From a study of the landscape feeling in the “Chanson de Roland”, prepared by the professor of the Universidad de Granada Juan Paredes Núñez; to the epic call to combat in Mío Cid and Bertrán de Born, by Antonio R. Rubio Flores; and the Latine language of the book of Alexandre, by José María Bellido Morillas; the epic and old Spanish ballads, by Giuseppe di Stefano; time and space in the “Chanson des Nibelungen”; or the mixture of genres in late chansons de geste, by Claude Roussel; the book Les chansons de geste, edited by the Universidad de Granada, includes the proceedings of the XVI Congrès Internacional de la Sociètè Rencesvals, pour l´Étude des Épopées Romanes held in Granada, and about fifty communications and papers of specialists of different countries of the world who gathered in Granada in July 2003.
Professors Carlos Alvar and Juan Paredes Núñez are the persons in charge of the edition of this volume which includes in 668 pages works in French and Spanish on the study of Romanesque epic.
Professor Philip E. Bennett, of the University of Edinburgh, refers to the existing difference between epic and history and how they reflect real events in a very different way. “History –he says- reproduces them in their exclusive singularity, unique, never repeated, as a product of a certain nation and persons, in a certain period with unrepeatable circumstances, and they are considered as complex matters, as part of a continuous series of events in the hazardous existence of nations and persons.”
On the other hand, epic, according to Bennett, “responding to its distant historic origins also gets the uniqueness of the historic events as typical of a certain hero, nation and time, but full of emotive motives, linking and subordinating certain events to others in an ideally skilful way.”
Reference:
Professor Juan Paredes Núñez. Department of Romanesque, Italian, Galician-Portuguese and Catalan Studies. Universidad de Granada.
Phone numbers: 958 243 588 / 958 249 924.
E-mail: jparedes@ugr.es
