G. K. Chesterton

“ And the value of the translation is that if we are really to learn history we must, in a double sense of the word, learn it by heart. We must learn it at length and as it were at large; lingering over chance spaces of contemporary work, for love of its detail and one might almost say for love of its dulness. Even a random reader like myself, only dipping here and there into such things, so long as they are really things of the period, can often learn more from them than from the most careful constitutional digests or political summaries, by modern men more learned than himself. ”

“ I admire the abnegation of the translator, who is himself a very brilliant and individual writer, in having really translated the Song of Roland. It would have been easy for a man of his poetic gift to make out of it a modern poem. It might easily have been a temptation to him to deal with Roland rather as Tennyson dealt with Arthur. But the value of his vivid and very laborious service to literature is precisely that a modern man, educated on the modern histories, may find here the things he does not expect. ”

“ The jongleur must at least have selected extracts or favourite passages, or the battle would have been unduly delayed. But the tale has the same moral as the translation; since both have the same inspiration. The value of the tale was that it did suggest to the childish mind, through all the deadening effects of distance and indifference, that a man does not make such a gesture with a sword unless he feels something, and that a man does not sing unless he has something to sing about. Dull avarice and an appetite for feudal lands do not inspire such jugglery. ”