Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth (, ) (c. 1100 – c. 1155) was a Welsh cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British history and the popularity of tales of King Arthur. He is best known for his chronicle Historia Regum Britanniae ("History of the Kings of Britain"), widely popular in its day, credited uncritically well into the 16th century and translated to various other languages from its original Latin.

Biography

Geoffrey was probably born some time between 1100 and 1110 in Wales or the Welsh 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. Geoffrey's knowledge of the Welsh language appears to have been slight. 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"). 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. 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. The first work about this legendary prophet in a language other than Welsh, it 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.

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 mythical 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 by William 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. 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. 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 from Bardic oral tradition, genealogical tracts, and embellished by Geoffrey's own imagination. In an exchange of manuscript material for their own histories, Robert of Torigny gave Henry of Huntington a copy of Historia regum Britanniae, which both Robert and Henry used uncritically as authentic history and subsequently used in their own works, 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". 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."

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. 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"). where it was generally accepted as a true account.

Furthermore, his 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. 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 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.

See also

Adam of Usk

Henry of Huntingdon

Ranulf Higdon

William of Malmesbury

Notes

References 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 1-55111639-1

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

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. ISBN 0-19-811588-1

N. J. Higham. King Arthur: Myth-making and History, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, ISBN 0415213053

John Morris. 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

Brynley F. Roberts. "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 0708313078

Michael Skupin, including translations of the Vita Merlini.

Curley, Michael. Geoffrey of Monmouth. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Ziolkowski, Jan (1990). "The Nature of Prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini". In Kugel, James L. (Ed.), Poetry and Prophecy: the Beginnings of a Literary Tradition. Cornell.

External links

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.

English 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

Category:1100s births Category:1150s deaths Category:12th-century Latin writers Category:12th-century Roman Catholic bishops Category:12th-century historians Category:Anglo-Normans in Wales Category:Writers of Arthurian literature Category:Bishops of St Asaph Category:Medieval Welsh literature Category:People from Monmouthshire Category:Welsh clergy Category:Welsh historians Category:Welsh mythology Category:Welsh poets Category:Welsh writers