28 Olifant / Vol. 5. No. 1 /October 1977
In line 2655 it refers to Baligant's vassals, who must remain standing while he alone is seated on his ivory throne.
19 The order is as follows: 1) esperuns, 2) osberc, 3) brunie, 4) elme, 5) espee 6) enseigne, 7) escut, 8) espiet, 9) hanste, 10) gunfanun, 11)destrier, 12) estreu (followed by a description of the knight who then spurs his horse). Only 1), 2), and 10) are absent, but they are introduced for neither warrior. A preliminary look at other chansons de geste would suggest that this is a general order (see Michael Holland, "Rolandus Resurrectus," in Mélanges offerts à René Crozet [Poitiers: Société d'Etudes Médiévales, 1966], I, 397-418, for an analysis of the arming order within the Roland, though Holland deals with a shorter list of motifs).
20 The six hemistichs are lacet sun elme (vv. 2989, 3142), pent a sun col (vv. 2991, 3149), tient sun espiet (vv. 2992, 3152), l'estreu li tindrent/tint (vv. 3113, 3156), cler/fier le visage (vv. 3116, 3161), and fait sun eslais (vv. 2997, 3166). Only the first and the fourth are used elsewhere in the Roland.
21 I am assuming that Bédier, Moignet, and others are right in filling the gap at verse 3146 with the name of Baligant's sword. V 7 has "La soue fist Preciouse apeler."
22 A similar analysis of other arming themes reveals like Christian/pagan con- trasts. In the Couronnement de Louis, for example, the arming descriptions of Guillaume and Corsolt share many attributes; where they differ is in the choice of weapons, Corsolt employing a whole battery of projectiles, weapons considered at the time to be unchristian (see vv. 405ff. and 636ff.). The same opposition is emphasized by formulaic repetition in La Chanson de Guillaume when Tedbald and the Saracens are armed (see especially vv. 133-39 and 219-27).
23 According to the "law of technical primacy," "Each subordinate art seeks to come into agreement with the dominant art," which for the early Middle Ages is architecture. Henry Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. C. B. Hogan and G. Kubler (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1948), p. 10.
24 The approach presented in this article is further developed in a paper entitled "The Paradigmatics of Community in the Oxford Roland," to be discussed at the 1977 Modern Language Association meeting in a seminar devoted to structuralist approaches to medieval literature. Copies of this paper are available from Professor Donald Maddox, Department of Romance and Comparative Literature, BrandeisUniversity, Waltham, Massachusetts 02154, U.S.A.