30, 1957

by Dorothy L. Sayers (Translator)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 244 ratings
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On 15 August 778, Charlemagne’s army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass. Out of this skirmish arose a stirring tale of war, which was recorded in the oldest extant epic poem in French. The Song of Roland, written by an unknown poet, tells of Charlemagne’s warrior nephew, Lord of the Breton Marches, who valiantly leads his men into battle against the Saracens, but dies in the massacre, defiant to the end. In majestic verses, the battle becomes a symbolic struggle between Christianity and paganism, while Roland’s last stand is the ultimate expression of honour and feudal values of twelfth-century France.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    208 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Penguin Classics
  4. Publication date
    December 30, 1957
  5. Dimensions
    5.07 x 0.57 x 7.74 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0140440755
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0140440751
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

The poem's vivid set pieces--the treason of Ganelon, the last stand of Roland at Roncesvals, Charlemagne's campaign of vengeance, and the final act of retribution--are justly famous.

About the Author

Glyn Burgess teaches at the University of Liverpool. He is an expert on early medieval French literature, and has translated and written widely on this area.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (December 30, 1957)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140440755
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140440751
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.07 x 0.57 x 7.74 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 244 ratings

About the author

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Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers

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Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) was a playwright, scholar, and acclaimed author of mysteries, best known for her books starring the gentleman sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey.

Born in Oxford, England, Sayers, whose father was a reverend, grew up in the Bluntisham rectory and won a scholarship to Oxford University where she studied modern languages and worked at the publishing house Blackwell's, which published her first book of poetry in 1916.

Years later, working as an advertising copywriter, Sayers began work on Whose Body?, a mystery novel featuring dapper detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Over the next two decades, Sayers published ten more Wimsey novels and several short stories, crafting a character whose complexity was unusual for the mystery novels of the time.

In 1936, Sayers brought Lord Peter Wimsey to the stage in a production of Busman's Honeymoon, a story which she would publish as a novel the following year. The play was so successful that she gave up mystery writing to focus on the stage, producing a series of religious works culminating in The Man Born to Be King (1941) a radio drama about the life of Jesus.

She also wrote theological essays and criticism during and after World War II, and in 1949 published the first volume of a translation of Dante's Divine Comedy (which she considered to be her best work).

Dorothy Sayers died of a heart attack in 1957.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
244 global ratings
This book isn't worth more than $3, NEW!
2 Stars
This book isn't worth more than $3, NEW!
The book I received was NOT the book pictured. It was used and worn. The front cover has fading (hard to see in pic). The inside was stamped to sell at $2.95...not the $9.99, I paid. The binding is creased.Highly contemplating to return this item simply bc I overpaid for an old used book that retailed for less than $3 new!
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Logan
5.0 out of 5 stars Proper Translation
Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2023
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This is a really good proper translation that includes the rhymes and rhyme schemes. Rhymes may be a bit confusing at times but a careful reader will understand them. Don’t buy any other translation. Would recommend a good German translation as well.
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Claude Lambert
5.0 out of 5 stars The pure pleasure of an epic story translated by the exquisite Dorothy Sayers
Reviewed in the United States on September 5, 2016
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Every country has a time for epic writings, with heroes, fair ladies, traitors and great deeds. The British one is King Arthur, the French one: the song of Roland, but there is also an Irish one, a German one, a Portuguese one, an Indian one, a Viking one...... and the first one of all: the Greek Iliad.
I am very fond of Roland because it is so vivid, and each person described has a standard role: the King is noble, the traitor is horrible, the fiancée is going to die from despair - on the spot.
I am sorry this has become "literature for the happy few" instead of being given to teenagers together with Tarzan and Batman. Here you find strength and poetry and charm; texts like this should enchant all the kids you know.
Now the truth is I did not buy this for Roland, that I have known and enjoyed in French for fifty some years. I bought it for Dorothy Sayers. She was an extremely well-educated woman from Oxford University. She got a degree in 1920 (before then, women could not earn a degree. She is the author of mystery books, notably the Peter Wimsey series, that I liked very much because it is the first time I have seen in literature a good description of PTSD after world war one. I like her translation of Roland: she understood the characters and their feelings quite well.
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Anand Joshua Venigalla
4.0 out of 5 stars An Admirable Poem
Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2019
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The Song of Roland is a work that I admired more than I loved, but which I liked for its epic seriousness, its relative tightness and focus, its intensely focused sharpness and clarity, and the mixture of heady and merry bloodshed with notes of darkness and sadness. It very much made me ask: “What makes an epic an epic?” It’s much more simple than The Iliad or the other great epic poems. It’s much less somber and more thoroughly “Christian” than the Old English epic Beowulf, and has had a greater chance to influence European literature than that Old English poem. Its hero Roland is one of the most charming, naive, amiable personages in all early European literature, and he is the foundation of the later Orlando of Italian poetry that appears in Dante, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Pulci. All of this influential power, in addition to its own intrinsic merits, make this the greatest heroic poem in medieval literature (though perhaps not the greatest medieval poem - that would go to Dante’s Commedia and to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales), rivaling Beowulf.

The Song of Roland is what the medieval French would call a chanson de geste, which is most literally a “song of deeds.” The poet/singer of the poem often refers to a “Geste” from which the story was derived, from which the poet selects. The chanson de geste was an artwork that was sung in high courts for the enjoyment of its audience, and two of the most famous chanson cycles focused around the great Charlemagne (Geste du roi) and around rebels (Geste de Doon de Mayence). This cycle, also known as the Matter of France, stood together with the Matter of Troy (the Trojan War and the Roman legends onward) and the Matter of Britain (much of it Arthurian), stood as one of the reservoirs of native European literature and story. In addition, there’s a rough song to it, partly due to the structure of the verses and the laisses. I do not know it very well since I do not read Old French, but perhaps Dorothy Sayers’ English pentameter gave a loose approximation of it.

The Song of Roland is the earliest and perhaps the greatest surviving of the chansons, and though it is strange for modern era due to its medieval setting, it is still worth reading at once both for a look at the origins of French literature, a sense of some of the early expression of the great Christian West and non-Christian East “clash,” and for a view of one of the most action-packed old poems. It has not the complexity I find in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Commedia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the Italian Renaissance epics of Tasso and Ariosto, or Milton’s Paradise Lost. All of these major epic poems, even the most difficult of them, will, I think, appeal more to the modern reader than The Song of Roland. But there is something of a vividness to The Song of Roland that I noted and admired. It is very clear,

The plot of The Song of Roland is rather simple: it centers first around the failure of Roland and his soldiers to survive, all because of treachery and conflict in the family, between Roland and his stepfather Ganelon; it then focuses on the great battle of Charlemagne’s revenge against the enemy and the trial, torture, and death of Ganelon; and then it closes with the somber sadness of our king as he is commanded to go on another fight.

What many readers might like to know is that though Roland is in the title of the poem, he dies in the first part of the poem, the second part of which is the bloody aftermath of the great slaughter of the first half. Yet even though he disappears, he makes a vivid impression on the reader and on the rest of the poem. Rash, naive, stubborn, he is also a merry spirit, a skilled warrior, and a heroic representative of Christendom. He’s given many of the most rousing speeches in the poem, and his presence reminds me somewhat of Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in the film Braveheart. Both Wallace and Roland are “simple,” larger-than-life epic heroes whose deaths and sacrifices give glory to their nations (Scotland and France respectively), though there is a youth to Roland that sets him apart from Gibson’s Wallace. Dorothy Sayers aptly sums up something of his essence: “the picture that remains most vividly with us is that of gay and unconquerable youth.” The aura around him, in contrast to the more grimly-set Beowulf, is that of sun and color, and that aura pervades much of this poem. Though Roland’s “rashness” is set against Oliver’s prudence, the “rashness” is shown in the end, I think, to have heroic value and to be the embodiment of faith and loyalty, the values praised in this poem. Though Roland’s “daring” ends up bringing the death of himself and his fellow men, it is also his daring that brings about the great war between West and East, in which the West achieves victory.

Some of that merriness around Roland the hero impacts the generally “sunny” tone of the very poem itself. The graphic violence is set in a setting of clear sky and sun, in contrast to the heavily nocturnal world of something like Beowulf. It reminds me a lot of Braveheart, where its great sequence, the Stirling Battle, takes place under a clear sky. I kept thinking of how The Song of Roland could be turned into a medieval-set epic film like Braveheart or Rob Roy, because the poem for me entertained such possibilities. A note of heady, serious joy mixes quite smoothly, in its own way, with graphic dismemberment, wounds, lacerations, and more. Roland’s shattered brow is at once somewhat improbable to us (for he keeps fighting after it) and yet fitting in the poem itself. It would take a filmmaker of some serious skill to capture some of this mood. It may be “other” to us due to its very simple distinction of good Christians and bad non-Christians (a dichotomy that is highly politically incorrect, to say the least). But perhaps that “otherness” gets some sense of value, in how it compels the reader to think of a different world with different assumptions, and to consider how that “other” poem has influenced the West today.

If The Song of Roland has any major flaw besides its simple lack of complexity (which is not necessarily an aesthetic flaw per se), it might be that, for all its talk of Christendom and for all its Christian cast and talk of Paradise, I see very very little of the spirit of the Gospels in it. There’s little of Jesus, or his good news, except insofar as “Christians are in the right” in this bloody war. At its worst, the nationalism of The Song of Roland, crucial in the national and religious milieu of this poem, can end up like a very crude nationalism in which Christianity has little meaning except where it can uphold a particular empire. The Song of Roland, for the critical reader today, is a way to meditate on a kind of Christian imperialism that has been predominant in medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian conceptions of empire as a civilizing, Christianizing force intended to bring the true religion to the non-white, the Muslim, the pagan, the “other.” In lieu of the dark side of empire, the “sunniness” of The Song of Roland has an unexplored sinister side to it, and this, perhaps even more than its literary form and style, might make it so alien to us moderns. Even that great pagan poem of empire, The Aeneid, has more thoughtfulness and nuance about the costs of empire, domination, and mass war.

Something of this poem reminds me of parts of the Old Testament, where there is in fact a fairly sharp distinction between Israelite and pagan, where holy war is for the most part commended and commanded, and where collective slaughter of tainted and polluted and offending populations is part of God's plan in history for the Israelites on their journey to take the land. The violent butchery of Ganelon and his family reminds me somewhat of the slaying of Achan and his family in Joshua 7. Just as Achan threatened the community of the Israelites through his violation of the sacred ban, so Ganelon's treachery threatens the whole Christian community, and thus his contagion must be put away.

Another possible wall between the reader and the poem could be the stronger presence of Beowulf, an Old English epic that has proved more congenial to us, partly because of similarities to Tolkien’s Middle-Earth sagas, the seriousness that pervades it, and the comparative popularization of its story. I will say that, in retrospect, Beowulf seems to appeal more to me as a modern reader than The Song of Roland, though I liked the French epic very much in the end. A preference for one or the other might be similar to whether one prefers the serious, heavily-built world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth sagas with its sense of brooding, or the more “merry” and “sun-lit” universe of C. S. Lewis’s “Narnia.” As an admirer of literary influence, clarity, and a certain sharpness, I admire The Song of Roland, but for immediacy Beowulf seems to work better for me. Ultimately, I prefer above all the great epics of Homer, Virgil, Spenser, Milton, and the other poets I listed.

The Song of Roland, like many great works, is not an easily "likable" poem, though Roland himself may be likable. It is very serious, it has not some of the heightened darkness of Beowulf, the profound historical and mythical brooding of the Aeneid, the indulgent variety of the Odyssey, the violent and fire-bright energy of the Iliad, or the fantastical diffuseness of The Faerie Queene, or the high serious fancy of Milton's Paradise Lost. It is highly committed to a binary of good Christian and bad pagan that seems simplistic to us and may have its darker side. It has a style that feels odd and alien to us and sometimes difficult to accept. But despite these "barriers" to appreciation, The Song of Roland has its serious virtues as an action-packed medieval poem that inaugurated French literature and sets its mind on heroism, glory, and a certain merriness and cheerfulness of attitude and mood.
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pokhalo
5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic story with an excellent introduction by the translator
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2018
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The translator's introduction in the beginning is rather long, but it is worth the read because of how many nuances are explained. The linguistics, culture, fact/fiction, translation differences, construction, spelling differences, and context are well detailed in the introduction and make the poem itself much easier to understand.
It's a fantastic read and an amazing epic story, but the reading level is rather high. I would recommend it as a challenging read for an advanced high school student, such as one in an AP class, or higher. It is helpful if the reader(s) read it aloud, as well, in order to catch the nuances (but you may want help on the French pronunciations).
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Reginald E. Deal
5.0 out of 5 stars The One and Only Roland
Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2010
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This is a truly outstanding book wriiten originally after more than 100 years had passed from action to minstrel song and story. The problem with superheros that are real is that they also tend to be soft, fragile, and vulnerable in certain situations. It is next to impossible to get one to seek help or to accept it when it is offered. In my opinion, Dorothy Sayer gave us a work or art and literature long after we have passed. It is a story about war and men and their relationships with fellow soldiers, subordinates and superior and how problems come to the fore and are worked out. This is a book for the ages. It is wonderful and will be wonderful for many years to come. Do not miss Ms Sayer's rendition and several others are also avaiable that are well worth reading and comparing.
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Shaun Schuyler
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and bloody
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2020
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What a read. The conflict of Roland and Charlamagne against their enemies is brutal and needlessly brought about by treachery. The battle sequences are graphic, with plenty of decapitations and disembowelmwnts. Both sides have brave and noble knights, but it's clear the who the author or poet favors. The translation is well done, in my layman's opinion, keeping a rhythmic tone throughout.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing by someone who was there or shortly after ...
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2016
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Excellent writing by someone who was there or shortly after the time. Somewhat difficult to read and understand but well worth the effort for one who loves English and French history.
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Top reviews from other countries

The Sentinel
5.0 out of 5 stars Song of Roland
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 13, 2018
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Second hand paperback edition was fine but a previous owner has left her name etc on the fly sheet (which I do myself !) and so cannot really be called “very good” condition. However otherwise it is absolutely fine.
My previous copy from the 60s of this translation has been purloined by a guest who will be “durendaled” when identified.
The saga is ridiculous and historical fantasy but enormous fun.
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Kamrul Alom
5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic short read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2021
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Fantastic book which will appeal to history/dramatized history fans! Short, sweet and sensational

The book is easy to read although some of the translations or content needs a little researching.
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Peter Forster
5.0 out of 5 stars Classic tale
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2014
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This is a great tale, based on fact but undoubtedly embellished. It's not like a modern writer would produce, but is designed to be sung or recounted by bards and hence there's alot of repetition particularly during the battle scenes but I think this adds to its charm. The explanatory notes help to bring the characters to life and show a great insight into human nature.
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a reader
5.0 out of 5 stars AMAZON, THESE ARE DIFFERENT TRANSLATIONS. THEIR REVIEWS ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2017
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This is not Anonymous, it is the Dorothy Sayers translation pictured. Please see reviews of the paperback for review of this edition's informative introduction and empathetic translation.
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