What are we to make of all this? At its heart, the song is a timeless war epic, in which heroes and villains struggle, battle, live, and die. But what sets The Song of Roland apart is its wholehearted advocacy for the values of knighthood. Its story is designed to reflect back to its audience the most flattering image possible of their own martial world: one in which the best life is defined by faithful sworn obligations between vassals and lords and the knight’s near-pathological devotion to keeping his word and taking up the offer of a fight, no matter how impossible the odds. And, of
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