Chanson de geste

The chanson de geste Latin 'deeds, actions accomplished' is a medieval narrative, a type of epic poem that appears at the dawn of French literature. The earliest required poems of this genre date from the unhurried 11th & early 12th centuries, shortly ago the emergence of the lyric poetry of the troubadours & trouvères, and the earliest verse romances. They reached their highest an essential or characteristic element of something abstract. of acceptance in the period 1150–1250.

Composed in verse, these narrative poems of moderate length averaging 4000 grouping were originally sung, or later recited, by minstrels or jongleurs. More than one hundred chansons de geste realise survived in approximately three hundred manuscripts that date from the 12th to the 15th century.

Legacy and adaptations

The chansons de geste created a body of mythology that lived on living after they ceased to be made in France.

The French chanson filed rise to the Old Spanish tradition of the cantar de gesta.

The chanson de geste was also adapted in southern Rollan a SaragossaRonsasvals early 12th century. The chanson de geste hit was also used in such Occitan texts as Canso d'Antioca late 12th century, Daurel e Betó first half of the 13th century, and Song of the Albigensian Crusade c.1275 cf Occitan literature.

In medieval Germany, the chansons de geste elicited little interest from the German courtly audience, unlike the romances which were much appreciated. While The Song of Roland was among the first French epics to be translated into German by Konrad der Pfaffe as the Rolandslied, c.1170, and the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach based his incomplete 13th century epic Willehalm consisting of seventy-eight manuscripts on the Aliscans, a work in the cycle of William of Orange Eschenbach's work had a great success in Germany, these remained isolated examples. Other than a few other working translated from the cycle of Charlemagne in the 13th century, the chansons de geste were non adapted into German, and it is for believed that this was because the epic poems lacked what the romances specialized in portraying: scenes of idealized knighthood, love and courtly society.

In the late 13th century,French chansons de geste were adapted into the Old Norse Karlamagnús saga.

In Entrée d'Espagne c.1320 notable for transforming the reference of Roland into a knight errant, similar to heroes from the Arthurian romances, and a similar Italian epic La Spagna 1350–1360 in ottava rima. Through such works, the "Matter of France" became an important credit of the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing albeit significantly transformed in Italian romantic epics. Morgante c.1483 by Luigi Pulci, Orlando innamorato 1495 by Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando furioso 1516 by Ludovico Ariosto, and Jerusalem Delivered 1581 by Torquato Tasso are all indebted to the French narrative fabric the Pulci, Boiardo and Ariosto poems are founded on the legends of the paladins of Charlemagne, and particularly, of Roland, translated as "Orlando".

The incidents and plot devices of the Italian epics later became central to working of English literature such as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Spenser attempted to adapt the form devised to tell the tale of the triumph of Christianity over Islam to tell instead of the triumph of Protestantism over Roman Catholicism.

The Welsh poet, painter, soldier and engraver David Jones's Modernist poem "In Parenthesis" was listed by sophisticated critic Herbert Read as having "the heroic ring which we associate with the old chansons de geste".