Elen of the Hosts: What’s Fact? What’s Fiction?

Tags

4th century Britain, Dream of Macsen Wledig, Elen of Caernarfon, Historical Fiction

In my research for “Betrothed to the Red Dragon,” I encountered a fascinating fourth century character, Elen of Caernarfon.

According to the “The Dream of Macsen Wledig” in The Mabinogion, the strong-willed Elen was married to the titular character, also known as Roman Emperor Magnus Maximus. She ruled with him and had roads built throughout Britain by men loyal to her. While I believe Elen existed, the poem is fiction, and the reality is more complex and more tragic.

Visit English Historical Fiction Authors for my post about who the real Elen might have been.

14th century manuscript (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

The Legendary Siegfried

Tags

Brunhild, Dragon, Siegfried

The story of Siegfried is part dragon slayer and part tragic soap opera, and it’s deeply ingrained in the Germanic psyche. You only need drive along the Rhine and encounter Drachenfels, the high hill where he slew the beast, and Worms, the city where he was betrayed and murdered.

The roots in history are tenuous. Part of Siegfried’s story might be based on a fifth century slaughter of rebellious Burgundians by the Romans, and a supporting character has a similar name to the Burgundian Gundahar. But we don’t know if Siegfried or someone like him existed. Nevertheless, he captured the Frankish imagination, and the story spread to the north, where Siegfried is called Sigurd. In the 19th century, Wagner gave the tale new life in his Ring Cycle operas.

Like any legends, there are variations, but here are the basics. Siegfried, the son of a slain warrior, forges a sword from the pieces of his father’s blade, one that can split anvils. At the instigation of the dwarf Regin, he goes after a giant-turned-dragon, guarding a cursed, stolen treasure.

The hero has one chance. He digs a ditch and lies in it. When the dragon goes for a drink, Siegfried stabs it in the soft underbelly. The dying dragon warns him that Regin plans to kill him.

Regin emerges from hiding, cuts out the dragon’s heart, and begs Siegfried to roast it. While it’s on the fire, Siegfried burns his fingers and sticks them in his mouth. He understands the speech of birds, who also tells him of Regin’s treachery. This time Siegfried listens and kills Regin. He bathes in the dragon’s blood, which makes him invulnerable except for where the linden leaf falls between his shoulders.

His next quest: Rescue a maiden in an enchanted sleep. She isn’t the stereotypical Sleeping Beauty. She’s Brunhild, a warrior queen who will marry only a man who must prove he knows no fear by riding though a fire that surrounds her.

Siegfried makes it through the flames and cuts off her too tight armor, which revives her. They fall in love. If only the story ended here, we’d have a happily ever after and could forget about the curse on the treasure. But the story continues, and we come to the part that resembles a soap opera.

When Siegfried leaves to do heroic deeds, Brunhild pledges her troth, and he promises to remain faithful.

Siegfried arrives at Worms, and that’s when his troubles really begin. There, he meets the lord, Gunnar (one of two or three brothers), and his sister, the beautiful Gundrun (also called Kriemhild). Siegfried drinks a potion that makes him forget Brunhild and then marries Gundrun.

Then it gets more complicated. Gunnar wants to marry Brunhild, but he can’t get through her wall of fire. The solution: he and Siegfried change forms, then Siegfried rides through the flames and claims Brunhild on Gunnar’s behalf. Fooled by the ruse, Brunhild reluctantly agrees to marry Gunnar. Siegfried removes the ring he originally gave to her and replaces it with a ring from the hoard.

And this could have been a happy ending for both couples, sort of, except for one problem. Brunhild learns the truth. When the women were about to bathe in the river, Brunhild refuses to be downstream from Gundrun, claiming a better father and husband. Gundrun can’t stand it and tells her Siegfried was the one who braved the fire. Then, she shows her rival a ring—the original token of Brunhild’s betrothal to Siegfried—as proof.

This becomes a matter of honor of Brunhild. She can’t be married to two men and plots with Gunnar and his brother to kill Siegfried. While they are hunting, the hero is stabbed in his only vulnerable spot, between the shoulders.

Brunhild is overcome with remorse, stabs herself with a sword, and pleads to burn with Siegfried on his funeral pyre. The grieving Gundrun lives only for vengeance, one with betrayal, murder, and cannibalism.

Public domain images by Arthur Rackham via Wikimedia Commons.

Originally published Dec. 17, 2014, on Unusual Historicals.

Source

The Nibelungenlied, translated by Daniel B. Shumway (Houghton-Mifflin Co., New York, 1909)

Saint Christopher: A Tough Guy Protecting Medieval Travelers

Tags

Christianity, medieval, Middle Ages, Saint Christopher

Travel in medieval times was often slow, unpleasant, and dangerous. At any time, someone could break a wheel, a person or animal could get sick, a storm could arrive suddenly, or brigands or demons could attack. You needed all the protection you could get and who better than Saint Christopher, a giant of a man so tough that only God was a worthy master?

Belief in Christopher was so strong that just seeing his image assured the viewers that they would not die that day (or at least not faint or fall). He was popular everywhere, but churches in medieval England had the most murals with his image.

Yet the one certainty about Christopher is that he was a martyr in Asia Minor, probably in the third century. The image in my mind is of a huge man who goes by a name that means Christ-bearer in Greek and decides that he will not stop preaching. He would rather die and go to heaven than renounce his faith and condemn his soul to hell. (Reports that the Church ruled in 1969 that he didn’t exist are wrong. Christopher is still a saint, but his feast was reduced to local cult rather than universal.)

Saint Christopher, from the Westminster Psalter, circa 1250 (public domain image via Wikimedia Commons)

Like many early saints, most of what we know about Christopher comes from legend. Originally named Offerus, he was a big guy and vowed to serve only a master who feared nothing. First, he served a king, but the king was afraid the devil. Then Offerus served the devil until the devil admitted he frightened by the cross.

Offerus decided Christ was the master for him and met a hermit who instructed and baptized him. Renamed Christopher, he decided to serve God by carrying people to safety across a raging stream.

One day, a child asked to be carried. No big deal, right? Well, the kid got heavy, so heavy Christopher feared he would drown. On the other side, Christopher asked the child why it felt like the world was on his shoulders, and the child revealed he was Christ and yes, he was carrying the whole world. To prove it, he told Christopher to plant his staff in the ground, and the next morning, it was a tree bearing flowers and dates.

Christopher then decided to travel and preach and perform miracles, winning a lot of converts. But that’s when he got into trouble. The authorities were unhappy and had him tortured and executed.

Over the centuries, the story has variations. As early as the fifth century, a church was dedicated to him, and in the eighth century, his legend was written in Greek and Latin. Its final form appears in the 13th-century Golden Legend.

You could argue that Christopher’s story is an allegory of what it means to bear Christ in your heart and endure the trials of following the faith. But I suspect Christopher’s legend was true in the minds of medieval folk. Although Christopher wasn’t a knight and dragon-slayer like Saint George, he was a brave and strong man, one who helped ordinary people in the travails of travel. Perhaps that is why he captured the medieval imagination and is so beloved.

Sources

“St. Christopher” by Francis Mershman, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, 1908

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, Fifth Edition Revised, by David Farmer

“The Life of Christopher,” The Golden Legend, from the Medieval Sourcebook

Butler’s Lives of the Saints, by Alban Butler

“St. Christopher was demoted but remains a saint,” by Ellen Creager of Knight Ridder Newspapers, Abilene Reporter-News, June 6, 1998

EWTN, Fr. John Echert answering a question about St. Christopher

This post was originally published at English Historical Fiction Authors on Aug. 5, 2014.

Saint Ursula: A Story of Courage

Tags

Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Saint Ursula

Most of what we know about Saint Ursula is from legend. Actually, legends, plural, with many fantastic elements. But I suspect there is truth buried within this story of courage. Virgins were martyred in Cologne, Germany, and they might have come from Britain.

The oldest version, a fifth-century Latin inscription in a Cologne church bearing Saint Ursula’s name, provides only a hint: “Often admonished by divine visions and by the consideration of the majesty of the martyrdom of the holy virgins who appeared to him, Clematius, a nobleman of the East, according to vow, thoroughly restored this basilica on his own estate and at his own expense (translation from Golden Hours by J. Jackson Wray).” A ninth-century addendum gives a dire warning: “But if anyone, notwithstanding the majesty of the place where the holy virgins shed their blood for the name of Christ, should dare to bury any person here, let him know that he shall be punished by the eternal fire of hell.”

The century of the virgins’ martyrdom is unclear; it could be third, fourth, or fifth.

In earlier versions of the story, who is leading the group changes, but later versions settle on Ursula. And the number of Ursula’s companions was closer to 10 than 11,000, the latter number appearing by the ninth century.

Nicolo di Pietro’s St. Ursula, circa 1410

The legend is more fleshed out in the 11th century. Ursula and the pagan Aetherius are betrothed. Having pledged herself to Christ, Ursula seeks to delay the marriage by going on pilgrimage. She takes 10 attendants, and each woman has 1,000 companions. They sail on the Rhine and stop at Cologne, where an angel tells Ursula they will be martyred on their return visit to the city.

Undeterred, Ursula and her companions continue their journey. At Basel, they pick up the local bishop and go all the way to Rome. There, the remaining pagans, including Aetherius, are baptized. Moved by a vision of an army of martyrs, the British-born Pope Cyriacus abdicates, so that he can share their martyrdom. (Conspiracy theorists explain you can’t find any mention of this pope in the records because the powers in Rome were so mad they erased his name.)

The group returns to Cologne, where they are indeed slaughtered with arrows by Huns in hatred of the faith. Then the army of martyrs drives the Huns away.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fictionalized history of Britain, Ursula is the daughter of Dianotus, king of Cornwell, and she and her companions are being sent to Armorica (Brittany) to provide conquering soldiers with wives. After being shipwrecked, the women are slaughtered by – you guessed it – the Huns, angry at being rebuffed by the beautiful ladies. No mention of vows of chastity or dying for Christ.

Hans Holbein the Younger’s St. Ursula, circa 1523

Regardless of what is accurate about the legend, the martyrs existed and their story of courage has inspired generations of believers.

About 1,000 years after the virgins’ death, their story was included in The Golden Legend, a book read to St. Angela de Merici when she was a child. Ursula’s legend must have stayed with her throughout her life. In 1535, the 61-year-old Angela founded an order under the patronage of Saint Ursula. The Ursulines are best known for educating girls, founding communities and schools throughout the world.

Images are in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources

Golden Hours, J. Jackson Wray

“St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins,” Albert Poncelet. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15.

“St. Angela Merici,” Michael Ott. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 1.

The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth

St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe, Scott B. Montogomery

Sisters of the Irish Ursuline Union

This post was originally published Jan. 16, 2014, at English Historical Fiction Authors.

Siegfried: Legend or History?

Tags

Historical Fiction, medieval, Middle Ages, Siegfried, The Cross and the Dragon

To us in the 21st century, Siegfried’s story is a legend. While it might incorporate a few historic events, it is mainly a fantastic tale with a dragon, sleeping beauty in armor, betrayal, and murder.

To my 8th century characters in Francia and elsewhere, he is as historic to them as George Washington is to us, and the fact that he is their hero reveals a lot about their culture and values. That’s why his story has a presence in both of my published novels and my work in progress.

The heroine of my first novel, The Cross and the Dragon, has grown up across the river from the high hill where Siegfried is said to have slain the dragon. I simply could not ignore his legend, as you will see in the following snippet:

During the evening meal in the great hall, Alda’s gaze fell on the tapestries recounting Siegfried’s deeds in reds, greens, and yellows, brilliant even by firelight. She realized how much she had missed Drachenhaus, built with stone from Drachenfels Mountain across the Rhine, where Siegfried had slain the dragon centuries ago and bathed in its blood for invulnerability. The mountain’s rock carried that magic, and Alda felt it envelop her.

See my post at Unusual Historicals for more about a hero whose story captivated the medieval imagination.

After slaying the dragon, Siegfried tastes his blood and understands the language of birds, by Arthur Rackham, 1911 (public domain image via Wikimedia Commons)

Saint Willibrord: ‘My God Is Stronger Than Your Devils’

Tags

Christianity, Frisia, Germanic gods, medieval, Middle Ages, Pagan, Radbod, Saint Willibrord, Willibrord

When Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul in 772 (a devastating event for my heroine in The Ashes of Heaven’s Pillar), he was not the first to meddle with a site sacred to pagans. Decades earlier, Saint Boniface, the Apostle of Germany, chopped down Donar’s Oak. And before Boniface, there was Saint Willibrord, a bishop Boniface assisted in Frisia from 719 to 722.

Statue of Willibrord by Albert Termote (1889-1978) (Wikimedia Commons image used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License).

In the late seventh and early eighth centuries, Willibrord traveled as a missionary to northern Francia, Frisia, and Denmark, the last of which he gave up on except for 30 boys. Alcuin’s The Life of Saint Willibrord recounts an unplanned visit to Fositeland (Heligoland), a North Sea island between Denmark and Frisia.

Willibrord and his companions were blown to the island by a storm and stayed there to wait for better weather. They found the island’s inhabitants worshiped the god Fosite and built temples to him. The cattle who grazed at holy sites were not to be bothered, and believers were silent when they drew water from a sacred fountain.

Determined to show the pagans the falseness of their ways and unafraid of Frisian chieftain Radbod’s cruelty, Willibrord baptized three people in a ritual that required the spoken word and had some of the cattle killed for meat. As objectionable as a tolerant 21st century person might find such an act, the purpose for medieval Christians was to show that their God was stronger than pagan deities and thus spur conversions and save souls.

Alcuin says the pagans were amazed nothing bad happened to Willibrord and his company, and they reported it to Radbod.

Furious, Radbod held Willibrord and his companions for three days and cast lots three times a day to see who should die. Perhaps Radbod used lots because he feared Frankish Mayor of the Palace Pepin II, who had already defeated him in battle and seized lands, but only one of Willibrord’s party was martyred. Willibrord tried to convince Radbod that he was really worshipping devils, but as readers of last Tuesday’s post know, the Frisian ruler would not be moved. Ultimately, Radbod let Willibrord return to Francia.

Willibrord, the subject of today’s post at English Historical Fiction Authors, would go to face a difficult dilemma: whom to side with in the civil war after Pepin’s death in 714.

A Conspiracy Theory about a Martyred Pope

Tags

conspiracy theory, martyrdom, medieval, Middle Ages, Pope Cyriacus, St. Ursula

While researching an upcoming post about Saint Ursula and her companions, I came across a conspiracy theory involving why there are no official records of a medieval pope martyred in Cologne.

The arrival of St. Ursula and her companions in Rome to meet Pope Cyriacus, from the Reliquary of St. Ursula, Hans Memling, 1489

According to legend, Ursula and her companions – including 11,000 virgins – visited Rome on their pilgrimage and met Pope Cyriacus. The pagans in Ursula’s group were baptized. Moved by a vision of an army of martyrs, he relinquished the papacy to follow Ursula and her group and was slaughtered with them in Cologne.

Problem is, Pope Cyriacus appears only in this legend. Conspiracy theorists say that the cardinals were so angry, they erased his name from the books.

It sounds like an easy job. Because of the expense, books in early medieval Europe were rare and precious. With few people who knew how to read, let alone write, information about early medieval times can be scarce. But in my research about the Carolingian era, a few centuries after Ursula died, evidence of a pope’s existence is not confined to documents in Rome.  We have mentions in annals and surviving letters.

So the conspirators must have done a thorough job. In an age where messages took weeks to deliver, they would have had to hunt down monasteries and Christian kings to wipe out any trace of Cyriacus’s existence.

The story of Cyriacus is not the only invention in the legends about Ursula. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia has used the word “fables” when recounting the details. But Ursula’s story is still worth sharing because at its core is a tale of courage that has inspired generations. More about Ursula next time.

Sources

“St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins,” Albert Poncelet. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 15.

St. Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe, Scott B. Montogomery

Florentines’ Claim to Charlemagne

Tags

Charlemagne, Dante, Florence, medieval, Middle Ages, The Song of Roland

Again, please welcome Tinney Sue Heath, author of A Thing Done, as she discusses the impact the legend of Charlemagne had on medieval Florentine identity.—Kim

By Tinney Sue Heath

Tinney Sue Heath

The Florentines believed Charlemagne had re-founded their city in 801 after its destruction by Attila (actually by Totila the Goth, in 410). Nor did they forget that “when the Lombard fang bit holy Church, under its wings Charles the Great came victorious to her aid,” referring to Charlemagne’s victory over the Lombard King Desiderius in 773. These words are spoken by the soul of the Emperor Justinian in the Heaven of Mercury (Dante’s Paradiso 6.94-96, all translations in this post by Robert Durling).

The Medici seal (photo by Tim Heath)

Several of the great Florentine families prided themselves on their supposed descent from one of Charlemagne’s knights. The Medici, for example, held that their ancestor, the brave knight Averardo, had done battle with a ferocious giant and slain him. They claimed that the circles on their coat of arms represented dents in Averardo’s shield from the blows dealt by the giant’s mace.

Also, the Adimari clan claimed that their progenitor Adimaro was one of Charlemagne’s knights. Dante did not think highly of this family; he called them “the presumptuous clan that is like a dragon against those who flee, but is placated like a lamb by those who show their teeth or their purse” (Paradiso 16.115-117).

Detail of a fresco depicting Florence about the mid-1300s (this public domain image and the one of Dante via Wikimedia Commons).

Some scholars (though not by any means a majority) believe that Charlemagne figures once more in the Divine Comedy. In Dante’s cryptic and much-debated prophecy in Purgatorio 33.43, where he poses a riddle involving the number 515, they think he might be referring to the year 1315, which is to say, 515 years after the coronation of Charlemagne in A.D. 800. We are not, however, aware of anything particularly cataclysmic by Dante’s standards that occurred in 1315.

Yet it was the sudden death in 1313 of a successor to Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, that dealt the exiled Dante the blow that destroyed any hope he had of ever returning to his native Florence. Gradually, over the years of his exile, Dante the former Guelf had come to believe that this young and relatively untried emperor could stand up to stubborn Florence and restore him, its unjustly exiled citizen, to his rightful place. He began to see the empire as the necessary corrective to what he saw as the injustices and evils perpetrated by his city.

Dante

Dante was among the many who paid homage to Henry after his coronation in Milan, and he urged the emperor, in letters that still exist, to march on Florence and even to attack her. The empire that Charlemagne had created was to have been Dante’s salvation, and his disappointment was bitter indeed when his hopes unraveled.

Perhaps when Dante wrote in his Divine Comedy about watching Charlemagne and Roland as if following the falcon in its flight, he was thinking of the eagle that symbolized the empire and of what might have been.

Tinney Sue Heath is the author of A Thing Done, which is about a jester who gets caught up in a prank that leads to a vendetta among the ruling families in Florence. For more about Tinney and her work, visit her website, tinneyheath.com, or her blog, Historical Fiction Research.

Previously: Dante’s vision of Charlemagne and Roland in the afterlife.
The lasting power of legends related to Roland.

Tomorrow: Let’s go to the (blog) hop

Dante’s Vision of Charlemagne in the Afterlife

Tags

Charlemagne, Dante, Divine Comedy, Florence, Historical Fiction, Inferno, medieval, Middle Ages, Paradiso, The Song of Roland

Today, I am glad to welcome Tinney Sue Heath, author of A Thing Done, published recently by Fireship Press. Here, she discusses how Dante interpreted the legend of Roland, more than four centuries after the attack at the Pass of Roncevaux.—Kim

By Tinney Sue Heath

Tinney Sue Heath

“Thus for Charlemagne and Roland my attentive gaze followed them both, as one’s eye follows his falcon in its flight.” So Dante in his Divine Comedy describes his vision of the two French heroes in the Heaven of Mars (Paradiso 18.43-45; my translation, all others in this post by Robert Durling).

Dante

By this point in the Comedy, Dante has already worked his way downward through the depths of the Inferno, where he sees the soul of Ganelon, the betrayer of Charlemagne and Roland, then up again through the Purgatorio, and having traded his pagan guide Virgil for the heaven-dwelling soul of his beloved Beatrice, is now progressing through the Paradiso itself.

Heroes in Paradise

The king and his knight (Carlo Magno and Orlando, to Dante) are in august company. The soul of Dante’s ancestor, the knight Cacciaguida, has directed Dante’s gaze toward the arms of the Cross, where the poet will gaze on the blessed souls of great heroes.

Two, Joshua and Judas Maccabaeus, are Old Testament figures. The others were defenders of Christendom in their lifetimes and have thus earned their exalted position in Paradise: Charlemagne and Roland share that honor with their contemporaries William, count of Orange and the giant Rainouart (Dante believed the giant was a historical figure and that he was converted to Christianity by William); with Duke Godfrey of Boulogne, leader of the first Crusade; and with Robert Guiscard, the Norman commander who fought against the Muslims to establish the Norman kingdom of Sicily.

A 14th century manuscript depicts the Chanson de Roland.

An earlier reference to Roland occurs in the Inferno, when Dante hears “the sound of a horn so loud that it would make any thunder feeble… After the dolorous rout, where Charlemagne lost the holy company, Roland did not sound his horn so terribly.” (Inferno 31.11-13, 16-18.)

Dante and his fellow Italians of the 13th century were very familiar with the characters of La Chanson de Roland. The story in brief, as Dante knew it, was this: Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew and a great paladin, was leading the king’s rear guard when they met with an ambush in the pass of Roncesvalles, due to the perfidy of the treacherous Ganelon, Roland’s stepfather and Charlemagne’s brother-in-law. Roland delayed too long in blowing his ivory horn to alert Charlemagne to what was happening, and the company was slaughtered. When Ganelon’s betrayal came to light, he was punished by being pulled apart by four horses.

The Villain’s Fate

But what of Ganelon, considered (with Judas) the archetypal traitor by Dante and his contemporaries? It will come as no surprise that he is to be found in the frozen lowest part of hell (at the point where it really has frozen over), encased in ice, only a short distance from where Satan is eternally gnawing on the greatest traitors of all: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.

A 19th century illustration of the Inferno by Gustave Dure

It is in Antenora, the second zone of Cocytus (the ninth circle of Hell) that we find the political traitors. Dante, a member of the Guelf faction, has a harsh and violent encounter with one of these, Bocca degli Abati, who in Dante’s eyes was the traitor who cost the Florentine Guelfs the battle of Montaperti and caused the River Arbia to run red with blood. Bocca, of a Ghibelline family, feigned Guelf sympathies and pretended to fight with the Guelfs, but at a decisive moment in the battle, he cut off the hand of the Guelf standard-bearer, plunging the Guelf army into fatal confusion.

It is Bocca who points out Ganelon to Dante. The Florentine and French traitors and other notorious betrayers dwell forever “down there where the sinners keep cool” (Inferno 32.116-117). The Italian, “là dove i peccatori stanno freschi,” as Ronald Martinez points out, includes the expression “star fresco,” which means “to be cool” but also “to be in for it.” It may have been a saying known to Dante, but whether he quoted it or coined it, the phrase is still in use today.

Tinney Sue Heath is the author of A Thing Done, which is about a jester who gets caught up in a prank that leads to a vendetta among the ruling families in Florence. For more about Tinney and her work, visit her website, tinneyheath.com, or her blog, Historical Fiction Research.

Next: Medieval Florence’s claim to Charlemagne’s legend.

Previously: The lasting power of legends related to Roland.

You might also like: What really happened at the Pass of Roncevaux.

Public domain images from Wikimedia Commons. Tinney’s author photo by W. Clinton Hotaling.

Centuries Later, the Legend of Roland Endures

Tags

Charlemagne, Franks, Historical Fiction, History, medieval, Middle Ages, The Cross and the Dragon, The Song of Roland

Regular readers of Outtakes will notice that I emphasize the eighth-century history of Charlemagne and Roland rather than the legend. Or to be more accurate, legends that have spanned centuries and countries.

The only historical account of Roland, called Hruodland in my novel The Cross and the Dragon, is in part of a sentence in Einhard’s ninth-century biography of Charlemagne in which he details the 778 ambush at the Pass of Roncevaux by the Christian Basques. In reality, the battle was a disaster for the Franks, so traumatic that apparently no one wrote about it while King Charles was alive. (See my post in Unusual Historicals for accounts about the actual events.)

I will talk more about the real world of The Cross and the Dragon in person at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, December 15, at the New Castle-Henry County Public Library in New Castle, Indiana. Today, I will touch on a handful of the fictional accounts.

Hruodland most often goes by Roland and Orlando in legend. The best known is the 11th century anonymous Old French epic, The Song of Roland. Here, he is the stubborn hero facing overwhelming odds in his fight against the Muslim Saracens.

The legend spreads even further. The German story that inspired The Cross and the Dragon (spoiler alert) has the character building a castle on the Rhine just to get a glimpse of the bride who thought he was dead and committed herself to a convent on a nearby Rhineland island (end spoiler).

In the late 13th century, the story has travelled north and become part of the Norse Karlamagnus saga, in which Roland and Oliver kill the Saxon Vitakind (a variant of the historic Saxon leader Widukind, and like the other legends, it’s very different from actual events).

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Italian poets take the legend into the fantastic with Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso.  And legend still lives on in marionettes.

“Even today, the main subject matter in the famous puppet shows of Sicily is the story of Carlo Magno, Orlando, and the other French knights,” says Tinney Sue Heath, author of A Thing Done. “These tales are presented in episodes, one short part of the story at a time, at puppet theatres throughout Sicily and the southern mainland – rather like watching episodes of Flash Gordon’s adventures each week in movie theatres in the 1930s. The puppet characters and their noisy sword battles continue to entertain audiences of locals and tourists alike.”

Tomorrow and Wednesday, Tinney will discuss how the legends of Roland and Charlemagne affected 13th century Florence, the setting of her novel, and its most famous poet, Dante.

Sicilian marionettes depict one of the Roland legends (photo by Tim Heath).