Crossing the Religious Boundaries with Monotheistic and Polytheistic Gods …

traditions but also with the religious customs of the Muslims. However, the poet shapes his narrative to prove that all the believers other than the Christians are pagans worshipping the ‘wrong gods.’ The Song of Roland presents two religions, respectively

‘Christians’ and ‘pagans;’ it is not clearly stated in the work, in which religion those pagans believe and the words ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ are never used. However, the critical analyses of the poem prove that that the pagans fighting against the Charlemagne army in the poem are the Muslims. Islam might not have consciously been presented as the enemy of the Franks, but the poet needed an opposite army, and it is obvious that the infamous religious conflict between the Christians and the Muslims would lead the poet to focus on Islam. Moreover, the time when the poem was composed determines the possible enemy of a Christian army; as it was written after the First Crusade, the Muslims were the opponents of the Christians at the time, and it was assumed that the Muslims also could come to Europe to invade the Christian lands as the Turks did during that period. In the poem, the enemies of Charlemagne pray to Mohammed and the hostility against Islam in that period leads readers and scholars to interpret the conflict between the Franks and pagans as the conflict between the Christians and the Muslims.

Nevertheless, the poet does not give obvious clues about Islam and confuses the readers at some points since he includes two more gods and makes changes in the belief system of the Muslims. These changes could arise from either a misunderstanding about Islam or an indifference to that religion.

By the twelfth century in which the poem was written, five hundred centuries after Islam emerged, few Christians knew about the Muslims and their way of worship. Islam

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was still a mystery for many Christians in the Middle Ages, and for this reason, they generalized it as a pagan religion. In the early medieval period, probably due to the limits in communication and the lack of literacy, people only knew about Islam from oral and written texts. Therefore, a limited number of people explained the Muslims by distorting the facts, and it seems that they explained the prophet Mohammed as the god of the Muslims as is seen in the Song of Roland. Joseph Francis Kelly declares this situation as follows, “few Westerners knew much about the Muslims, which made them easy to demonize and their religion easy to distort. Nowhere is this better seen than in great French epic The Song of Roland” (Kelly 68). The Song of Roland, in the first laisse, introduces the Muslim king, Marsile and the “gods” he worships: “Marsile its King, who feareth not God’s name, / Mahumet’s man, he invokes Apollin’s aid, / Nor wards off ills that shall to him attain” (I. 7-10). King Marsile’s introduction to the audience demonstrates that the Westerners do not think that the Muslims love or obey the true God.

O’Hagan translates the line about Marsile as “who loveth not God, nor seeks His grace”

(I.8), the common belief being that if a person is not Christian, it means he/she does not respect God. Moreover, the rest of the laisse confirms that the Muslims are pagans in the Christians’ eyes. For that reason, throughout the poem, the prejudice against the Muslims demonstrates whatever they do or however brave the knights they are, the “pagans are wrong: Christians are right indeed” (LXXIX. 1015). According to Ashe, “the pagans are in the wrong because they fight for the wrong gods” (“A Prayer and a Warcry” 362).

Therefore, the poem reflects the general view on Muslims in the common memory of medieval Christian society.

Another diversion in the Muslims’ belief system is their ‘multiple’ gods. As it is known, the Muslims neither serve Apollon nor worship him; Apollo is a god that belongs to Ancient mythology. The multiple gods in the text do not demonstrate the ignorance of the poet. Kablitz writes that “from the perspective of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,

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however, the observation is consistent with a Christian viewpoint for which the only distinction that mattered was whether one believed in [the Christian] God or not. They did not establish categories of unbelievers” (151-152). The text was written in an era when the Ancient gods were not recognised anymore; yet, as a Christian, the poet seems not to pay attention to what kind of religion the Muslims believed in. As Kablitz states in the previous quotation, the Christians did not bother to categorise the other religions. For that reason, Islamic faith was intertwined with the Ancient belief, and that polytheistic structure attributed to Islam reflects the general perception in medieval Europe. Thus, despite the presence of an Ancient Greek god and Muslim prophet together, the audience is aware simply that King Marsile leads a Muslim army, and the researches on the Song centre around that claim.

As well as the god of the Ancient Greeks, the poet adds another god for the Muslims and creates a kind of trinity in Islam. As in many chansons de geste that adapt the mission to spread Christian propaganda, the Song of Roland undertakes another mission to denigrate Islam with an ‘unholy trinity’ against ‘holy trinity.’ In the poem, the Muslims pray to a god, named Tervagan; for instance, in the 194^th laisse the Muslims curse all three gods, Tervagan and Mohammed and Apollo respectively after they are defeated by Charlemagne:

About that place are seen pagans enough, Who weep and cry, with grief are waxen wood, And curse their gods, Tervagan and Mahum

And Apolin, from whom no help is come. (CXCIV, 2694-2697)

Tervagan, also known as Termagant, is a common point of chansons, and it is generally attributed to women and any evil creature that the Muslims were believed to worship. The medieval poets with their religious prejudice believed that the Muslims were not able to

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reach heaven because they were villains who did not believe in the true God, and their gods could not in any case protect them. In a general sense, the Song’s poet reflects that thought: “in the Spanish city of Saragossa the Muslims venerate an idol of Mohammed.

They invoke their gods in battle. They even have a sort of trinity, combining Mohammed, Termagant, and Apollyon … The unbaptized Muslims cannot go to heaven, so even if a Muslim warrior fights bravely and dies a noble death, Satan still carries him off to hell”

(Kelly 69). From this comment, it is suggested that the Muslims cannot be rewarded with heaven even if they are religious because they believe in three wrong gods and do not have a ‘holy’ unity.

Although Termagant is believed to be a deliberate deception used by the French poet, surprisingly that figure was included after the Old French romances came to England. The Old French epics socially and culturally were affected by the English culture; thereby, it is assumed that the interaction occurred after the Normans came to the country and encountered the Saxon culture. Some researchers such as Sharon Kinoshita and Siobhain Bly Calkin associate the misleading trinity concept about the Muslims with the Song of Roland, and some such as Thomas Percy claim that the old French Romancers created the pseudo trinity by having “corrupted Temagant into Tervagant, couple it with the name of Mahomet as constantly as ours [the English’s]” (Percy 404). However, Tervagan, in some chansons de geste, was depicted as a Saxon god such as Layamon’s Brut³⁷ (Fumo 115) and it is not totally related to the Saracens. Herbert Pilch did some research on Tervagan and its connection with both the Saxons and Muslims; he discovered that in chansons de geste the Saracen was a term used for all enemies, including the Saxons (127). After the chansons de geste were brought to Britain, the poets

37 The priest Layamon’s Brut (1190-1215) is accepted as the first chronicle written in English after the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in Old English in the first half of the twelfth century. Laymon’s Brut is a loose translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut (1150-155), which is the Norman adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin chronicle Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) (1135-113).

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might have added some traditions of the Saxons, and they might have presented Tervagan as a god in Islam under the influence of Saxon culture. When the Song’s original Old French version was taken into consideration, it could be concluded that the trinity was made up by the Norman poet who copied the French text. As did many translators in that period, he might have included the ethnic figures from the Saxon tradition with which the English audience was familiar. Moreover, the other poets of the French epics and romances, which were put down on paper after the Battle of Hastings, embrace the same misunderstanding.

The purpose of the ‘unholy trinity’ is to show how the pagans’ gods are weak to protect their believers, and to some extent, by creating the Saracen trinity, the chanson poets merged three figures from three cultures, respectively Mohammed from Islam, Apollo from the Greco-Roman mythology and Tervagan from the Saxon culture. Thus, the poets by combing three periods -the Ancient time, the Old English period and the contemporary medieval time when the Song was written caused the literary works to cross temporal borders. As the oldest chanson de geste, the Song of Roland transfers the concept of the unholy trinity to the other medieval cultures and it “becomes the standard, indeed formulaic, representation of Saracen religion throughout the rest of the European Middle Ages - primarily in epic, but also across a range of texts and genres influenced by it” (Kinoshita and Calkin 29). The Islamic trinity seems a convention of the French romancers in the Anglo-Norman period; therefore, those poets, by mingling the literary traditions of the Saxons and the French also affected the new Anglo-Norman culture. The readers of Anglo-Norman literature naturally embraced the unholy trinity concept, and it gained a place in both the Anglo-Norman culture and later medieval cultures emerging in Britain.

The position of the Song of Roland between the Norman and Anglo-Saxon cultures manifests itself in the political structure of the country. In England, the Norman

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traditions did not immediately take their place in cultural development but, by the 1150s, the society had been through a transitional process both in cultural and diplomatic terms.

The traditional first feudal age, based on the classic hereditary nobility, starts to give place to a period known as the second age when the nobles exploit the traditions, which introduces the subject of a baronial rising. Within this context, The Song of Roland reflects that transitional period, as it is believed to have been written between 1129 and 1165. Robert Francis elaborates the place of the work by stating,

The poem is often studied as though it were firmly rooted in the second [feudal age] … It has been described both as propaganda for Capetian centralization and as a manifesto for baronial autonomy … It describes … rules that are thought of as immutable and more-or-less- God-given, rules that is the right-thinking man or woman’s grace to follow, and the evil’s man curse to flout… the Song of Roland is in these terms a transitional document, mustering some of the emotions and instincts of the age in the service of that increasing desire for order often said to characterize the second. (204)

In the Song, the baronial hierarchy is seen through the relationship of Roland and the other knights. As the second commander after Charlemagne, Roland does not allow the other knights to advise him even in the course of the battle. His arrogant attitude as the leader of the rear guard shows his power, which he gained after the transformation in the feudal order. Roland’s authority reflects the changing balance of power in medieval society. In Britain, the second phase is seen after the Norman Conquest, but, it would be wrong to say that the transitional period was as effective as the Conquest. The changes in diplomacy and dominance of the classes in the court affected both the social life and the literary culture throughout Europe. The medieval European states gradually underwent that period, and the interaction among the societies increased the effect of that

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development. As the Second Feudal Age depended upon the changing power relationships among the elites, the role of the noble Franks settling in Britain gained importance in the transition process of the English culture. Thus, the new literature, combining Anglo-Saxon and Norman literary traditions, holds a mirror up to the socio-political structure of the society. Such social transformations and cultural shifts reflected in the texts left marks in the local memory of the period and were passed down to the generations.