Durendal
Durendal, Roland's sword in the eleventh-century Chanson de Roland, is the greatest blade of the Frankish epic, carried by the hero and given to him, according to the poem, by the emperor Charlemagne. Its gilded pommel holds holy relics, a tooth of Saint Peter, blood of Saint Basil and hair of Saint Denis, making the sword a reliquary as much as a weapon. Wounded and dying after the rearguard's defeat at Roncevaux, Roland refuses to let the Saracens take the blade and tries to shatter it against a marble rock; the sword survives and the rock splits open. The same motif appears in the later Old