Geoffrey of Monmouth

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Geoffrey of Monmouth
Old Station Tintern in Monmouthshire
Born
Galfridus Arturus

c. 1095
Possibly Monmouth
, Wales
Diedc. 1155 (aged 59–60)
Other names
  • Galfridus Monemutensis
  • Galfridus Arturus
  • Galfridus Artur
  • Gruffudd ap Arthur
  • Sieffre o Fynwy
OccupationCatholic cleric
Known forHistoria Regum Britanniae
Prophetiae Merlini
Vita Merlini

Geoffrey of Monmouth (

Latin: De gestis Britonum or Historia Regum Britanniae)[1] which was widely popular in its day, being translated into other languages from its original Latin. It was given historical credence well into the 16th century,[2]
but is now considered historically unreliable.

Life and career

Geoffrey was born between about 1090 and 1100,[3][4][5][6] in Wales or the Welsh Marches. He had reached the age of majority by 1129 when he is recorded as witnessing a charter.

Geoffrey refers to himself in his Historia as Galfridus Monemutensis (Geoffrey of Monmouth), which indicates a significant connection to Monmouth, Wales, and may refer to his birthplace.[7] His works attest to some acquaintance with the place-names of the region.[7] Geoffrey was known to his contemporaries as Galfridus Arturus or variants thereof.[7][8] The "Arthur" in these versions of his name may indicate the name of his father or a nickname based on his scholarly interests.[8]

Earlier scholars assumed that Geoffrey was

Frank Merry Stenton and others have suggested that Geoffrey's parents may have been among the many Bretons who took part in William the Conqueror's conquest and settled in the southeast of Wales.[7] Monmouth had been in the hands of Breton lords since 1075[7] or 1086,[8] and the names Galfridus and Arthur were more common among the Bretons than the Welsh.[7]

He may have served for a while in the Benedictine

Archbishop Theobald of Bec consecrated Geoffrey as Bishop of St Asaph at Lambeth on 24 February 1152,[10] having ordained him a priest at Westminster 10 days before. According to Lewis Thorpe, "There is no evidence that he ever visited his see, and indeed the wars of Owain Gwynedd make this most unlikely."[11] He appears to have died between 25 December 1154 and 24 December 1155 according to Welsh chronicles, when his successor took office.[8]

Works

Geoffrey's structuring and shaping of the Merlin and Arthur myths engendered their vast popularity which continues today, and he is generally viewed by scholars as the major establisher of the Arthurian canon.[12] The History's effect on the legend of King Arthur was so vast that Arthurian works have been categorised as "pre-Galfridian" and "post-Galfridian", depending on whether or not they were influenced by him.

Historia Regum Britanniae

Geoffrey wrote several works in Latin, the language of learning and literature in Europe during the medieval period. His major work was the

Cymbeline, 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

Robert of Torigny gave Henry of Huntingdon a copy of History, which both Robert and Henry used uncritically as authentic history and subsequently used in their own works,[16]
by which means Geoffrey's fictions became embedded in popular history.

The History of the Kings of Britain is now usually considered a literary forgery 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."[17]

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."[18]

Geoffrey's major work was nevertheless widely disseminated throughout medieval Western Europe; Acton Griscom listed 186 extant manuscripts in 1929, and others have been identified since.

Brut, and several anonymous Middle Welsh versions known as Brut y Brenhinedd ("Brut of the Kings").[20]
where it was generally accepted as a true account.

In 2017, Miles Russell published the initial results of the Lost Voices of Celtic Britain Project established at Bournemouth University.[21] The main conclusion of the study was that the Historia Regum Britanniae appears to contain significant demonstrable archaeological fact, despite being compiled many centuries after the period that it describes. Geoffrey seems to have brought together a disparate mass of source material, including folklore, chronicles, king-lists, dynastic tables, oral tales, and bardic praise poems, some of which was irrevocably garbled or corrupted. In doing so, Geoffrey exercised considerable editorial control, massaging the information and smoothing out apparent inconsistencies in order to create a single grand narrative which fed into the preferred narrative of the Norman rulers of Britain. Much of the information that he used can be shown to be derived from two discrete sources:

  • the orally transmitted, heroic tales of the Catuvellauni and Trinovantes, two essentially pre-Roman tribes inhabiting central south-eastern Britain at the very end of the Iron Age;
  • the king-lists of important post-Roman dynasties that ruled territories in western Britain.

Stretching this source material out, chopping, changing and re-editing it in the process, Geoffrey added not just his own fictions but also additional information culled from Roman and early medieval histories and early medieval writers such as Gildas and Bede.[22]

Other writings

Geoffrey's earliest writing was probably the Prophetiae Merlini (Prophecies of Merlin) which he wrote before 1135, and which appears both independently and incorporated into The History of the Kings of Britain. It consists of a series of obscure prophetic utterances attributed to Merlin which he claimed to have translated from an unspecified language.

The third work attributed to Geoffrey is the hexameter poem Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin), based more closely on traditional material about Merlin than 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 the History's Merlin, but the author tries to synchronise 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 it contains recognisably Galfridian elements in its construction and content, and most critics recognise it as his.[8]

See also

References

Notes

  1. ISBN 978-1-84383-206-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  2. ^ Polydore Vergil's sceptical reading of Geoffrey of Monmouth provoked 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.
  3. ^ Crick 2004: "it seems likely that he was born within ten years of 1100".
  4. ^ Foster 1959: "Geoffrey was b. between 1090 and 1100".
  5. ^ Arthurian Figures of history and legend: A biographical dictionary: "Geoffrey of Monmouth (floruit 1112–1139/ lifespan circa 1095–1155)".
  6. ^ A Concise History of Wales: "The key historical text was Historia Regum Brittanae (c.1139) by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1090–1155)".
  7. ^ a b c d e f g Roberts, "Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regnum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd", p. 98.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j J. C. Crick, "Monmouth, Geoffrey of (d. 1154/5)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 7 June 2009
  9. ^ Dunn, Charles W. (1958). Bibliographical Note to History of the Kings of Britain. E.P Dutton & Co.
  10. ^ Burton, Edwin Hubert (1909). "Geoffrey of Monmouth" . Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6.
  11. ^ From the introduction to his translation of The History of the Kings of Britain (London: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 12.
  12. ^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain, p. 20ff., particularly pp. 20–22 & 28–31.
  13. ^ Richard M. Loomis, The Romance of Arthur New York & London, Garland Publishing, Inc. 1994, pg. 59
  14. ^ Michael Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, p. 12
  15. ^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain pp. 14–19.
  16. ^ C. Warren Hollister, Henry I (Yale English Monarchs), 2001:11 note44.
  17. ^ Quoted by Thorpe, Kings of Britain, p. 17.
  18. ^ Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales/The Description of Wales (Lewis Thorpe ed.), Penguin, 1978, Chapter 5, p 116.
  19. ^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain p. 28
  20. ^ Thorpe, Kings of Britain p. 29
  21. ^ Russell, Arthur and the Kings of Britain: The Historical Truth Behind the Myths p. 297-300
  22. ^ Lost Voices of Celtic Britain Project

Bibliography

External links

Editions of the Latin text

English translations available on the internet