Acceso usuarios
Florian Kragl
Medieval literature and especially heroic poetry seem to irritate modern readers in many ways, which also poses a serious challenge to narratological description. The protagonists of heroic poetry are particularly challenging as they are usually perceived as «flat», due to their lack of psychological depth, and thus do not seem to be able to motivate the events on the storyline. Drawing on examples from the Chanson de Roland and the Rolandslied, the article scrutinizes this perceived flatness and passiveness of character from the perspective of the semi-orality of medieval literature. It proposes to replace a modern reading that privileges the written word with a more flexible, performance-related approach. Such an approach invites reading between the lines and can disclose passages of irony and related phenomena. As a consequence, what the protagonists claim to do – and what, in its literal sense, often appears to be illogical or even absurd –, becomes psychologically plausible or at least understandable against the backdrop of performance.
