The Legend Of Charlemagne, A Story That Deciphers Love
The Legend of Charlemagne is one of Italo Calvino’s most insightful and interesting stories. This wonderful Cuban-born writer, the son of Italians, left an impressive testimony to his acute sensitivity and clear intelligence in this mini-tale.
Calvin has always wandered between radical realism and limitless imagination. The legend of Charlemagne is a good example of this. Starting from a fantastic and almost unbelievable story, it manages to print a deep and analytical vision around passionate love.
Much of Calvino’s works have a touch of fable. The legend of Charlemagne can be categorized into this group. However, in this case the purpose goes far beyond a moral. The tale makes an impressive revelation about a couple’s love. In this theme, the position of Italo Calvino is very close to the position of contemporary psychoanalysis.
The legend of Charlemagne and love as passion
The legend of Charlemagne begins as follows: “Emperor Charlemagne fell in love, as an older man, with a young German girl. The nobles of the court were very concerned that the sovereign, possessed of ardent love and having forgotten the royal dignity, neglected the affairs of the Empire”.
It is interesting that Italo Calvino chose an older and more powerful man as the main character. Apparently, it’s the antithesis of that teenage posture in which love trumps anything. Regardless of the fact that he is an emperor, when he falls in love, he closes his eyes to everything else.
That’s why the nobles are worried. Power and love are not two realities compatible with each other, although they sometimes go hand in hand. In this case, love imposes itself on power, a matter that puts the entire empire at risk. This is just the beginning of the startling facts that follow.
love, a mistake, a spell
After having fallen so intensely in love, the unthinkable occurs. The young beloved dies suddenly. The legend of Charlemagne says that love did not die with her. The emperor, blind with pain, had the embalmed corpse taken to his room. And he didn’t want to be separated even for a moment from that inert body.
The tale continues, stating the following: “Archbishop Turpín, frightened by this macabre passion, suspected a spell and wanted to examine the corpse. Hidden under the woman’s tongue, he found a ring with a precious stone”.
It turned out that love actually hid a spell. Finally, Charlemagne was not all that in love with the young German woman. What had happened was the work of magic, not real feeling.
Italo Calvino begins here to reveal the true nature of love. There is something that the loved one carries, but it is not himself. The lover falls in love with what the person carries, not with the person himself. In terms of psychism, we would say that love is the activation of a magical element. Not in the poetic sense, but literally. To love, you give in to the rules of logic and begin to touch the impossible, hoping to make them a reality.
Love: a ring with a gemstone
The end of the Charlemagne legend could not be more surprising and overwhelming. What happened after the Archbishop found the ring was as follows: “As soon as Turpín took the ring in his hands, Charlemagne hurried to perform the funeral of the corpse and directed his love towards the person of the Archbishop. To get out of the embarrassing situation, Turpin threw the ring into Lake Constance. Charlemagne fell in love with Lake Constance and never wanted to leave its shores”.
In this final part, the nature of this inflamed love that did not give way to reason is definitively revealed. In the end, Charlemagne didn’t care what the object of his love was. So he fell in love with the Archbishop and then with the lake, which he loved forever. The secret to everything was in the magic ring.
The ring is a figure in which there are edges, but in the center there is nothing. It is a circle that delimits the void. But it has a precious stone, something that shines, that attracts, that dazzles. Finally, that’s how love is, or that’s how some people characterize it. An attempt to put a limit on emptiness, on nothing. Despite this, it has a real existence in people and even determines their lives. Passionate love is born, grows and dies in imagination.
