Ami et Amile.

Abstract

It is not so very many years ago that students of Folk-Lore who felt that the indebtedness of Europe to the East in the matter of stories had been exaggerated were greatly interested and pleased by Bédier's work on the French Fabliau. The same scholar is now publishing the results of his investigations in the field of the French epic, results extremely suggestive, not to say exciting. What more startling than to be told that if, because of illness or accident, William of Toulouse had died before he was able to enter the monastery of Aniane and found the monastery of Gellone, not one of the chansons de geste, not one of the legends of the cycle of Orange would exist; and not one of these chansons nor one of these legends would exist, if by chance, three or more centuries after the death of this man in the Abbey of Gellone, the monks of the abbey had not been anxious to attract to his relics the pilgrims of Saint Gilles de Provence and Santiago of Compostela? Whether such a radical theory meets with general acceptance or not, it was well that some one, instead of trying to reconstruct the French epic postulated as existing before the documents which we possess, should examine the latter anew and pay especial attention to what is an interesting phenomenon in nearly every mass of epic literature, the relations of the religious bodies to these great narrative works. No one could have done this more brilliantly than Bédier. No one henceforth will forget how intimate these relations were in France. Nevertheless, it is hard to give up without a struggle what we have fancied were intermediate steps in the evolution of the French epic, when we remember what has gone on in other countries participating in epic activity, and one may well hesitate to attribute to the church so great a rôle as does this latest theorist. Doubts become especially insistent when one reads his remarks upon the Ami and Amile legend, in its three forms, the eleventh century Latin poem on friendship by Raoul le Tourtier, the chanson de geste, and the Vita sanctorum Amici et Amelii of the twelfth century. To do Bédier entire justice, his own words will be quoted as far as possible, even his summary of the legend, with which it is well to start.