The Baligant Episode in the Chanson de Roland and the Historia of Peter Tudebode
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Baligant Episode in the Chanson de Roland and the Historia of Peter TudebodeVarious pieces of evidence have been gathered to show that the material in the Baligant episode is later than the contents of the rest of the Chanson de Roland, but does that mean that the text is later, and that by removing the Baligant episode we have the text of an earlier poem about Roland?If a break is to be made, the beginning of laisse 189 seems a likely point, for it is there, if anywhere, that we find what looks like a seam joining two texts.Roland and the peers and the soldiers of the rear-guard have been killed and Charlemagne and the Frankish army have taken vengeance on the killers.Saracen power in Saragossa has been smashed, and Bramimonde is beginning the traditional feminine lament for its fall.Line 2610 recapitulates line 2 and the poem's auditors anticipate a coda.All of a sudden, our expectations are derailed.The poem is not over, the story of battle is not over, for there is a greater enemy to face.We have been reminded of the "set anz tuz plens" for a quite different purpose.Back in the first year, Marsile had sent letters to Baligant in Babylon asking for reinforcements, and the emir's army is so large that it has taken seven years to organize; the huge pagan host is arriving right now, just in the nick of time, just when we (and Charlemagne) thought that all was safe.This is precisely the sort of blending of material that modern authors would do well to avoid.It is a technique which, for modern audiences, breaks the willing suspension of disbelief, reminds us that there is an author, and provokes us to pass negative judgments on his basic competence.An author who knew what he was doing would have prepared us in advance for the arrival of the emir, if only by letting us know that he existed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".