5

“Epic fear”. The emotion of fear as a literary subject in the French Chanson de Geste A literary system founded on the concentration and overestimation of values, such as the Chanson de Geste, can only be constructed with a set of contrasts. Therefore courage cannot really exist without fear: fear among other people, among those who must be identified as enemies to be destroyed or converted, fear among those who do not belong to the social group which almost exclusively owns courage. But also fear among the heroes themselves, who are also human beings, also creatures of God, of a God who observes them and whom they must fear. This hero’s fear, beyond its religious and moral attributes, also has a number of literary functions; it can even become an “epic subject” as soon as it enters the system of epic writing, as soon as it becomes a motivational matrix. This is the literary “subject” to be studied here.