The chanson de geste represents the first manifestation of a French literary tradition, with its oldest extant written text dating from around 1098. This is the Chanson de Roland, preserved in the Oxford Manuscript Digby 23. These chansons, and the Chanson de Roland in particular, have been the focus of critical attention from the nineteenth century onwards, as theories of their origins, the means of their composition and dissemination, their relation to history, and their function as ideological and literary models have been repeatedly constructed and deconstructed. Whether we take the view expressed by Gaston Paris in the late nineteenth century and see the chansons de geste as works of the collective imagination that grew and evolved as part of a nascent national consciousness (traditionalism), or whether we espouse the view of Joseph Bédier, who in the early years of the twentieth century suggested that the chansons de geste were consciously and spontaneously created by individual poets (individualism), seems to matter relatively little nowadays. The essential point to note here is that epic texts, by their very nature as texts spanning the oral/literary divide, were subject to mouvance – that is, to reinvention, renewal and rewriting. Even if they were composed as integral poems, their subsequent dissemination through singing and performance, and through repeated copying over the years, produced living texts, open to transformation and regeneration in response to their changing context.