Writers of Wales: Geoffrey of Monmouth (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writers of Wales: Geoffrey of Monmouth Andrew Breeze Karen Jankulak , Writers of Wales: Geoffrey of Monmouth. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010. Pp. 118. ISBN: 978-0-7083-2151-5. £16.99. University of Wales Press has over the years produced many volumes in its Writers of Wales series, a collection of booklets that describe Welsh writers from Taliesin to Dylan Thomas and beyond. They are meant for a wide audience and so assume no previous knowledge. Quite apart from information on their subject, they always accurately convey how Welsh writers are perceived in Wales (even on the few occasions when the booklet's author is not Welsh). A little thought suggests a possible disadvantage in books written about the Welsh, by the Welsh, for the Welsh. The result might be perennial one-sidedness, like a country where the same political party always wins the elections. That has its effect on discussion of Geoffrey of Monmouth in this attractively printed volume by Karen Jankulak. Like Henry V, Bertrand Russell, and Lawrence of Arabia, Geoffrey was Welsh only in the sense that he was born there. Nevertheless, by his Arthurian inventions he became the most successful literary propagandist that Wales has ever seen. The book's nine chapters start with the man and his work, and then turn to the difficult question of the sources for Historia Regum Britanniae. Chapter 3 is more general, engaging with models for historiography in twelfth-century Britain. Chapter 4 attends to questions of sovereignty, an active tradition in Britain from Gildas to this day, where it lies behind the very notion of a 'United Kingdom.' We are then directed to the theme of Rome and thereafter Magnus Maximus (a fourth-century usurper who became a figure of legend) and the founding of Brittany. Chapters 7 and 8 deal with the momentous subjects of Arthur and Merlin. We close with Geoffrey's historical legacy, both internationally (where it was challenged in the sixteenth century) and in Wales (where it lingered up to the nineteenth). Although long discredited as a chronicler, Geoffrey from the grave still molds the imaginations of millions, as the ever-retold Arthurian fictions of bestseller and Hollywood make clear. Jankulak is a learned writer, but unfortunately she is an incomplete one so that many who have written on Geoffrey and his times will find strange omissions in her book. Jankulak seems, for example, to be unaware of what has been going on in Mabinogion studies since the mid-1990s. She says that 'we can only speculate' on the audience and setting of these tales (7), when this reviewer has argued that the four [End Page 135] best-known of them are by a writer of royal blood from north Wales who moved to a court in the south: hence their positive and informed picture of royal power in both Gwynedd and Dyfed. Once grasped, this helps us understand better their social context. Elsewhere she calls these tales 'difficult to date' (57), oblivious to evidence that places the Four Branches of the Mabinogi to after about 1120 and before 1136 or so. They mention Oxford as a focus of royal power, which was hardly the case before the 1120s, when Henry I began issuing charters there. Yet they make no reference to Arthur, so surely predate Geoffrey's Historia of the later 1130s. A similar myopia applies to the ferocious political poem Armes Prydein, 'The Prophecy of Britain,' airily described as 'probably dating from the tenth century' (64), when David Dumville and others have related it to the post-Athelstan period, and probably to late 940, immediately after West Saxon capitulation to the Vikings at Leicester (which Armes Prydein mentions). If, then, one seeks a full and up-to-date account of Geoffrey and his relation to Celtic tradition, it will be found not here but in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). Though published in Wales, that volume has the inestimable advantage of contributors from the wide-open spaces below blue skies of North America. One feels that if more volumes of the Writers of Wales series were written not in...