The Song of Roland by Anonymous
Published 1100 · 136 pages · 32,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · epic poetry, chanson de geste, medieval literature, war epic
How hard is The Song of Roland to read?
The Song of Roland scores 34 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- The chanson de geste draws on a formulaic epic vocabulary — hauberks, oliphants, gonfanons, paynims — that reads as moderately archaic in translation, well below Moby-Dick's specialized whaling density but above contemporary prose. Oral-formulaic epithets ('Rollant li proz', 'Guenes li fels') repeat throughout, which narrows the working vocabulary rather than expanding it.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Written in laisses of assonanced decasyllables, the poem favors short, paratactic clauses and repeated syntactic patterns typical of oral-formulaic composition — closer to 1984's directness than to Jamesian hypotaxis. Sentences state action and consequence in sequence rather than nesting subordinate clauses.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- The poem stays almost entirely in the register of concrete action — swords breaking, horses falling, messengers riding — rather than philosophical reflection. Its ideas about loyalty, pride, and holy war are dramatized through combat and dialogue rather than argued directly, closer to Remains of the Day's buried abstraction than to Brothers Karamazov's explicit debate.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Catalog-like passages naming the twelve peers, Saracen kings, and geography (Roncevaux, Zaragoza, Aachen) pack in proper nouns quickly, and the poem's famous 'laisses similaires' retell the same event three times with variation, demanding readers track repetition and difference. Still, the plot itself is compact and linear, keeping density below War and Peace's scope.
- Narrative indirection: 28 out of 100
- An intrusive narrator states moral judgments outright — Ganelon is a traitor, Roland's cause is righteous — leaving little for readers to infer, much like 1984's direct exposition. The poem tells you what to feel about each character before and as they act.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The oliphant horn Roland refuses to blow becomes a concentrated symbol of pride versus duty, and the Christian-Saracen conflict carries explicit religious symbolism of martyrdom and holy war. It sits below Moby-Dick's saturating symbolism but above a book like To Kill a Mockingbird in how consistently objects and acts carry doctrinal weight.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- The poem's sympathies are stated plainly — the Franks are right, the Saracens are wrong, Roland's pride is only lightly second-guessed — leaving almost no gap between what the text says and what it means. This sincerity places it near Moby-Dick's earnest register rather than Lolita's seductive unreliability.
- Resolution withholding: 20 out of 100
- The plot resolves fully: Roland dies, Charlemagne crushes the Saracen counterattack under Baligant, and Ganelon is tried and executed by combat. Nothing is left ambiguous about outcomes, closer to Beach Read's closed ending than to Lolita's open aftermath.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- The narrative is essentially linear, but its signature device — three successive laisses retelling the same moment with small variations — introduces a formal repetition uncommon outside oral epic tradition. That trebling technique pushes it above a strictly chronological epic like War and Peace without approaching the fragmentation of Pedro Paramo.
How The Song of Roland is regarded
The Song of Roland holds a literary regard score of 62 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.