The Paradox of Charles the Great:
WOLFE, ANN F.
The Paradox of Charles the Great Charlemagne: The Legend and the Man. By Harold Lamb. Doubleday. 320 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review" "Saturday...
...And long after the Carolingian dynasty and the nascent empire were no more, "the remarkable monarch of a golden age" was said to sleep in his tomb, still the hope of Christian Europe, ready to take sword against the Saracens in the hour of need...
...taking strange women as he lusted after them, gorging meat after sunset on fast days, tricking his friends, he...
...He located his capital in the Aix Valley and built his Mary cathedral of old Ravenna's palace marbles and church mosaics...
...Lamb thus sums up the paradox of Charles the Great: "A half-taught brute...
...In the Loire-Rhine wilderness where the lusty fellow hunted and swam, Rome's aqueducts lay in ruins half buried beneath the woodland growth of centuries...
...Charles led no trained, organized troops, but householders who rode at his call, expecting to get home for the harvest...
...Not even the barbarians' looting and burning could entirely destroy its physical treasures or dam its civilizing influence...
...He had been born out of wedlock to dour Pepin, near-king of the land-locked, enemy-ringed Franks...
...Charlemagne did not seek the imperial crown...
...It was a crude, dark beginning for the eighth-century tribal chieftain who was to shape one of history's most glowing eras...
...Napoleon to the contrary, the Frank was no strategist...
...he once slew 4,000 pagan Saxons that their land might be Christian...
...He led them forth, for the most part, either to keep his father's promise or to widen the frontiers of Christendom...
...felt responsibility for all human beings under his rule...
...The legend inspired Frankish soldiers on their march against Moor and Avar and helped reassure hamlet folk in their dread of the plague and their fear of the world's end...
...He did not conquer for the sake of conquest, power or loot...
...As he did in his portraits of Genghis Kahn, Tamerlane and Alexander, Harold Lamb has combined scholarship and poetic imagination to interpret a leader and recreate his age...
...Reviewed by Ann F. Wolfe Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review" "Saturday Review" THE HULKING semi-barbaric forest youth was dubbed the Churl...
...Charles's renaissance would endure even if his empire did not...
...We see his hunger for learning grow, with the help of Celtic Alcuin, into the founding of schools and libraries and patronage of the arts...
...And therein, it seems to one reader, lay his greatness...
...Long before the 72-year-old king-emperor died, he saw the legendary Charlemagne take majestic form...
...We watch the mind of the primitive forest lad mature into wisdom through expanding contact with the extra-Frankish world...
...As for the tenuous empire that stretched from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean over past the Elbe and the Danube, it was something that history imposed upon the son of the isolated inland...
...Out of the brief peace of a few bright years rode the heroic-size figure of a Christian Augustus, flying the banner of Jerusalem and accompanied by a glittering company of nobles and prelates...
...In the latter cause, the enlightened ruler could act in the spirit of his age...
...When Charles learned to read, his imagination was captured by Saint Augustine and he aspired to dominion over a new City of God...
...Mount Cenis and Roncevalles were blunders...
Vol. 37 • October 1954 • No. 40
