“Flying birds, excellent birds…”

When you keep an eye on the media for references to Charlemagne, the results are sometimes peculiar—for example, this recent leadership profile in, of all places, Investor’s Business Daily—but even I didn’t expect to find Charlemagne in a preview of a video game based on the Lego version of Indiana Jones.

But there he is, mentioned by a writer who lists the scenes he hopes will be included in an Indiana Jones Lego video game:

A favourite funny moment from The Last Crusade… Indiana and his father, Professor Henry Jones, are in a car being chased by a couple of German aeroplanes and end up crashing on a beach. One plane turns through the air and bears down on the hapless pair. Professor Jones suddenly opens up his umbrella, flaps it around and starts clucking like a chicken while advancing on birds on the sand.

Indy looks at him as if he’s saying, ‘WTF?’, but the birds are scared into flight and the plane collides with the flock and crashes and burns. “I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne”, says Professor Jones. “Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky…” What a guy.

The line attributed to Charlemagne by Sean Connery’s character has proven to be remarkably durable. It’s a favorite epigram on quotation sites, .sig files, and MySpace pages, and Wikipedia cites it as an example of Charlemagne’s “cultural significance.”

I’ve never seen any evidence that Charlemagne actually said it.

Granted, I haven’t read every word written about Charlemagne, nor have I read every romance, chanson, or miscellaneous fragment of the Matter of France. However, I have read everything that an inquisitive screenwriter with a Charlemagne fixation might have encountered, such as sources translated into English. But the line cited by Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., isn’t in Einhard or Notker; it isn’t in any of the commonly republished capitularies, annals, or letters; it’s not in The Song of Roland or in popular translations of the Italian Charlemagne stories; and it’s not in the main American source for modern, fictionalized Charlemagniana: Bulfinch’s Legends of Charlemagne.

Furthermore, the line doesn’t even appear in major literary and historical sources that would have been unfamiliar to most non-scholars when the movie was made in 1989. “The Battle of the Birds,” a political allegory by Theodulf of Orleans, sounds like the first place to look, doesn’t it? But Theodulf wrote his poem three years after Charlemagne’s death, and while he does liken flocks of birds to warring armies, he doesn’t much dwell on the rocks and the trees. The Visio Wettini, in which Walahfrid Strabo recounts the deathbed visions of his mentor, also seems like a likely source for philosophical musings, but even though Walahfrid does include a vision of Charlemagne in Hell, the emperor is too busy having his genitals eaten by an animal to utter anything as lovely as the line from the film.

More pedantically, the line quoted by the elder Dr. Jones is a dubious thing for the real Charlemagne to have said. According to Bernard Bachrach, the Carolingian army drew on a pool of approximately 2 million men between the ages of 15 and 55. They had inherited late Roman military tactics, the troops were well trained, and morale was high. Despite the wise observations his scholars sometimes attributed to him, Charlemagne had no pressing reason, beyond accounting for the role of topography and weather in military planning, to speculate about nature either as an aid to military power or as a peaceful, metaphysical alternative to it.

But those aren’t the only plausible readings of the pseudo-Carolingian quote. It might be the cry of a Luddite, the sigh of a nature lover, or the reassuring mantra of a pacifist. It might also be the credo of a Christian warlord who wants God’s creation to be his ally—or who fervently believes that it already is.

In the movie, the bemused reaction of Indiana Jones to the bird episode suggests that we’re meant to see his father’s literal enactment of the line as surprising, even ironic, as if its original context were more solemn or noble. Adding to the allure of the quote is its meter: it’s a pentameter line, but the final four feet are anapests; that many anapests signal formal poetic intentions to the ear of an English speaker. Finally, by attributing the quote to a medieval figure whose name is synonymous with legend—or whose French name is at least a euphonious enigma—the screenwriter cleverly evokes a mystical past while hinting at credible history behind lots of implausible fantasy. By seeming to allude to religion, nature, legend, and poetry, this little line plays right into modern assumptions about things medieval. It seems authentic, even if it’s not.

For centuries, medieval storytellers used Charlemagne to evoke a mythic past, and while it’s fittingly medieval of their modern counterparts to do the same by citing sources that never existed—just like Sir Thomas Malory claiming that “the Freynsh booke makyth mencion” of something that the French book maketh no such mention of at all—I find it charming that the Indiana Jones screenwriter wound up inventing the only Charlemagne “quote” that most people are likely to remember.

A few years ago, someone on the Mediev-L listserv asked about this elusive quote. The list archive is offline, but I do remember that the question stumped the scholars who responded. Dr. Jones’s pseudo-scholarly quip may have a genuine source; if so, I’d be pleased if a sharp-eyed scholar could come along to render this blog post obsolete.

In the meantime, I can easily see why a plausible but spurious reference to Charlemagne by an elderly, fictional medievalist has intrigued and enamored so many. Before 1989, this lyrical line didn’t mean anything to anyone, so today you can say it—let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky—and evoke a universe of medieval mystery, while really saying nothing at all.

[January 12, 2008: I posted an update of sorts here.]

[November 30, 2025: With the recent death of Tom Stoppard, people have been discussing his role as an uncredited script doctor for “Last Crusade.” Could he have added this line to the script? Perhaps a Stoppard scholar might offer a clue or two.]

“I will walk in the garden, and feel religion within…”

On Sunday mornings, the ringing of church bells rolls right down the side-streets and echoes through the bushes and trees. Heed their call and hike up the hill; at the top you’ll find a gothic cathedral. Stunning in its own right, it also looms over one of Washington’s prettiest places: the Bishop’s Garden, a thriving reminder of 14th-century monastic life.

In one corner of the garden is something even older: an anachronism within an anachronism, a massive stone baptismal font encircled by special plants. This little “garden room,” a small sign explains, is here to evoke the ninth century, with each leaf and shoot a living monument to the era of Charlemagne. The emperor might have approved, in passing, of this collection of flowers and herbs. But twelve centuries later, its existence owes less to Charlemagne and more to the legacy of a mostly forgotten man, a monk named Walahfrid Strabo.

Walahfrid first beheld Reichenau at the age of eight. His parents were humble and poor, but the brothers on the island in Lake Constance saw promise in this strange little boy, this strabo—this “squinter”—who readily took to the life of the mind. In his later writings, he wryly recalled his barbaric roots, but the library at Reichenau was truly where Walahfrid Strabo was born.

Walahfrid’s heart never left that quiet island, not even after he was sent to Fulda for further study, nor during his nine years at Aachen, where he tutored Charles, the son of Emperor Louis. In 838, when Louis rewarded Walahfrid with an abbacy, the monk, then thirty, went home to Reichenau at last. Except for two years of political exile and the occasional diplomatic mission, Walahfrid spent the rest of his brief life there. In the decade left to him, he polished his poems, he wrote to a scandalous friend, and he worked, when he could, in his garden.

We know about the garden because of one poem: Walahfrid’s 444-line De Cultura Hortorum, “On the Cultivation of Gardens,” now more commonly known as his Hortulus, “the little garden.”

In a lively preface, Walahfrid exhorts others to share his commitment to gardening:

For whatever the land you possess, whether it be where sand
And gravel lie barren and dead, or where fruits grow heavy
In rich moist ground; whether high on a steep hillside,
Easy ground in the plain or rough among sloping valleys—
Wherever it is, your land cannot fail to produce
Its native plants. If you do not let laziness clog
Your labor, if you do not insult with misguided efforts
The gardener’s multifarious wealth, and if you do not
Refuse to harden or dirty your hands in the open air
Or to spread whole baskets of dung on the sun-parched soil—
then, you may rest assured, your soil will not fail you.

Although bookish by nature, Walahfrid makes clear that he is not merely transmitting found knowledge:

This I have learnt not only from common opinion
And searching about in old books, but from experience—
Experience of hard work and sacrifice of many days
When I might have rested, but chose instead to labor.

With quiet joy, Walahfrid walks the reader through his garden, a former mess of nettles and weeds now made useful and neat through careful springtime tending. His tour leads past rows of long-necked poppies, brilliant purple irises, pungent rue, and sprigs of fragrant mint. At every step, he catalogs the practical uses of his garden plants: wormwood, he claims, can cure a headache; fennel loosens the bowels, and it cures a cough when added to wine.

But Walahfrid’s thoughts range far beyond his humble garden, and his Hortulus is a fertile bed of budding notions. In sage, when new growth chokes its old leaves, Walahfrid sees “the germ of civil war.” Gourd-vines remind him of shields, ladders, and girls spinning wool; he admires their tenacity in a storm, and he marvels at how they aspire “to grow high from a humble beginning.” He points out that horehound counteracts the poisons of an evil stepmother, while pennyroyal lets him marvel at God’s bounty and contemplate the economics of scarcity. In a fit of Virgilian whimsy, Walahfrid even invokes the Muse, “who in sacred song / Canst stablish monuments of mighty wars / And mighty deeds,” all so he can more eloquently praise the heartburn-reducing properties of chervil.

Practical advice and classical flourishes, political allegory and good humor, philosophical musings and mock-epic—here and there, modest ideas and tender allusions break through the surface of the Hortulus, intertwine a little, and grow toward nothing in particular. In the end, Walahfrid’s garden path leads to the lily and the rose, Christian symbols both, each leaning against the other; he spots them just as he begins to tire. It would be odd indeed if a ninth-century abbot did not end his gardening book in this way—but it is odd already that Walahfrid has left this literary garden, in which he glimpses all creation, at fewer than 500 lines.

To understand Walahfrid’s brevity, close his Hortulus. Tuck it under your arm, pass beneath the open archway, and visit the real hortulus, which blooms in the shadow of a cathedral that Walahfrid never could have imagined. Here grows rosemary; here grows the fleur de lys; here grow fennel, black cumin, and green-leafed Gallic rose. In patches, bowing in their raised beds, the flowers and herbs surround the baptismal font, while around them grows a larger garden still.

Tourists and pilgrims walk its stone-paved paths. Beautiful women lounge on benches and bathe in the sun. Toddlers rush for the goldfish pond, while clergy lead visiting dignitaries beyond the bushes and bees. Across the lawn, and frozen in stone, a father forgives his lost son.

Sit and sweat in the swampy heat. Relish this riot of flowers and bushes and vines. Savor every scent. And look, if you can, for the gardener.

Squint, and you’ll see him; he peers back at you across twelve hundred years. He lives in the dear freshness of this garden, where his work is remembered by those who now spend their mornings exactly as he did: spreading dung, contending with vermin, and tending to fistfuls of moist, fragrant soil.

He wonders why your hands aren’t hardened by labor; then he glimpses his book. His smile is kind, but his glare is reproachful. He is, after all, an abbot.

“A poem is only a poem,” he tells you, his voice made tender by time, “but a garden, dear brother, is art.”

“…but when it’s your brother, sometimes you look the other way.”

What hath Tony Soprano to do with Charlemagne? Matthew Gabriele at Modern Medieval poses the question and ponders two points of comparison: Charlemagne’s coldly methodical consolidation of power, and the rex quondam et futurus vibe that resonated long after the Frankish king’s death. As someone who’s written about Charlemagne and as a proud son of the great Garden State, I’m happy to throw a few coals on the “Tony Sopranomagne” debate, letting it smolder like the hearth at Aachen on a cold winter night—or like cigarette butts in a half-eaten pork-roll sandwich at a north Jersey diner at 3 o’clock in the morning.

While the description of Charlemagne as a “cold-blooded thug” is certainly plausible for the king’s earlier years, I’m not sure the comparison fully stands. Granted, Charlemagne kept his family close; he propagated a famously contentious dynasty; and, like Tony, he loved his onion rings. But generally speaking, Charlemagne was more likely to exile his enemies, not have them whacked. He finagled Bavaria from his former brother-in-law with a big-picture strategy that would have left a brute like Tony Soprano gaping in amazement. At the same time, he cultivated a loyal inner circle and maintained it through wariness, charisma, and worthy rewards rather than mob-boss paranoia. Within the modest limits of his intellectual gifts, Charlemagne was also far more inquisitive than one might expect of a man who discovered learning fairly late in life; it’s safe to suggest that, unlike Tony, Charlemagne was more enlightened at the start of his own personal season six than he was at the start of season one.

As for Matthew’s theory about the factors that caused later medieval people to doubt Charlemagne’s demise and further inflate his legend, I can’t argue with it. I’ll defer to, and eagerly await the publication of, the very neat-looking book of essays he’s editing. I should disclose, however, that I have a vested interest in a Charlemagne who isn’t dead. Think of the sequel possibilities! Becoming Charlemagne II: The Rise of the Silver Denarius. Or maybe Become Charlemagne or Ein Hard. Even better: 62,036 Weeks Later. Yes, I can already hear the rumbling voiceover at the start of the trailer: “In a world shattered by chaos, one man…”

“I’ve heard it said, or maybe read…”

Ever since I started working on you-know-what, Charlemagne has been a frustrating roommate. He can barely sign the rent check, he pretends not to hear you if you don’t flatter him (“O Father of Europe, is the shower free?”), and he can’t be bothered to scrape the meat scraps off the George Foreman. However, to my great delight, he does find himself in the news nearly every week.

If you had hoped to glimpse the holy relics supposedly acquired by Charlemagne, you’re too late: after being displayed for veneration at Aachen during a ten-day period of pilgrimage, they’re going back into the vault, like Disney DVDs, for another seven years. This Deutsche Welle report focuses on the ambivalence, even unease, that relics now inspire. Just try phoning the Vatican for their comment on the subject and you’ll see what I mean.

If you’re interested in Carolingian manuscripts but can’t get to Paris in the next two weeks, take heart: the Bibliothèque Nationale has put its current exhibition on the Web. Thoughtfully, for three of the exhibits, the online version of “Trésors carolingien: Livres manuscrits de Charlemagne à Charles le Chauve” offers one feature that merely gawking at the books under glass does not: it lets you turn the pages.

Best of all, we can expect Charlemagne to stride across the silver screen next year in Love and Virtue, an adaptation of the 16th-century poem Orlando Furioso. I’d prefer a more straightforward take on Karl and friends—but you know, I think I need to see any movie that casts Peter O’Toole as a sorcerer named Atlantes…