Mal fou arda Nerbona

By commenting the capture of Narbonne as related in the Venetian version (V4) of the Chanson de Roland only, this paper intends to study the dark side of violence as revealed by the chanson de geste. An obvious counterpoint to the celebration of heroic bravery, the episode endeavours to condemn the brutality of Christian warriors and thereby encourages the reassessment of the epic imaginary of violence. Actually, in the French corpus of the Chanson de Roland, the praise of war never conceals the disturbing face of violence. The reassessment undertaken in this paper will combine two anthropological approaches: the theories of Georges Dumézil and René Girard, although very different, enable the appraisal of an ambiguous imaginary, overtly embodied by the hero, from dissimilar but complementary angles