Medieval European Heroes

From the fifth century to the fifteenth, the peoples of Europe composed one of the richest bodies of folk-heroic narrative in the world. The Anglo-Saxons sang of Beowulf, the Welsh of King Arthur, the English of Robin Hood, the French of the chansons de geste and the roman courtois, the Germans of the Nibelungenlied, the Norse of the sagas of Sigurd and the Volsungs, the Russians of the bogatyrs of the byliny, the Spanish of the Cid. The heroes of this long millennium — warriors, kings, outlaws, and saints — were remembered in a small number of great literary and oral forms, and the comparison of those forms is one of the most revealing ways into the world of the medieval folk imagination.

This page is part of the wider survey of Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures. It explores the medieval European branch of that tradition in two companion articles: one on the origins of Robin Hood and one on the mythology of King Arthur, and it connects to the wider currents of European Folklore, the Celtic world, and the Norse sagas from which so much of this material was drawn.

The Forms of Memory

The heroes of medieval Europe were not preserved in a single shape. They were remembered in a small number of literary and oral forms, each of which gave the hero a slightly different face.

The Chanson de Geste

The chanson de geste — literally, “song of deeds” — is the French narrative form that reached its highest point in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The earliest and greatest of the chansons is the Chanson de Roland, composed in its present form around the year 1090 but based on older material, in which the paladin Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne, is ambushed by the Saracens at the pass of Roncevaux in 778 and dies heroically, sounding his horn for help that comes too late. The Chanson de Roland is the founding epic of the French nation in its self-image: Christian against Muslim, loyal vassal against treacherous stepfather, the humble soldier against the magnificent enemy. The form spread quickly. The Chanson de Guillaume, the Chanson de Charlemagne, the cycle of Garin de Monglane and his sons and grandsons, the cycle of Doon de Mayence and the rebellious vassals — the chansons form a vast and largely vanished library, of which only a fraction survives.

The chansons are remembered not only as literature but as a way of thinking. The hero of the chanson is the man who keeps his oath, even at the cost of his life. Roland refuses to blow his horn until it is too late because he does not wish to seem a coward. Oliver tells him that his pride is madness. Roland answers that he would rather die than be shamed. The chanson tradition gives us a heroic ideal that is not, in the modern sense, attractive — it is too stiff, too bloodthirsty, too obsessed with the great and the powerful — but it is a powerful one, and it shaped the way medieval France and, through France, much of Europe, imagined the hero.

The Roman Courtois

The roman courtois is the courtly novel that emerged in the French-speaking world in the latter half of the twelfth century, and that within a generation had taken over the literary landscape of Europe. Where the chanson remembered the great and the powerful, the roman remembered the aristocrat and the lady. The genre begins with Chrétien de Troyes, whose Erec et Enide, Cligès, Lancelot, Yvain, and unfinished Perceval set the template for centuries of subsequent romance. To Chrétien we owe the figure of Lancelot, the great knight who is the lover of Queen Guinevere; the figure of Yvain, the knight who wins a lion’s gratitude and becomes its companion; and the figure of Perceval, the innocent who sees the Grail and does not understand what he has seen.

The roman courtois is a folk-heroic form in disguise. Its heroes are not the demigods of older myth, but they are larger than life. They ride through the forest, encounter giants, enchantresses, and weeping maidens, and they test themselves against the standards of a courtly code that is more strict, in its way, than the older heroic code. The most popular roman of the later Middle Ages was the prose Lancelot-Graal, the great thirteenth-century cycle on which Malory’s English Le Morte Darthur is based, and in which the figure of King Arthur finally takes the central place in the European imagination.

The Saga and the Skaldic Tradition

The Norse world remembered its heroes in the saga — the long prose narrative of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, written down in Iceland but drawing on older oral tradition. The Völsunga saga tells the story of the hero Sigurd (the German Siegfried), who kills the dragon Fafnir, wins the treasure of the Nibelungs, betrays and is betrayed. The Saga of the Ynglings traces the line of Swedish and Norwegian kings back to the gods. The Egils saga Skallagrímssonar remembers a real Icelandic poet-warrior of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The saga is a form of peculiar restraint: the hero is presented through his deeds, not his feelings, and the narrator declines to comment. The form is the perfect vehicle for a culture that valued manly silence and the ability to bear one’s fate without complaint.

The saga is not the only Norse form. The Norse also had the skaldic tradition, in which the court poet, or skald, celebrated the deeds of his chieftain in a highly formalised verse. The skaldic tradition is closely related to the wider oral storytelling of the medieval world, and it is the form in which the deeds of the early Norse kings were remembered. The skald was not merely an entertainer: he was a keeper of memory, and his praise or blame could make or unmake a reputation.

The Folk Ballad

The folk ballad is the simplest of the medieval forms, and in some ways the most durable. It is a short narrative song, in a regular metre, with a strong story-line, and it is composed and remembered by ordinary people. The Danish ballads of the late Middle Ages, the English and Scottish border ballads, the Spanish romances, the Balkan epic songs, the Russian byliny — all are variations on the same basic form. The hero of the ballad is not a king or a demigod: he is the knight who meets a ghost in the wild wood, the maiden who follows her lover into fairyland, the mother who recognises her son’s body in the river, the robber who is betrayed by his wife. The ballad is the form in which the folk hero of the lower classes is preserved.

The Chivalric Romance in English

The English tradition did not have a chanson de geste cycle of its own, but it absorbed the French romans and turned them into something distinctively its own. The Alliterative Morte Arthure of the late fourteenth century, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur of the same period, the great Le Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory (printed by Caxton in 1485), and the later ballads of Robin Hood and the Monk and Robin Hood and the Potter preserved the Arthurian tradition and the Robin Hood tradition for the English-speaking world. Malory’s book, the first great Arthurian narrative in English prose, became the source from which Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites, T.H. White, and the modern cinema and television industry all drew.

The Heroes Themselves

Within these forms lived a small number of great heroes, each of whom embodied a different facet of the medieval European imagination.

Beowulf

Beowulf is the hero of the Old English epic composed, in its present form, sometime in the eighth or ninth century, and preserved in the single manuscript known as the Cotton Vitellius A.xv. He is a Geat, a Scandinavian people, and he travels to the court of the Danish king Hrothgar to kill the monster Grendel, who has been devouring the king’s thanes in the mead-hall of Heorot. He kills Grendel by tearing off its arm. He kills Grendel’s mother in her underwater cave. He returns home, reigns for fifty years, and dies fighting a dragon that has been ravaging his land.

Beowulf is the great northern hero, and his tale is one of the founding texts of English literature. The hero is not a Christian in the modern sense, though the poem was composed in a Christian England and is interlaced with Christian moralising. He is the warrior whose loyalty to his lord, and to the people entrusted to him, drives him to face one impossible enemy after another.

King Arthur

King Arthur is the subject of the other companion article in this section. He is a paradox: a folk hero whose story is told in the most elevated literary forms, a figure of Welsh origin whose greatest renown came in French and English. The mythology of Arthur is one of the great subjects of European narrative, and it is the case study for everything that happens when a folk hero is taken up by the highest literary culture.

Robin Hood

Robin Hood is the other great English hero. He is the subject of a companion article on his origins and development, but the short story is this: he is an outlaw, perhaps of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, who lived in the greenwood of Nottinghamshire and robbed the rich to give to the poor. He is one of the most durable folk heroes in the English-speaking world, and he has been re-imagined in almost every subsequent century.

Charlemagne and the Bogatyrs

The chansons de geste remembered Charlemagne as the great Christian emperor of the West, leading his peers out of France and into Spain, Italy, and the Holy Land. The historical Charlemagne (c. 742–814) was a real Frankish king who became emperor in 800, and the chansons transformed him into the model of the crusader-king, surrounded by his twelve peers — Roland, Oliver, Ogier the Dane, Turpin the Archbishop, and the rest.

The Russian tradition remembered the bogatyrs of the byliny, the great epic songs of old Rus. Ilya Muromets was a peasant’s son who, at the age of thirty-three, gained supernatural strength and went to the court of Prince Vladimir of Kiev. Dobrynya Nikitich was a nobleman and a diplomat. Alyosha Popovich was the clever one, the trickster-hero who could out-think his enemies. The three heroes are the Russian answer to the French chansons de geste: the defenders of the land, the great champions, the wise fools.

William Tell and El Cid

The Swiss remembered William Tell, the crossbowman of the early fourteenth century who refused to bow to the hat of the Austrian bailiff Gessler and was forced to shoot an apple from the head of his own son. The earliest account, in the White Book of Sarnen of 1470, presents Tell as a historical figure, and the legend became the foundation myth of the Swiss confederation.

The Spanish remembered El Cid, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c. 1043–1099), the Castilian knight who fought for Christian and Muslim lords alike, captured Valencia, and was buried sitting on his horse at the gates of the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña. The Cantar de mio Cid of c. 1207 is the great Spanish chanson, and the figure of the Cid became the model of the Christian knight in the long centuries of the Reconquista.

The Chevalier d’Orléans and the Warrior Saints

The French tradition also remembered the Chevalier d’Orléans — that is, Joan of Arc, the seventeen-year-old peasant girl of Lorraine who fought her way to the Dauphin at Chinon, led the French armies to victory at Orléans in 1429, and was afterwards captured, sold to the English, tried as a heretic, and burned at Rouen in 1431. The rehabilitation trial of 1456 cleared her name, and she was canonised in 1920.

Other warrior saints, like Saint George, Saint Denis, Saint Wenceslas, and Saint Margaret, were remembered in the popular tradition less for their martyrdoms than for their physical courage, their battles with dragons and demons, and their appearance on the banners of medieval armies. Saint George and the Dragon is the most enduring of these legends, and it has its own place in the wider tradition of European Folklore.

Sigurd, Beowulf, and the Heroic North

The Norse world remembered Sigurd (the German Siegfried), the slayer of the dragon Fafnir, the owner of the cursed ring of the Nibelungs, the lover of the valkyrie Brynhildr. The Völsunga saga of the thirteenth century and the Nibelungenlied of the early thirteenth are the two great texts of the legend, and they shaped the imagination of Wagner, of Tolkien, and of every subsequent fantasy writer. The Norse also remembered the heroic sagas of Iceland, which preserve the memory of the tenth- and eleventh-century settlers of that wild island and their often violent feuds.

The Anglo-Saxon Beowulf is a near-contemporary of the Norse sagas, and his tale has much in common with the Norse heroic tradition. The dragon he fights at the end of the poem is the cousin of Fafnir. The hero who dies defending his people is the model of the Norse ideal.

Tristan and the Late Medieval Romance

The figure of Tristan (or Tristram) is one of the great loves of medieval European literature. The earliest French roman de Tristan of c. 1150 tells the story of the knight who is sent to fetch the Irish princess Iseult for his uncle King Mark, falls in love with her on the way back, and is discovered and driven into the forest, where the lovers live in a kind of perpetual doomed ecstasy. Gottfried von Strassburg’s German Tristan of c. 1210 is the supreme version. The story of Tristan and Iseult is the model of the courtly love affair, and it remained popular for centuries.

The Outlaws of the Late Middle Ages

The late medieval period produced a great wave of folk-outlaw figures, the counterparts of the older Robin Hood. The German tradition remembered the robber-barons of the Rhine, the wild counts who preyed on the rich and were sung of in the popular ballads. The Slavic tradition remembered the hajduks, the Christian outlaws who lived in the mountains of the Balkans and fought against the Ottoman power. The Italian tradition remembered the brigand as a figure of popular resistance. The Scottish tradition remembered Rob Roy MacGregor, the cattle-dealer and outlaw of the early eighteenth century whose memory was preserved in the ballads and in the novels of Walter Scott.

Heroic Virtues and Vices

The medieval European hero is, on the whole, an admirable figure, but he is rarely a simple one. The chansons de geste hero is loyal to his lord but often violent to his enemies; Roland refuses to blow his horn partly because he does not wish to seem a coward. The roman courtois hero is brave but also subject to a code of love that can lead him to betray his king. The outlaw hero steals, kills, and breaks the law; but he does it in the name of a higher justice. The folk saint may be a young woman condemned by the official Church and worshipped by the people. The medieval hero is, in short, a complicated figure, and the medieval audience was able to hold all of these complications in mind at once. The hero is the figure through whom the culture explores its own conflicts: loyalty against prudence, duty against love, the law of the king against the law of the people, the law of the Church against the law of the heart.

The Hero and the Landscape

The medieval European hero is inseparable from the landscape. Beowulf dies in the land of the Geats, fighting the dragon that has ravaged his people. Robin Hood lives in the greenwood of Sherwood. The Cid is buried at San Pedro de Cardeña, looking out over the Castilian plain. The bogatyrs ride across the Russian steppe. William Tell stands on the Alpine pass. The hero belongs to a particular ground, and the memory of the hero is the memory of the people and the land from which the hero came. The folk hero is, in this sense, a geographical as well as a narrative figure, and the comparison of the heroes is in part a comparison of the landscapes that produced them.