MAPPING THE NATIONAL NARRATIVE: PLACE-NAME ETYMOLOGY IN LA3AMON’S BRUT AND ITS SOURCES

Abstract

Shortly before 1138 Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his Historia Regum Britanniae. The popularity it rapidly acquired, and the credence which was almost universally accorded to the epic history that it charted, were matched only by the vehement incredulity of its sceptics. Geoffrey's narrative, which claimed that the Britons were descendants of survivors of the Trojan diaspora, had a tension at its heart which threatened to destabilize it, and which pardy accounts for the polarized reactions it received. On the one hand, the Trojan foundation myth conferred prestige and glory; on the other, it strained at the limits of a credible historical genre. This tension between glory and veracity, between the historian's motive (to promote a glorious national myth) and his methodology (to do so in a credible historical style) was inherited by Geoffrey's translators, Wace and La3amon, and their handling of their source probes what it means to write patriotic history at all. Every retelling of the national narrative stumbles over its sources, from the earliest European Trojan myths, to the problematic ways in which Geoffrey of Monmouth negotiated the classical authors, and in which he himself was mediated by Wace, and Wace by llamon. In the problematized dialogue between text and source the landscape itself, and the place-names inscribed upon it, emerge as the supreme source text.This article will argue that for Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and llamon, etymologizing the landscape was a means of giving Britain a glorious and self-authenticating history, independendy from their problematic sources. The tension between glory and veracity is precariously hung, in these histories, upon the motif of the place-name etymology. The fabulous events of the Brut narrative are anchored in recognizable low. as Jane Bliss argues, People and places are knotted into the spatio-temporal grid that supports memory of the past.1 The illustrious myth is mapped onto a familiar landscape, providing both an aetiology that glorifies it, and evidence that corroborates it. For example, the claim that Carlisle was once Kaerleil, the city of Leil, king of Loegria, has a bipartite function: it suggests a glorious ancient history, and vindicates that suggestion by citing a plausible etymology of the existing name. Such is the basic structure of the etymological mapping of these texts: the history glorifies the land; the landscape vindicates the history, llamon in particular relates to the national myth very differently from Wace, his source, identifying with the conquered rather than the conquerors, history's losers rather than its victors. His etymological truth-claims function more as elegies for the erosion of the glory of the national myth, and as prophecies for its ultimate reinstatement, than as certifiers of the veracity of his account.The background of the European Trojan mythInventing a Trojan foundation legend for a European country was not Geoffrey of Monmouth's innovation. The earliest documents to do so are Frankish chronicles from the seventh and eighth centuries. However, their manipulation of the supreme source for the foundation legend, the Aeneid, makes it evident that it was not an easy tool in the aggrandisement of any medieval royal house, Carolingian or Angevin. In harvesting and remoulding ancient epic for contemporary chronicle history, the attitude of early medieval historians was not deferential towards the patronymic text, but defiant.The author of the seventh-century Chronicle of Fredegar takes pains to emphasize his rusticity, his ignorance, and his role merely as compiler of the greater works that have gone before. Yet he adds to them a genealogy tracing the ancestry of the Franks back to Franchis, the descendant of Priam. It is an addition far beyond the conspectus of his illustrious sources (Jerome, Hydatius, Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours). Although calling his own work merely an appendage to theirs, he also implies that theirs are a preface to his: quasi quandam futuro opere (as it were a source of material for a future work). …