VI.—Why Did Ganelon Hate Roland?

Abstract

In the words of Dante, “Carlo Magno perdè la santa gesta”; he lost it thru the base treachery of his brother-in-law, Ganelon. Ganelon became a traitor, we have been told, first, because of bribes, and, second, because of his hatred of Roland. As Gaston Paris formulated it, “In the beginning, Ganelon was a traitor only because he was bought by the gold of the pagans; later on, they rendered the situation more interesting and at the same time increased the importance of Roland by adding the motive of the hatred of Ganelon against Roland.” Thus far, nearly all have been agreed; but when we go a step further and ask, What was the cause of this hatred, the answers vary: simply because the two men were step-father and step-son, says one; because Roland nominated Ganelon to a fearfully dangerous mission, says another. The second of these two reasons has the support of Ganelon's own statement at his trial, at least of his second statement, for he makes two, as will be recalled. His first statement, being a riddle, has been generally left out of consideration: it is the purpose of this paper to advance the idea, based upon a new reading of line 3758, that the step-father motive, and the dangerous mission motive, were both secondary in the poet's mind, not primary; that for the poet the primary motive, the real spring of the action, was that Ganelon, being a covetous man and envious of Roland's greater wealth, had hated him on that account before ever Charles had reached the seventh year of the Spanish war.