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YMMV / The Song of Roland

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  • Designated Villain: Excepting one or two members of Marsile's forces, the Saracens don't really do anything evil over the course of the story; their behaviour is in fact, nearly identical to that of Charlemagne' forces.
  • Fair for Its Day: While their religion is portrayed very unflatteringly for obvious reasons, most of the Saracen warriors are shown to be courageous and skilled fighters, and aside from a few exceptions like Chernuble and Abisme, they have no particular malice in their actions, only fighting out of a sense of duty and a desire to defend their home from Charlemagne’s conquests.
  • Fridge Logic: Charlemagne is described as 200 years old. His sister's son Roland can't be more than 30. How exactly does that work?
  • Ho Yay: Roland's supposed to be engaged to Olivier's sister Aude, but he seems to like Olivier himself a lot more. He doesn't even think of Aude as he dies, but when Olivier dies Roland weeps and hugs his "ami's" body to his chest. When Olivier has been fatally wounded and is striking out furiously and blindly around him, he accidentally hits Roland, who realizes that his friend is semi-delirious and talks him down by saying, "Look, I am Roland, that loved you all my days."
  • Magnificent Bastard: Blancandrin is one of the "cunning vassals" of King Marsile of Saragossa tasked with abating the Frankish threat. While suggesting conversion and vassalage towards King Charlemagne, Blancandrin formulates a more devious plan to remove Charlemagne and his Paladins from Spain for good. Noticing the hatred inside Ganelon, stepfather to Roland, he pushes the right buttons to earn himself an ally that helps strategize the Roncevaux army massacre. Selling the idea of a peace summit to both Saragossans and the Franks to hide his real intentions, Blancandrin's deceit successfully razes the Frankish rearguard in a move meant for the greater survival of his king and people.
  • Narm: Having the hero die not from getting killed in battle but from blowing a horn hard enough that his skull bursts is a little hard for modern audiences to take seriously.
  • Unintentionally Sympathetic: The Saracens are liable to come off this way to a modern audience, especially Baligant and his men, who played no part in Marsile's treachery.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • In a surprising example of a clash between early medieval and later medieval values, Archbishop Turpin tells Roland that a knight who is not brave, "is not worth 4 cents, and ought to be in a monastery, praying every day for our sins" — because all bishops think more highly of knights than monks, right?
    • After Charles convicted Ganelon of treason, not only is he sentenced to death but so are thirty of his relatives who sincerely defended him. Yup, this is an example of collective punishment where a whole family is held responsible for crimes by one member (like the story of Achan in the Bible). This is of course very unfair for modern audiences.
    • Back when the poem was written, it was considered the height of manliness to make a huge show of your grief, especially in battle, even to the point of falling to the ground and weeping. To modern audiences, of course, this just makes the Franks look overly dramatic.
    • Some modern audiences read the epic as a tragedy about how Roland's extreme hubris got him and all his friends killed. One of the translators, Robert Harrison, has argued that this sort of reading is a mistake, that Roland's death should not be read as a result of hubris, but as an event preordained by God that had to happen in order to convince Charlemagne to eliminate the threat posed by the Saracens once and for all.
    • Plus, naturally, all the Saracens being evil because they're not Christians, and Roland's battle-cry being "Pagans are wrong and Christians are right!"
  • Woolseyism: The Swedish translation by Frans G. Bengtsson changes the assonances to a complex rhyme scheme and adds some Scenery Porn not in the original. Some people consider it an improvement.

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