But who were these Wascones, and what was their quarrel with Charles? Certainly they were not Saracens or Mussulmans as the minstrels of later centuries supposed. A part of the mysterious Basque race, which has throughout the historic period occupied the high upland valleys on either side of the Western Pyrenees, and has given its name to Biscay in Spain and to Gascony in France, these mountaineers represent probably the oldest population of Europe of which any traces now remain. Their language, bearing no relation to any Aryan or Semitic tongue, is to this day one of the great unsolved enigmas of philology. As has been said, they were certainly not Mussulmans, and they may have professed and called themselves Christians, but it is not necessary to seek for any deep political combination, Christian or Mohammedan, to account for their attack on Charles’s baggage-train. The men whose ancestors had been driven, perhaps two thousand years before, into those mountains by the Celts, were determined, and had been determined ever since, to keep their last asylum free from the foot of the invader. Roman and Goth had vainly tried to subdue them, and now this Frankish interloper should have a lesson that should prevent his paying too frequent visits to their mountains. Theirs was a savage love, not merely of independence but of absolute isolation: that, and the attractions of the Frankish baggage-train seem quite sufficient to account for the disaster of Roncesvalles. Among the nobles who fell was, as has been said, Hruodland, governor of the Breton March. This is none other than the far-famed Roland of mediæval romance. The minstrels and _trouveurs_ of much later centuries have invented for him a relationship to Charlemagne, have mated him with Oliver, and have said a thousand beautiful things concerning his life and his heroic death; but, of all this, authentic history knows nothing. And yet authentic history cannot afford altogether to ignore even the Roland of romance, since it was-- De L’Allemaigne et de Rollant Et d’Olivier et de Vassaux Qui morurent en Rainschevaux, that Norman Taillefer sang as he spurred his horse and tossed his sword aloft before the battle of Hastings.[49] Even the mythical Roland had become, three centuries after the rout of Roncesvalles, a great name to conjure with.