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The epic tales of medieval France, called chansons de geste, or -songs of deeds-, provided the chief means of cultural and imaginative expression in the French language for over one hundred and fifty years (c.1100-1250), during one of the most significant periods of social change in the history of Western civilisation. Yet they remain largely unknown to most English-speaking readers of the twenty-first century. In Heroes of the Old French Epic (Boydell, 2005) Michael Newth translated a selection of the traditional militaristic narratives dominated by male heroes. This oral-based epic genre...

"Fierabras and Floripas" relates the tale of two Saracen siblings who join forces with Charlemagne and his Peers. It was the most successful French epic tale - or chanson de geste - among audiences in medieval England, not excluding the great "Song of Roland," with which it shares much of the dynamism of their oral-based genre. Its expansive narrative explores both the limits of epic battle description and the usefulness of allegory to explore moral and spiritual issues. Two separate but successively performed original compositions, "La Destruction de Rome" and "Fierabras" are translated...

"Aymeri of Narbonne" tells the story of Aymeri, son of one of Charlemagnes paladins, who alone accepts the great emperors challenge to reconquer Narbonne in Languedoc from the Saracens. Epic siege and battle, betrayal, and acts of individual heroism evoke all the elements of the great age of French chanson de geste epitomized in the Song of Roland.
Unlike Roland and many of its imitators - tales that breathe the air of military culture and the crusade - Aymeri of Narbonne takes a step forward, toward the age of the Romance, with a second plot that is no less important than great battles and...

"The Song of Roland" is acknowledged today as the first masterpiece of French vernacular literature and one of the world's greatest epic poems. Newth's new verse translation--the first in English for more than 50 years to preserve the full poetic diction of the medieval composition--recaptures the form, feel, and flow of the original work in performance by restoring the genre's "verbal music."