Anonymous (Old French)

The Chanson de Roland, the oldest major work of French literature, was composed in Old French around 1100 by a poet whose identity is unknown. It is a chanson de geste of some 4,000 lines in assonanced laisses, built on the defeat of Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncevaux in 778 and the vengeance that follows.

The earliest and best text survives in the Oxford manuscript, Digby 23, in the Bodleian Library, copied in Anglo-Norman England in the twelfth century. Its last line names a certain Turoldus ("Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet"), but whether he was the author, a copyist or a reciter has never been settled, and the poem is credited to no one with certainty.