When Men Cry: Grief and Masculinity in the Song of Roland Julia Dupuis College

Masculine identity in The Song of Roland is grounded in emotional experience. From knights on the battlefield to King Charlemagne, men throughout the poem frequently weep or faint because of the intensity of their emotions. Contrary to expectations of medieval gender roles, male expressions of grief in The Song of Roland are crucial in defining and constructing acceptable forms of manhood. Performances of strong emotion during times of war are central to the male-dominated feuding culture—these descriptions provide a model of honorable conduct for knighthood and a method of legitimizing political acts of violence.

Stephen D. White’s essay “The Politics of Anger” from Anger’s Past: Social Uses of Emotion in the Middle Ages provides important historical context for the analysis of emotion and masculinity. He asserts that men operated under “well understood conventions about when it was proper to display emotion” (White 137). Emotions typically expressed in the home differed from those considered appropriate among other nobles or on the battlefield. For Roland and his men, grief is especially crucial while at war, because a lack of emotion could be considered an insult to king and country. White also explains that emotion had “a...