Landscape/Pathetic Fallacy

You know how annoying it is when you're having a terrible day—you've failed a test or been dumped by your girlfriend—and the weather is just so dang unfeelingly beautiful? Well, poets have a way of getting around that annoyance. It's called the pathetic fallacy and it means that the weather and landscape mirror the emotions of the characters. Cool, right?

We've got a lot of pathetic fallacies happening in the Song of Roland. And given all the fighting and dying and weeping and wailing, you might be guessing that the weather forecast is pretty grim.

Just think about what happens when Roland is being decimated in the mountain pass. Back in France, people think the world itself is ending. There are violent thunderstorms, lightning, darkness at noon, even earthquakes. This is the poet's way of really emphasizing the tragedy of Ganelon's treachery and Roland's death:

Many say: "This is the end of all things,
The end of the world that we are witnessing!"
They do not know, they do not talk sense;
This is the great mourning for the death of Roland. (110.1434-37)

The universe is just as angry as the Franks.

We get a different phenomenon later when Charlemagne and his pals are hurrying after the Saracens to avenge Roland. This is no time for sobbing heavens and shaking earth, not when Charlemagne is trying to fast-track it down to Marsile.

Instead of letting the earth respond to human emotion, the poet lets human plans control the earth. Charlemagne needs more time to march? Well, then, let's just stop the sun. For three days the sun does not set at all, allowing Charlemagne and his men to march and march without stopping for the darkness (179).