Conclusion: “A wise man may enjoy leisure”: The place of Latin Arthurian literature

Summary

With Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, we have returned to the author with whom the Arthurian portion of this study began. The Vita, like the Historia, uses a mixture of literary forms and devices, a facetious style, here specifically invoked through the references to the musa jocosa, and a variety of sources, to create a work which is at once funny, fantastic, and profoundly unsettling. Its focus on kingship, fate, and their relationship reprises the themes of the Historia, while its narrative manipulations recall the earlier work's undermining of both the form and content of conventional historiography. It is appropriate that Geoffrey should thus “bookend” the Arthurian material in this study. He is the most influential of the writers here examined. He exemplifies many of the themes and approaches of court writing in its Arthurian guise. And in the Vita, he moves away from the specific focus on Arthur to return us to the larger world of rulers of whom Arthur is simply one (striking) example. At the end of this work, then, I move with Geoffrey, away from Arthur and back to the world of kings in general and the Angevin court in particular.

The first real story – he calls it a fabula – in Walter Map's De nugis curialium concerns Herla, an ancient king of the Britons.