“Hic est Artur”: Reading Latin and Reading Arthur

Summary

Studies of Arthurian tradition often touch only lightly on the contribution of Latin texts to that tradition. Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, when we are rediscovering almost daily new riches in the vernacular inheritance of the Middle Ages, it sometimes seems that we feel we know all we need to know about Latin. While Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie is given its just due as a foundational Arthurian text, Geoffrey is usually the only Latin writer to be included in an Arthurian survey, and he is also often seen as sui generis, a maverick who stands apart from the system that formed him and later judged him. Those judgements may be presented through a collection of disgruntled remarks by Latin chroniclers, and we have generally been content to accept their representation of Latin attitudes to Arthurian tradition as the attitude of the learned elite. Even then, however, we often do not appreciate the exact nature of these objections to Arthurian history.

These objections begin before Geoffrey of Monmouth ever set quill to parchment. William of Malmesbury’s famous denunciation of the Breton hope in his Gesta regum Anglorum dismisses not just the stories of Arthur’s return, but also the very form in which those stories survive:

Hic est Artur de quo Britonum nugae hodieque delirant; dignus plane quem non fallaces somniarent fabulae, sed veraces praedicarent historiae, quippe qui laban- tem patriam diu sustinuerit, infractasque civium mentes ad bellum acuerit.

(i.II; I.8; emphasis mine)

[This is that Arthur about whom the foolish tales of the Britons rave even today; one who is clearly worthy to be told about in truthful histories rather than to be dreamed about in deceitful fables, since for a long time he sustained his ailing nation, and sharpened the unbroken minds of his people to war.]

Hic est Artur: in his Latin chronicle history, William draws a distinction between the nugae (foolish tales) and fallaces … fabulae of the Britons (lying stories in, we assume, the vernacular), and the veraces … historiae, the truthful (Latin) texts that tell about the British leader and his role in the Saxon wars. The criticism, implied or explicit, of a rival (or a rival tradition) is a common enough move in medieval chronicle histories. But in the Arthurian context such commonplaces can mislead modern readers, with our separation of “fact” from “fiction,” into misunderstanding the true nature of the criticism.