La Geste de Garin de Monglane

La Geste de Garin de Monglane is the second cycle of the three great cycles of chansons de geste created in the early days of the genre. It centres on Garin de Monglane.

One of its main characters is the Merovingian hero of war and religion, Saint William of Gellone (or Guillaume d'Orange).

The cycle of Guillaume has more unity than the other great cycles of Charlemagne or of Doon de Mayence, the various poems which compose it forming branches of the main story rather than independent epic poems. There exist numerous cyclic manuscripts in which there is an attempt at presenting a continuous histoire poétique of Guillaume and his family. Manuscript Royal 20 D xi. in the British Museum contains eighteen chansons of the cycle.

The conclusions arrived at by earlier writers are combated by Joseph Bedier in the first volume, "Le Cycle de Guillaume d'Orange" (1908), of his Legendes epiques, in which he constructs a theory that the cycle of Guillaume d'Orange grew up round the various shrines on the pilgrim route to Saint Gilles of Provence and Saint James of Compostella—that the chansons de geste were, in fact, the product of 11th and 12th century poets exploiting local ecclesiastical traditions, and were not developed from earlier poems dating back perhaps to the lifetime of Guillaume of Toulouse, the saint of Gellone.

As established in the various texts, the Monglane family tree is generally as follows (spelling of names varies from text to text):

No less than thirteen historical personages bearing the name of William (Guillaume) have been thought by various critics to have their share in the formation of the legend. William, count of Provence, son of Boso II, again delivered southern France from a Saracen invasion by his victory at Fraxinet in 973, and ended his life in a cloister. William Tow-head (Tête d'étoupe), duke of Aquitaine (d. 983), showed a fidelity to Louis IV paralleled by Guillaume d'Orange's service to Louis the Pious.

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