5 - ‘Three texts into one’: Laʒamon's Brut

Summary

Laʒamon's Brut is best known today as the earliest narrative about King Arthur in English. Yet the Brut holds an altogether different significance for our purposes. As the earliest surviving Middle English verse chronicle, the Brut demonstrates how historiographical varietas – that is, a specific set of ideas and literary practices derived from classical rhetoric, applied to British history, and then popularized by twelfth-century British historians – finds its way from Latin prose histories into Middle English verse chronicles.

Laʒamon's Brut is a translation of Wace's Roman de Brut (completed in 1155), which is itself a translation of Geoffrey's Historia (c. 1138) into Anglo- Norman French. Laʒamon's Brut was likely produced a few decades later, c. 1216. Like other Middle English verse chronicles of the Brut tradition, Laʒamon's Brut tells the story of Britain's foundation by Brutus and its subsequent history under British rule. Although it is a fairly faithful translation of Wace's text, Laʒamon also adapts Wace's Roman de Brut to suit his own vision of history. Importantly, that vision is built on varietas. The varietas – both formal and philosophical – of Laʒamon's Brut exceeds that of Wace's Roman de Brut. It also exceeds that of the First Variant Version, the Latin recension of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia produced between 1138 and 1155 that Wace used as his primary source for the Roman de Brut. Sometimes, Laʒamon’s varietas even exceeds that of Geoffrey himself. Yet Laʒamon never uses the Latin word varietas in his Middle English chronicle, nor does he ever discuss this concept explicitly. How, then, can we discern varietas in his work?

As earlier chapters established, the formal variety of a piece of historical writing can reveal whether its author considers varietas a tool for repairing historical narratives, whether he uses varietas in that way, and even what kind of varietas he favors. This chapter follows the same approach, scrutinizing Laʒamon's formal variety for glimpses of his varietas.