36. Introduction from Selections from Laȝamon's Brut, ed. G. L. Brook
The English Brut, like Malory's Morte Darthur or Chaucer's Troilus and Knight's Tale, is a work for which we can thank no single author. Touching up something that was already there is almost the characteristically medieval method of composition.
In 1147 Geoffrey of Monmouth produced his prose Historia Regum Britanniae. It gives the British story from the birth of Brutus to the death of Cadwallader and claims to have got it out of an ancient book in the British tongue (i. 1). We know no such book, but much genuine legend and some true history may survive in Geoffrey's narrative. To the Arthurian section (vii. 20‒xi. 2) it was probably his own rather vulgar invention that added the tasteless fiction of Arthur's foreign conquests.
Wace (ob. 1175?) turned Geoffrey's matter into Norman French octosyllabics as the Geste des Bretons or Roman de Brut. He approached his work neither like a modern historian nor like a modern novelist. On the one hand, he thinks his story mainly true, though not completely reliable, and is anxious to avoid errors; from a different poem, the Roman de Rou, it appears that he sometimes took pains to test a tradition by personal investigation. On the other hand, he feels himself quite free to touch up Geoffrey's narrative, describing scenes as if he had been an eyewitness and adding details from his own imagination. His poem is bright and clear, not without gaiety, and slightly touched with scepticism. In it the courtesy and pageantry and some of the love-lore of the High Middle Ages appear.
Then came La
amon, who probably wrote before 1207. He tells us he was a priest of Ernlee (King's Areley) on the Severn, and had travelled much. Whether only in England, is not clear; but an amusing passage about ‘muglinges’ suggests that he had visited the Continent and there been twitted with coming from an island where men have tails (M 29593‒8). He tells us – speaking here like a true book-lover – that he used three sources: an English book by Bede (no doubt the Old English translation of the Ecclesiastical History), a book by Seinte Albin and þe feire Austin, and Wace (M 30‒40). The second item is a puzzle, and we are not satisfied with the explanation that it is simply Bede over again, but this time in Latin. It is, however, only the last source, Wace, that really throws much light on Laamon's work.
The English Brut differs importantly from Wace's Roman. Before asking why, it is best to make clear how.
I. Its very language – still more its metre and phraseology, which both descend from Anglo-Saxon verse – make it inevitably sterner, more epic, more serious. Nothing in Norman octosyllabics ever had the hammer-like impact of Godes wiðersaka (M 1808), mid orde and mid egge (M 5202), sæwerie (M 6205), weorld-scome (M 8323), or feollen þa fæie (M 14038).
II. It is more archaic and less sophisticated than the Roman. Wace's characters are knights and courtiers; those of the Brut, heroes and thanes. Wace's battles often have some real strategy; the Brut blurs or ignores it and shows us only what primary epic would show – the war-hedge like a grey wood (M 16372), old warriors hewn with swords (M 4166‒7), shields cloven (M 5186), heathen souls packed off to hell (M 18321). Wace writes like one who knows contemporary courts; the Brut's picture of a court is something like Hrothgar's hall. In Wace the Roman ambassadors are real diplomats, grave old men carrying olive branches; in the Brut, ‘valiant thanes, high battle-warriors, high men with weapons’ (M 24741). In the passage which immediately follows, the differences are even more interesting. Arthur summons his council in a room at the top of a tower. As Wace's knights go up the spiral stair Cador calls out merrily to Arthur that this threat from Rome is welcome; there's been too much peace and love-making. Gawain replies in defence of love ‘ . . . thus the lords joked’. In the Brut there is no joking and no chatting on the stairs. First the tower itself is characterized – ‘an ancient stonework, stout men wrought it’ (M 24885) – and this Beowulfian glance at a remoter past alters, as it were, the whole lighting of the passage. There is nothing about love. Cador seriously denounces idleness; Gawain utters weighty praise of peace. There is a real strife or flit between them, and Arthur, who knows the swords might be out any minute, quells it sternly (M 24966‒72). Not a trace of the Norman gaiety remains.
III. The Brut, though fiercer, is usually kinder than the Roman. Once, indeed, it introduces an atrocity (M 22841 ff.) of its own. But it was done in hot blood, and far more often its rough-hewn heroes have tender hearts. Its Brennus saves Rome from pillage and massacre and brings home the refugees (M 5944 ff.). Its Vortimer has a project for emancipating all slaves (M 14852). Its Arthur swears that if he wins France every poor man's life shall be the easier for it (M 23741). He dismisses his veteran knights to pass their last days in prayer (M 2411f ff.). He is a father to the young and a comforter to the old; Wace's Arthur had been one of Love's lovers and the founder of all the courtesies that kings have used since. Its charity extends even to pagans (provided, of course, that they are not Saxons); alas that ever such a man as Julius Caesar should have gone to hell! (M 7223).
IV. It is rather more interested in marvels than Wace had been. It tells us that elves took and enchanted Arthur as soon as he was born (M 19253 ff.; 1894 below), and that an elvish smith had made his byrnie (M 21131; 2830 below). In addition to the prophetic eagles mentioned by Geoffrey and the Roman, nikers people its Loch Lomond till it becomes very like Grendel's mere (M 21739 ff.; 3134 ff. below).
V. It has touched up Wace as Wace touched up Geoffrey. In it all becomes one degree more actual, closer to the reader. It has far more dialogue than Wace, much of it excellent. Where he had said merely that people gave certain news or made certain arrangements, the Brut sets them talking, soliloquizing, too, or praying. It might have been written by one who had learned from Aristotle that the narrative poet should speak as little as possible in his own person. It realizes visually and emotionally much that Wace merely stated or ignored. It shows us the pirates watching the arrival of Ursula's storm-tossed fleet, ‘ships . . . one . . . and one . . . sometimes more . . . sometimes none . . . then four . . . then five’ (M 12034 ff.); Merlin in his trance twisting like a snake ‘as those said who had seen it’ (M 17906 ff.; 1221 ff. below); Arthur turning alternately red and white, when they told him he was king (M 19887 ff.; 2210 ff. below). It adds to the account of Merlin's begetting all that renders the story worth telling – the virgin bower, the beautiful ladies-in-waiting, the glimmering golden shape of the aerial ravisher (M 15700 ff.). Chaucer himself is hardly more vivid and immediate than scores of passages in the Brut.
VI. It has a wealth of simile that Wace lacks. Troops muster thick as hail (M 14517). Ridwathlan rushes on his enemies as a whirlwind, with its cloud of dust, rushes on a field (M 27645). An army advances ‘as if the earth would catch fire’ (M 4577, 11978). More surprisingly, we find those long-tailed or Homeric similes which were not a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon epic: the wolf (M 20120‒7), the hunted crane (M 20163‒75), and the goat (M 21301‒15). That of the ‘steel fishes’ (M 21323‒30) is in a class by itself. Its complex imaginative structure illustrates the ‘esemplastic faculty’ better than anything in Wordsworth.
The Brut has many faults, but they are those of its source; it is tied to Geoffrey's amorphous, and sometimes uninteresting, matter. Its (often astonishing) merits are its own. Can we say ‘Laamon's own’? This, for several reasons, would be rash.
I. Many scholars think that he did not work from the text of Wace, as we now have it, but from a recension already incorporating other materials.
II. Laamon never mentions Geoffrey, and, since medieval ‘historical’ poets are far readier to boast of learning than of invention, we may probably infer that he never saw the Historia. Hence passages where he agrees with Geoffrey but not with Wace may well indicate an independent recourse to the same – presumably Celtic – tradition on which Geoffrey depended. Such are his ‘thirty days’ (M 1275, Wace, trois jors), his specification of the fief given to Hengist as Lindesey (M 14050), Pridwen as the name of Arthur's shield (M 21152), and others. But even if we assumed that he had read Geoffrey, we should still have evidence that he knew more of Geoffrey's sources than Geoffrey transmitted. At vii. 3, Geoffrey makes Merlin prophesy that Arthur's acts will be food to those who tell them (actus eius cibus erit narrantibus). Laamon gives us six lines (M 18856‒61) in the same strain. The manner is quite unlike his usual style and quite un-English. He must be giving us more of the same Welsh poem that underlies Geoffrey. Again, in a passage peculiar to the Brut (M 13563‒90), the name Gille Callaet for Constance's murderer suggests Celtic tradition.
III. The Brut alone relates (M 12253 ff.) the revolt of Ethelbald and Ælfwald. The thoroughly English names given to these supposed Britons, and the firm localization of their revolt in East Anglia – no regional patriotism would lead Laamon there – strongly suggest that he is here in touch with an English, not British, tradition of some later revolt, perhaps against Danes, or even Normans.
IV. Mr H. S. Davies has acutely observed that many of the Brut's best similes, and all its long-tailed similes, are bunched in one section (M 20000‒22000). He also finds that Arthur's character is a little different in this section, and that the course of events – we are dealing with Arthur's defeat of the Saxons – departs considerably from that in Wace. It is difficult to explain how a poet who had once achieved the long-tailed simile should then abandon it completely in his subsequent work. Mr Davies therefore suggests that Laamon may here be following closely a lost poem in Old, or early Middle, English. This seems not improbable.
An acceptance of this hypothesis would make a difference to our estimate of Laamon's individual genius. But what most interests the historian of poetry would not be changed. Either way – in Laamon or in the lost poem – we see the vigorous survival of our native poetic style. Either way, we see it enriched by the long-tailed simile, and must still wonder whether this is due to the sheer leap of some remarkable genius or to the influence (possibly at many removes) of Virgil.
Mr Davies modestly raises a needless difficulty against himself by stressing the paradox of a work so very English as his hypothetical poem must have been which nevertheless celebrated the defeat of the English by the Britons. But it would not have differed in this respect from the Brut itself, which professes to tell the story of the ‘Engle’ (M 13) and actually tells that of the Britons, making of the real ‘Engle’ a comparatively brief and wholly hateful interruption. It would not have differed in this from later treatments of Arthur. They all take the British side. Ignorance of racial fact and indifference to strictly racial sentiment are the norm. In poets so early as Laamon there might be a special reason. The Normans with their nið cræfte (M 7116) were still fairly new. The Saxons, like them, had been foreign invaders. Arthur, like Harold, had been fighting for our homes. It was perhaps some compensation to show Colgrim actually faring at Bath as William the Bastard ought to have fared at Hastings. Perhaps after all we need no lost poem to explain (if that were all) why Arthur should be fiercer and far more alive in this part of the Brut than in his foreign wars.
The metre of the Brut descends from Anglo-Saxon verse. Its direct ancestor was probably not the ‘classical’ verse of Beowulf but a looser and more popular form. It is, however, by starting from the classical type that the metre is most easily analysed. Its units were selected blocks of speech rhythm, known as Half-lines. The elements of each Half-line were Lifts and Dips. A Lift is either one long and accented syllable or two short syllables with accent on the first. A Dip is any reasonable number of unaccented syllables. There were five types of Half-line, all of which can be traced in the Brut. We add modern equivalents in brackets, and all the Anglo-Saxon examples are from Beowulf.
A. Lift‒Dip‒Lift‒Dip. prým gefrúnon (2), or mónegum m
gþum (5). (‘Wells and Winches or Merry-eyed maidens’.) Brut: mónnen fróure (M 25570) or cómon to an kinge (M 17089). Anacrusis (a prelusive unaccented syllable or syllables) may occur. Ne frín þu æfter slum (1322). (‘At Wells and Winches’.) Brut: and lúden bilæfden (M 20584).
B. Dip‒Lift‒Dip‒Lift. Siþþan rest wearþ (6). (‘For a pint of beer’.) Brut: na his cláþes na his hórs (M 17053).
C. Dip‒Lift‒Lift‒Dip. Ofer hrónráde (9). (‘Or of rough cider’.) Brut: þat he fléon wólde (M 17058).
D. Lift‒Lift‒Dip. There is here only one Dip, and it must contain an element nearly, but not quite, as strong as a Lift. Ýmbsíttènde (8). (‘Hood's housekeeper’.) Brut: wíltídènde (M 17090). Or expanded: mre méarcstàþa (102). (‘Hunter's housekeeper’.) Brut: hæe hérekèmpen (M 24743).
E. Lift‒Dip‒Lift. Here also the single Dip must contain a strengthening element. Wéorþmýndum þáh (8). (‘Bedmakers’ binge’.) Brut: Séilien òuer sæ (M 20889) or Jàphèth and Chám (M 12).
The first (and only the first) Lift of the second Half-line was linked by alliteration with one or both of the Lifts in the first Half-line; if with only one, then normally with the first. The Brut ignores these rules, alliterating any Lifts, or none.
Some of its Half-lines reproduce the Anglo-Saxon types perfectly, some approximately, and others not at all. In the latter class we find (1) four-beat types: Láuerd hu háuest þu ifáren toníht? (M 28011). (2) More often, three-beat: Séléste álre ræden (M 16986), þe nes nánes mónnes súne (M 17107). The two Half-lines are often linked by rhyme (umbe lutle stunde hi wurþeþ al isunde, M 17191‒2), assonance (and ferden swa longe þat hi comon to Irlonde, M 17262‒3), or consonance (wiþuten and wiþinne mon toenes monne, M 22917‒18).
The Brut thus varies between passages that an Anglo-Saxon poet's ear would have wholly approved – such as
æðela iwurðen,Wihte wal-kempen, on heora wiðer-winnan (M 776‒8) ‒
and the nursery-rhyme jingle of He makede swulc grið, he makede swulc frið (M 4254‒6). But the result is not intolerable as a mixture of different syllabic metres would be, because Laamon's irregular Half-lines are, no less than the classical types, blocks of genuine speech rhythm. In pathetic, derisive, or gnomic comment they have great pungency. The total effect of the poem is really closer than the rumble of much fourteenth-century alliterative verse to the crusty, emphatic quality of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Dr. J. Hall in his Laamon's Brut (1924) selected passages from all over the poem. We have preferred to disengage and to give as continuously as possible Laamon's Arthuriad, which we think on the whole the best part of the Brut. Even from this the limits of our space forced us to omit something, and we jettisoned without reluctance the Icelandic, and the Roman wars. The record of monotonous victories, even when true, is not the stuff of epic; when it has no roots in history, legend, or myth, it is hardly endurable.