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Updated: May 21, 2025
Leaving the chansons de geste, Guinemer reappears in the history of the Crusades. Count Baudouin of Flanders and his knights, while making war in the Holy Land , see a vessel approaching, more than three miles from the city of Tarsus. They wait on the shore, and the vessel casts anchor. "Whence do you come?" is always the first question asked in like circumstances.
At length Erasmus was led, in spite of all, to do what he had always tried to avoid: he wrote against Luther. But it did not in the least resemble the geste Erasmus at one time contemplated, in the cause of peace in Christendom and uniformity of faith, to call a halt to the impetuous Luther, and thereby to recall the world to its senses.
These were the Romans Bretons, a series of romances in verse, inspired by the Celtic myths and traditions which still lingered in Brittany and England. The spirit of these poems was very different from that of the Chansons de Geste.
It is not fantastic even to expect that the conquerors might under certain circumstances say to the conquered, "Take your losses from the Americans: they alone have made money out of our common woe!" No, ours has not been the beau geste as a nation. Nor can the American take comfort in the thought that Washington diplomacy does not fairly represent the sentiment of our people.
In our opinion these passages are traditional formulae, as in our own old ballads and in the Chansons de Geste, and Noack also takes this view every now and then. They may well be older, in many cases, than Iliad and Odyssey; or the poet, having found his own formula, economically used it wherever similar circumstances occurred.
Such are certain recurring terms of phrase like, Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century, printed in black letter, "broadsides," or single sheets. Wynkyn de Worde printed in 1489 A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood, which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject.
It may, perhaps, be replied to this argument that our Iliad is only a very late remaniement, like the fourteenth century Chansons de Geste, of something much earlier and nobler.
"Had the knight looked up to the page's face, No smile the word had won; Had the knight looked up to the page's face, I ween he had never gone: Had the knight looked back to the page's geste, I ween he had turned anon, For dread was the woe in the face so young, And wild was the silent geste that flung Casque, sword, to earth as the boy down-sprung, And stood alone, alone!"
Nothing can be less surprising, if the heroes whose legendary feats inspired the poet lived centuries before his time, as Charlemagne and his Paladins lived some three centuries before the composition of the earliest extant Chansons de Geste on their adventures. There was, in such a case, time for much change in the details of life, art, weapons and implements.
We know the heroic epic in different languages throughout a period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are the German Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, which belong to the end of the twelfth century.
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