Les poèmes du 2e cycle de la croisade : problèmes de composition et de chronologie

Abstract

The composition and the date of the poems of the second cycle of the crusade are still in debate. MMr Cook and Crist think that a cyclical adaptator or a staff of tumblers using announces would have cast together independent songs such as the Godefroid, Baudouin de Sebourc, the Bâtard de Bouillon and the Saladin. They rejected from the cycle the Baudouin de Sebourc saying that the author would have known it only by hearing it. The eldest, the Bâtard de Bouillon would have influenced the Godefroid. The original Saladin would have two sources, an epic cycle and an Ernould including songs. Without dismissing the possibility that a lost recasting of the work could have brought the history up to Saladin's death, though previous facts, that are known to us, should have allowed the author of the Godefroid to draw from it a possible continuation, we think that the three other poems have been written — as we have them — by the author of the Baudouin de Sebourc. This author took — as he says himself — from the Godefroid the personage of Baudouin, the last of Rose's three sons chosen as the future king of Jerusalem (Baudouin II du Bourg). He wrote about his childhood, the « flower », expecting the time when he could gave the « flour » of it : his action, as he was king, in the Bâtard de Bouillon (nowadays incomplete), which is followed by the Saladin or Andrius of Chauvigny. He knows perfectly the cycle, but takes from it (and particularly from the incomplete Godefroid), only a few episodes, which he has reshaped to introduce them into a new history, in order to renew the interest of them. To this end, he uses Chronicles, a hagiographical legend, Marco Polo's book, reshaping them very freely. But the three poems have three common points : misogyny, feudal state of mind, anticlericalism, importance given to money, and also a few subjects : some of them are traditional, and come from the cycle, such as the « Vengeance Jhesus Christ », some others are romantic, such as performance that only the best knight in the world can achieve. Allusions to well-known or actual facts keep up the interest, which explains that the Pas Saladin has been brought to England. The author is very hostile to the British : he wrote in a moment when crusade-spirit was overflowed by national passion, when bastards have become very useful, when literature smothered real history. Our author's fancy, and risky cheerfulness, which are the same all along the text, lead us to think that this work was written by one author, and not by a staff. The crusade-cycle has been more developed than nowadays.