Prise d'Orange
Its fictional story follows the hero Guillaume as he captures the walled city of Orange from Saracens and marries Orable, its queen.
The surviving text of Prise was probably based on an earlier version, composed at the beginning of the 12th century, which emphasized war over love and contained a section called Siège d'Orange about Tibaut's military campaign to recapture Orange from Guillaume.
The chansons de geste are a group of around 120 poems composed in Old French in the 12th and 13th centuries about nobles affiliated with the Carolingian dynasty.
[15] In the cycle, Guillaume, an epic hero guided by divine inspiration, defends Christendom against Muslim leaders of al-Andalus.
[17] Prise and other poems in the cycle dramatize feudal concepts such as the fealty of a vassal to his lord, highlight military campaigns,[17] and often show "pagan women" who love "Christian men".
[24] Léon Gautier, Alfred Jeanroy, and Raymond Weeks, who calls it "stupid and impossible",[25] argue that Prise is entirely unrealistic.
[26] Jeanroy, in his critique, notes that major narrative elements are implausibly repeated;[27] Weeks likewise points out "not a small number of inconsistencies and repetitions", concluding that "so full is this poem of wearisome commonplaces, so deficient in epic power, that no one has yet been found to claim for it the slightest merit.
"[28] Guillebert de Laon, an escaped prisoner from the walled city of Orange,[29] visits Guillaume in Nîmes.
[29] Pretending to bring news of Tibaut from Africa, they infiltrate the city and make their way to Gloriette, the tower where Orable lives.
[39][38] Decasyllable metre is standard across the chansons de geste, including in those chronicling Guillaume's adventures,[17] and in Old French epic generally.
[46] In her view, repetition emphasizes the connections between distinct narrative elements, draws the reader's attention to important plot points, and reinforces Prise's comic episodes in particular.
[38] In this episode, called Siège d'Orange,[61] Tibaut returns to recapture the city and wife that he lost to Guillaume in the portions of the narrative that survive.
[62] Siège was thought to be completely lost until 2021, when Tamara Atkin discovered a 47-line fragment of it, incorporated into the binding of a 1528 book, in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.
[63] Around 1450, Couronnement, Charroi, and Prise were adapted in a prose text called Roman de Guillaume d'Orange,[64] which survives in two manuscripts.
[70] Claude Régnier [fr] edited Les Rédactions en vers de la Prise d'Orange, first published in 1966.
[72] Claude Lachet and Jean-Pierre Tusseau's translation of Régnier's manuscript reconstruction into modern French was published in 1972, with a second edition in 1974.
[2] Lynette R. Muir's English Prise, published in a volume edited by Glanville Price and based on the Old French text in Régnier's Rédactions, followed in 1975.
[77] According to Minnette Grunmann-Gaudet, Prise's narrative is shaped by Guillaume's struggle between the opposing roles of lover and conquering hero.
[82] In other respects, Orable is not consistent with the trope: she is older than most Saracen princesses and, unlike in other chansons, her meeting with the hero, Guillaume, is not by chance.
[83] By contrast with other chansons about his exploits, the Guillaume of Prise is generally motivated by love as opposed to fealty or religious fervour.
[39] According to William W. Kibler, Joseph Bédier's 1908 study Les Légendes épiques was the first to treat Prise as a comic text.
[17] Claude Régnier calls Prise a "masterpiece of humour", noting its "discreetly parodic" use of tropes of the epic genre.
