LaЗamon's Gift

Abstract

LaЗamon's Brut, from a moment in English literary and cultural history whose sense of tradition is particularly difficult for us to comprehend–a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, at the beginnings of Middle English–has a notoriously complex relation to England's past and traditions. This essay focuses on how The Brut takes a traditional social and literary preoccupation in pre-Conquest England, the lordly gift exchange, and expands it to explore a new range of spiritual gifts (or deceptive claims to them), including professional knowledge, counsel to the powerful, and literary fame. This expansion of the gift corresponds to broad cultural shifts as well as to more topical matters in King John's reign, the probable period of the poem's composition. The poem fashions itself as a gift in these volatile terms, repeatedly embracing an unknown literary future while it accurately limns some fundamental new features of Middle English literature. (AG)