Display MoreI don't think the Wing Commander movie club can formally recommend The Song of Roland in any way… but I'm not sorry I watched it! As we noted at the beginning, the entire experience had the feeling of being shown a movie in 7th grade social studies because the teacher is out sick. It was impressively made and felt a bit like a 1970s Game of Thrones… but it was also very slow and relied on an understanding of medieval history shorthand that the average American does not have.
The big connection to Wing Commander is that the Song of Roland was one of the pieces of medieval literature that inspired Paladin to take up arms for the Confederation. The implication is also that Roland inspired Mr. Taggart's callsign, as he was one of the original Paladins. So at the risk of sounding like a true idiot, we should pause and ask: what's a Paladin? Well, that's one thing the Wing Commander movie was right about: Paladins are French. The original Paladins were the twelve legendary senior knights serving Charlemagne; think the French equivalent of the Knights of the Round table. Centuries later, Dungeons and Dragons adopted the term from that history for their class of knight-errant-inspired spiritual warriors (which is the context in which Ultima and similar RPGs use the term).
And here's Roland's famed sword, Durendal, the namesake of a heroic Landreich destroyer in Wing Commander False Colors.
We also learned that Orlando is the Spanish version of the name Roland… which means that the depot seen (briefly, before Seether explodes it) in the introduction to Wing Commander IV might also be named after the original paladin!
Then Durendal he bares, his sabre good?
