The Chanson de Roland, composed around 1100, narrates the Battle of Roncevaux in laisses of varying length, using epic repetition and the tragic grandeur of Roland's death to define the values of Carolingian chivalry for medieval French audiences; The laisse technique of the chanson de geste is illustrated by the famous laisses similaires describing Roland's death, where the same event is narrated three times with slight variations, creating ritual solemnity through repetition rather than narrative progress; Turold, the poet possibly identified in the final line of the Oxford Roland manuscript, demonstrates how the chanson de geste was a composed literary work as well as an oral performance tradition, challenging simple distinctions between oral and written medieval literature; The Chanson de Guillaume, preserving more archaic features than the Roland, shows how the genre accommodated both grandeur and comic earthiness, with the giant Rainouart fighting with a club representing a lower register that coexists with aristocratic heroism; A student reading the chanson de geste should pay attention to the laisses' irregular lengths, noticing how the poet extends some moments of action and compresses others, creating a rhythm of expansion and contraction that is the genre's primary narrative technique; The ideological content of the chansons de geste, with their celebration of crusading values, feudal loyalty, and Christian sacrifice, reveals how medieval epic served a social function of value transmission that was inseparable from its aesthetic achievements.