Value For Comparative History
In the case of the Battle of Roncevaux, historians possess both the description of an event by contemporary and fairly reliable sources and the depiction of the same event resulting from centuries of an oral tradition, in which it was magnified to epic proportions and changed almost unrecognizably.
The ability here to compare both accounts, and trace how an actual historical event is transformed into legend, is useful for the study of other events of which the only existing account is one deriving from centuries of oral tradition, and in which historians need to try to reconstruct the actual historical facts and separate them from later myth (for example, Homer's depiction of the Trojan War).
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