Revised with an Introduction by Richard Abels. Raoul de Cambrai is one of the most violent and illuminating of the twelfth-century epic poems of chivalry known as the chansons de geste.
Two manuscript fragments of the poem, preserving different recensions of the tale, also survive. As it stands, BN fr.
The first lines Raoul I are in verse, and the remainder Raoul II is in assonance, a substitute for rhyme in which the vowels are the same but the consonants differ. The character of the poem also abruptly changes with the shift in versification, going from a realistic tale of war and vengeance to a courtly romance. The most reasonable explanation for the change is that lines to represent a later continuation of the story. They are, in effect, a different poem.
For historians Raoul I , with its brutally realistic depiction of warfare, politics, and feudal relations, is of far greater interest than Raoul II.
Miss Crosland chose to translate only the former and I have not thought to challenge her decision. The scribe of Raoul I wrote in an early thirteenth-century hand. He was copying, however, an earlier, now lost, manuscript. We cannot be certain when the poem was composed, and it is possible, maybe even probable, that Raoul I is itself a composite piece that took form over the course of decades or perhaps even centuries.
