e fell
By Fontarabbia:"

hence Dante's record of the _dolorosa rotta_ (dolorous rout) in the
_Inferno_, where he compares the voice of Nimrod with the horn sounded
by the dying Orlando: hence the peasant in Cervantes, who is met by Don
Quixote singing the battle as he comes along the road in the morning:
and hence the song of Roland actually thundered forth by the army of
William the Conqueror as they advanced against the English.

But Charlemagne did not "fall," as Milton has stated. Nor does Pulci
make him do so. In this respect, if in little else, the Italian poet
adhered to the fact. The whole story is a remarkable instance of what
can be done by poetry and popularity towards misrepresenting and
aggrandising a petty though striking adventure. The simple fact was the
cutting off the rear of Charlemagne's army by the revolted Gascons, as
he returned from a successful expedition into Spain. Two or three only
of his nobles perished, among whom was his nephew Roland, the obscure
warden of his marches of Brittany. But Charlemagne was the temporal head
of Christendom; the poets constituted his nephew its champion; and hence
all the glories and superhuman exploits of the Orlando of Pulci and
Ariosto. The whole assumption of the wickedness of the Saracens,
particularly of the then Saracen king of Spain, whom Pulci's authority,
the pseudo-Archbishop Turpin, strangely called Marsilius, was nothing
but a pious fraud; the pretended Marsilius having been no less a person
than the great and good Abdoulrahmaun the First, who wrested the
dominion of that country out of the hands of the usurpers of his
family-rights. Yet so potent and long-lived are the most extravagant
fictions, when genius has put its heart into them, that to this day we
read of the devoted Orlando and his friends not only with gravity, but
with the liveliest emotion.

THE

BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES

A miserable man am I, cries the poet; for Orlando, beyond a doubt, died
in Roncesvalles; and die therefore he must in my verses. Altogether
impossible is it to save him. I thought to make a pleasant ending of
this my poem, so that it should be happier somehow, throughout, than
melancholy; but though Gan will die at last, Orlando must die
before him, and that makes a tragedy of all. I had a doubt whether,
consistently with the truth, I could give the reader even that sorry
satisfaction; for at the beginning of the dreadful battle, Orlando's
cousin, Rinaldo, wh