History, Fable and Love: Gottfried, Thomas, and the Matter of Britain

Summary

1

In his prologue, Gottfried implies that one of the reasons why he took Thomas as his principal source was that Thomas was the only author to have presented a historically reliable account of the Tristan story (see Chinca 46–60). It was Thomas alone, according to Gottfried, who an britûnschen buochen las / aller der lanthêrren leben / und ez uns ze künde hat gegeben (read in British books the lives of all the rulers of the country [i.e. Britain], and made them known to us; 152–54 [All translations are my own]). Gottfried's formulation makes it appear as if Thomas's version of the Tristan story is written in the form of a historical chronicle. Yet this is utterly misleading. It is clear from the extensive surviving fragments of his poem that Thomas does not do what Gottfried claims: he does not write early British history in the sense of offering a record of the lives of all the rulers of Britain. The two twelfth-century authors who did write histories of Britain matching Gottfried's description were Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace (Le Saux 18–22). Geoffrey's Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1138) is composed in the form of a regnal narrative (see Davies 4); it gives Britain an unbroken succession of kings arranged, in Geoffrey's own words, “continuously and in order” (“continue et ex ordine,” ed. Wright, ch. 1). Wace's Roman de Brut, the Norman French adaptation of Geoffrey's Historia completed in 1155, carefully preserves the regnal form of its Latin source. In the prologue to the Roman de Brut, Wace announces that he will present the early history of Britain “from king to king and from heir to heir” (De rei en rei e d'eir en eir, 2; ed. and trans. Weiss); he promises to identify all those kings, and also to specify in what order they ruled (Quels reis i ad en ordre eü, 5). In introducing Thomas as a historian of early Britain, Gottfried seems to be mischievously conflating him with Geoffrey and Wace; and in speaking of Thomas reading “British books,” he may well be making a playful intertextual allusion to Geoffrey, who famously cites as the principal source for his history “a very ancient book in the British language” (quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum; ed.