Some "Roland" Emendations

Abstract

It is well understood that the unstressed pronouns me, te, etc., do not regularly stand after a pause or begin the sentence in Old French, and that this is also true of the adverbs i and en, the position of all these words being that of enclitics, not of proclitics. It is intelligible that sooner or later they came to be used also as proclitics, and yet may have continued to preserve, and perhaps for a considerable time, the old position in the sentence. The words Nen i ad cel (Roland, 2545) may serve as a starting point from which it may be argued that this process began in the course of the twelfth century, if not even earlier, in the case of i and probably of en. I am here concerned only with the Roland as seen in the Anglo-French of the Oxford manuscript, and with the probable early form of the poem near the beginning of the twelfth century. Neither Nen i ad cel (vs. 2545) nor Cel nen i ad (vss. 822 and 1618) can cause any difficulty as being peculiar; the form nen before a vowel is well enough known as old, and cel (or icel) is the normal original form of the accusative. But when we find N'iY ad celoi at the beginning of vs. 411 we may well pause to examine this and other instances of the impersonal expression with the negative and the pronoun cel, icel, or celui. Not that the shorter form ne does not often occur, and this before a vowel naturally becomes n', but obviously nen is the older form, and one is tempted to restore nen whenever possible in this position in the Roland text, especially in this expression, which occurs so often as to give the impression of being one of the so-called epic formulas. That it is a formula-not necessarily an epic formula-or at least was in common idiomatic use, appears from the fact that it is found in Alexis, vs. 555, Cel nen i at (MS L has Cel nen niat), where Paris printed Cel n'en i at (so also in the edition of 1911); cf. also vs. 554, Nul(s) nen i at. For an example in continental Old French see Chr6tien's Ivain, vs. 6132, in Foerster's edition, N'i a celui, ne soit bleciez, where the