Dee Finney's blog September 28, 2012 page 317 GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH

Geoffrey was probably born some time between 1100 and 1110^[2] in Wales or theWelsh Marches. He must have reached the age of majority by 1129, when he is recorded as witnessing a charter.

In his Historia, Geoffrey refers to himself as Galfridus Monumetensis, "Geoffrey of Monmouth", which indicates a significant connection to Monmouth, Wales, and which may refer to his birthplace.^[3] Geoffrey's works attest to some acquaintance with the place-names of the region.^[3] To contemporaries, Geoffrey was known as Galfridus Artur(us) or variants thereof.^[2]^[3] The "Arthur" in these versions of his name may indicate the name of his father, or a nickname based on Geoffrey's scholarly interests.^[2]

Earlier scholars assumed that Geoffrey was Welsh or at least spoke Welsh.^[2] However, Geoffrey's knowledge of the Welsh language appears to have been slight,^[2] and it is now recognised that there is no real evidence that Geoffrey was of either Welsh or Cambro-Norman descent, unlike for instance, Gerald of Wales.^[3] He is likely to have sprung from the same French-speaking elite of the Welsh border country as the writers Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, to whom Geoffrey dedicated versions of his Historia Regum Britanniae.^[2] It has been argued, by Frank Stenton among others, that Geoffrey's parents may have been among the many Bretons who took part in William I's Conquest and settled in the southeast of Wales.^[3] Monmouth had been in the hands of Breton lords since 1075^[3] or 1086^[2] and the names Galfridus and Arthur (if interpreted as a patronymic) were more common among the Bretons than the Welsh.^[3]

He may have served for a while in a Benedictine priory in Monmouth.^[4] However, most of his adult life appears to have been spent outside Wales. Between 1129 and 1151 his name appears on six charters in the Oxford area, sometimes styled magister("teacher").^[2] He was probably a secular canon of St. George's college. All the charters signed by Geoffrey are also signed byWalter, Archdeacon of Oxford, also a canon at that church. Another frequent co-signatory is Ralph of Monmouth, a canon ofLincoln.^[2]

On 21 February 1152 Archbishop Theobald consecrated Geoffrey as bishop of St Asaph, having ordained him a priest 10 days before. "There is no evidence that he ever visited his see," writes Lewis Thorpe, "and indeed the wars of Owain Gwynedd make this most unlikely."^[5] He appears to have died between 25 December 1154 and 24 December 1155, in 1155 according to Welsh chronicles, when his apparent successor, Richard, took office.^[2]

Historia Regum Britanniae

Geoffrey wrote several works of interest, all in Latin, the language of learning and literature in Europe during the medieval period. His major work was the Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), the work best known to modern readers. It relates the purported history of Britain, from its first settlement by Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas, to the death of Cadwallader in the 7th century, taking in Julius Caesar's invasions of Britain, two kings, Leir and Cymbeline, later immortalized byWilliam Shakespeare, and one of the earliest developed narratives of King Arthur.

Geoffrey claims in his dedication that the book is a translation of an "ancient book in the British language that told in orderly fashion the deeds of all the kings of Britain", given to him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. Modern historians have dismissed this claim.^[6]It is, however, likely that the Archdeacon furnished Geoffrey with some materials in the Welsh language that helped inspire his work, as Geoffrey's position and acquaintance with the Archdeacon would not have afforded him the luxury of fabricating such a claim outright.^[7] Much of it is based on the Historia Britonum, a 9th century Welsh-Latin historical compilation, Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and Gildas's sixth-century polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae expanded with material fromBardic oral tradition, genealogical tracts, and embellished by Geoffrey's own imagination.^[8] In an exchange of manuscript material for their own histories, Robert of Torigny gave Henry of Huntingdon a copy of Historia regum Britanniae, which both Robert and Henry used uncritically as authentic history and subsequently used in their own works,^[9] by which means some of Geoffrey's fictions became embedded in popular history.

Historia Regum Britanniae is now acknowledged as a literary work of national myth containing little reliable history. This has since led many modern scholars to agree with William of Newburgh, who wrote around 1190 that "it is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, or indeed about his predecessors from Vortigern onwards, was made up, partly by himself and partly by others".^[10] Other contemporaries were similarly unconvinced by Geoffrey's "History". For example, Giraldus Cambrensis recounts the experience of a man possessed by demons: "If the evil spirits oppressed him too much, the Gospel of St John was placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished; but when the book was removed, and the History of the Britons by 'Geoffrey Arthur' (as Geoffrey named himself) was substituted in its place, they instantly reappeared in greater numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the book."^[^11]

However, his major work was widely disseminated across the whole of Medieval Western Europe: Acton Griscom listed 186 extant manuscripts in 1929, and others have been identified since.^[12] It enjoyed a significant afterlife in a variety of forms, including translations/adaptations such as the Anglo-Norman Roman de Brut of Wace, the Middle English Brut of Layamon, and several anonymous Middle Welsh versions known as Brut y Brenhinedd ("Brut of the kings").^[13] where it was generally accepted as a true account.

Other writings

For more details on this topic, see Prophetiae Merlini.

The earliest of Geoffrey's writings to appear was probably the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin), which he wrote at some point before 1135, and which appears both independently and incorporated into the Historia Regum Britanniae. It consists of a series of obscure prophetic utterances attributed to Merlin, which Geoffrey claimed to have translated from an unspecified language.

Geoffrey's structuring and reshaping of the Merlin and Arthur myths engendered the vast popularity of Merlin and Arthur myths in later literature, a popularity that lasts to this day; he is generally viewed by scholars as the major establisher of the Arthurian canon.^[14] The Historia's effect on the legend of King Arthur was so vast that Arthurian works have been categorized as "pre-" or "post-Galfridian" depending on whether or not they were influenced by him.

The third work attributed to Geoffrey is another hexameter poem Vita Merlini ("Life of Merlin"). The Vita is based much more closely on traditional material about Merlin than are the other works; here he is known as Merlin of the Woods (Merlinus Sylvestris) or Scottish Merlin (Merlinus Caledonius), and is portrayed as an old man living as a crazed and grief-stricken outcast in the forest. The story is set long after the timeframe of Historia's Merlin, but the author tries to synchronize the works with references to the mad prophet's previous dealings with Vortigern and Arthur. The Vita did not circulate widely, and the attribution to Geoffrey appears in only one late 13th century manuscript, but contains recognisably Galfridian elements in its construction and content, and most critics are content to recognise it as his.^[2]

Notes

^ Polydore Vergil's sceptical reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth provoked at first a reaction of denial in England, "yet the seeds of doubt once sown" eventually replaced Geoffrey's romances with a new Renaissance historical approach, according to Hans Baron, "Fifteenth-century civilisation and the Renaissance", in The New Cambridge Modern history, vol. 1 1957:56.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k J. C. Crick, "Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 7 June 2009
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Roberts, "Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regnum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd", p. 98.
^ Dunn, Charles W. (1958). Bibliographical Note to History of the Kings of Britain. E.P Dutton & Co..
^ From the introduction to his translation of The History of the Kings of Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 12.
^ Richard M. Loomis, The Romance of Arthur New York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc. 1994, pg. 59
^ Michael Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 12
^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain pp. 14–19.
^ C. Warren Hollister, Henry I (Yale English Monarchs), 2001:11 note44.
^ Quoted by Thorpe, Kings of Britain, p. 17.
^ Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales/The Description of Wales (Lewis Thorpe ed.), Penguin, 1978, Chapter 5, p 116.
^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain p. 28
^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain p. 29
^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain, p. 20ff., particularly pp. 20–22 & 28–31.

eferences and further reading

Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Edited and translated by Michael Faletra. Broadview Books: Peterborough, Ontario, 2008. ISBN 1-55111-639-1
Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. Translated, with introduction and index, by Lewis Thorpe. Penguin Books: London, 1966. ISBN 0-14-044170-0
Parry, John Jay, and Robert Caldwell. "Geoffrey of Monmouth" in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Roger S. Loomis (ed.). Clarendon Press: Oxford University. 1959. ISBN 0-19-811588-1
Morris, John. The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650. Barnes & Noble Books: New York. 1996 (originally 1973). ISBN 1-84212-477-3
Roberts, Brynley F.. "Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regnum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd" in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1991, ISBN 0-7083-1307-8
Curley, Michael. Geoffrey of Monmouth. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.
Echard, Siân. Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0521021524
N. J. Higham. King Arthur: Myth-making and History, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0-415-21305-3
Echard, Siân, ed. The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature: The Development and Dissemination of the Arthurian Legend in Medieval Latin. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0708322017

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Geoffrey of Monmouth

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Geoffrey of Monmouth

Latin Chroniclers from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries: Geoffrey of Monmouth from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume I, 1907–21.

Editions of the Latin Text

Hammer, Jacob/ Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, a variant version. Edited by Jacob Hammer. Medieval Academy Books, No. 57 (1951). Medieval Academy Electronic Editions.

nglish translations available on the web

Historia Regum Britanniae:
- Histories of the Kings of Britain, tr. by Sebastian Evans, at Sacred Texts
- By Aaron Thompson with revisions by J. A. Giles at http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/geoffrey_thompson.pdf. (PDF)
- (Arthurian passages only) edited and translated by J. A. Giles at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/geofhkb.htm.
Vita Merlini, Basil Clarke's English translation from Life of Merlin: Vita Merlini (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973).
- At Jones the Celtic Encyclopedia
- At Sacred-texts.com

Background

The Prophetiae is in some ways dependent on the De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae of Gildas.^[1] From Gildas and NenniusGeoffrey took the figure of Ambrosius Aurelianus, who figures in the preface to the prophecies (under a variant name): there is then a confusion made between Ambrosius and Merlin, deliberately done.^[6]

When Geoffrey's Historia was largely translated as the Roman de Brut, the material on Merlin's prophecies was omitted. It was still read in Latin, but was displaced for readers in French, and then English, by other political prophecy.^[7]

This work not only launched Merlin as a character of Arthurian legend: it also created a genre of prophecy. A distinctively English style of political prophecy, which as been called Galfridian, was created, in which animals stand for particular political figures.^[8]Political prophecy in this style remained popular for at least 400 years. It was subversive, and the figure of the prophetic Merlin was strongly identified with it.^[9]

Content and the character of Merlin

The Prophetiae is the work that introduced the character of Merlin (Merlinus), as he later appears in Arthurian legend. He mixes pagan and Christian elements.^[4] In this work Geoffrey drew from the established Welsh tradition of prophetic writing attributed to the sage Myrddin, though his knowledge of Myrddin's story at this stage in his career appears to have been slight.^[10]

In the preface Vortigern asks Ambrosius (Merlin) to interpret the meaning of a vision. In it two dragons fought, one red and one white. Merlin replies that the Red Dragon meant the British race, the White Dragon the Saxons. The Saxons would be victorious. A long prophetic sequence forms the body of the work, relating mainly to the wars.^[6]

Many of its prophecies referring to historical and political events up to Geoffrey's lifetime can be identified – for example, the sinking of the White Ship in 1120, when William Adelin, son of Henry I, died.^[11]

Geoffrey introduced the spelling "Merlin", derived from the Welsh "Myrddin". The Welsh scholar Rachel Bromwich observed that this "change from medial dd > l is curious. It was explained by Gaston Paris as caused by the undesirable associations of the French word merde".^[12]

Influence

The first work about the prophet Myrddin in a language other than Welsh, the Prophetiae was widely read — and believed — much as the prophecies of Nostradamus were centuries later; John Jay Parry and Robert Caldwell note that the Prophetiae Merlini "were taken most seriously, even by the learned and worldly wise, in many nations", and list examples of this credulity as late as 1445.^[13]

Ordericus Vitalis quoted from the Prophetiae around 1134–5.^[14] At much the same time, and in the same area, Abbot Suger copied some of the prophecies almost exactly in his Life of Louis the Fat, for the purpose of praising Henry I of England.^[15] In the 1140s or early 1150s John of Cornwall produced another work collecting prophecies, that drew on the Prophetiae. It contained elements from other sources, however, which predominate.^[16] This work was also named Prophetiae Merlini. Gunnlaugr Leifsson made an Icelandic translation of the prophecies, Merlinús spá.^[17] There is a 15th-century English manuscript commentary on Geoffrey's work.^[18]

In the 16th century the founding legends of British history came under strong criticism, in particular from Polydore Vergil. On the other hand they had their defenders, and there was a revival of Arthurian lore with a Protestant slant. By the 17th century Geoffrey's history in general, and Merlin's prophecies in particular, had become largely discredited as fabrications, for example as attacked byWilliam Perkins.^[19] But the politics of the Union of the Crowns of 1603 gave the prophecies a short new lease of life. The Whole Prophesie of Scotland of that year treated Merlin's prophecies as authoritative.^[20] James Maxwell, a student of prophecy who put it to political use in the reign of James VI and I, distinguished between the Welsh and "Caledonian" Merlins.^[21]

otes

^ ^a ^b Richard Barber (18 March 1999). Arthurian Literature. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-85991-163-4. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Helen Fulton (1 February 2012). A Companion to Arthurian Literature. John Wiley & Sons. p. 98. ISBN 978-0-470-67237-2. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Christopher Harper-Bill; Elisabeth Van Houts (2007). A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. pp. 200–.ISBN 978-1-84383-341-3. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ ^a ^b Laura C. Lambdin; Robert T. Lambdin (2008). Arthurian Writers: A Biographical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-313-34682-8. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ James L. Kugel (1990). Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Cornell University Press. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-8014-9568-7. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ ^a ^b Libellus Merlini in Lewis Spence, A Dictionary of Medieval Romance and Romance Writers (1913), pp. 222–3; archive.org.
^ Lesley Ann Coote (2000). Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England. Boydell & Brewer. p. 101. ISBN 978-1-903153-03-1. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (1911), pp. 4–5;archive.org.
^ Bart Van Es (5 December 2002). Spenser's Forms of History. Oxford University Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-19-924970-1. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Ziolkowski, Jan (1990). "The Nature of Prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini", p. 152. In Kugel, James L. (Ed.), Poetry and Prophecy: the Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Cornell.
^ "Geoffrey of Monmouth". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
^ Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads, second edition [Cardiff: University of Wales, 1978], p. 472 n.1.
^ John Jay Parry and Robert Caldwell. "Geoffrey of Monmouth" in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Roger S. Loomis (ed.), Clarendon Press, Oxford University, 1959, p. 79
^ Siân Echard (10 September 1998). Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition. Cambridge University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-521-62126-7. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Lindy Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France (1998), p. 39 and p. 42.
^ A. G. Rigg (10 December 1992). A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066-1422. Cambridge University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-521-41594-1. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Harald Kittel; Juliane House; Brigitte Schultze (30 December 2007). Übersetzung: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. Walter de Gruyter. p. 1362. ISBN 978-3-11-017145-7. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Patricia Ingham (2001). Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 54–5. ISBN 978-0-8122-3600-2. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, pp. 507–8.
^ James P. Carley; Felicity Riddy (1 August 1997). Arthurian Literature XV. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. p. 200. ISBN 978-0-85991-518-2. Retrieved 9 May 2012.
^ Roger A. Mason (27 April 2006). Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603. Cambridge University Press. p. 202. ISBN 978-0-521-02620-8. Retrieved 9 May 2012.