The following essay is extracted from a longer critical assessment of Geoffrey of Monmouth done by John J. Parry and Robert A Caldwell during the 1950s.

Source: John J. Parry and Robert A. Caldwell, 'Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae', in Arthur King of Britain: History, Chronicle, Romance and Criticism, ed. by Richard L. Brengle (New York, 1964), pp. 339-43.

Geoffrey's two chief contributions to the book are the stories of Merlin and Arthur. There were previous Welsh legends about Myrddin..., but at this time Geoffrey seems to have known little about them. Apart from the form and something of the content of the prophecies..., he perhaps got from oral tradition the remarkable account of the transference of the Giants' Dance from Ireland to Salisbury Plain....But he took from Nennius the tale of Vortigern and his tower, the dragons in the drained pool, and the marvellous boy without a father–Nennius's Ambrosius, whom Geoffrey adopted by the simple expedient of saying that Merlin was also called Ambrosius. The rest of the Merlin story seems to have been the child of his own fertile brain.

Regarding the treatment of Arthur, much remains uncertain, but a few of the most plausible conjectures may be set down. As to Uther Pendragon, whom Geoffrey credits with the begetting of Arthur, opinion is divided as to whether there was a tradition about him or whether his name grew out of a misunderstanding of the Welsh uthr, 'terrible'. For this story of Arthur's begetting there are many parallels. Fara pointed to the classical myth of Jupiter and Alcmene. Nutt preferred the Irish tale of The Birth of Mongan, while Gruffydd took the combined evidence of this tale and the mabinogi [tale from the Welsh collection known as The Mabinogion] of Pwyll to argue the existence of a Celtic tradition of a wonder child begotten by a god who visited the mother in the shape of a king, her husband. But if these stories came to Geoffrey in anything like the form in which we have them, he used his imagination freely upon them.

Nennius is the obvious source of Arthur's battles with the Saxons and of the natural marvels connected with the stagnum Lumonoi (Loch Lomond) and Linliguan, although the possibility that Geoffrey used other traditions cannot be excluded. At any rate, from Nennius's list of battle sites he took over three. The river Dubglas, which Nennius placed in the region of Linnius, wherever that may be, Geoffrey placed south of York, perhaps under the impression that Linnius was Lindsey (north Lincolnshire). After interposing a siege of York and a battle at Lincoln, for which Nennius furnished no warrant, Geoffrey carried the war into Scotland and placed Arthur's next victoty at the wood of Celidon, which he found in Nennius. the great historic battle of Mons Badonis [Mount Badon, Badon Hill], which is the climax of Nennius's list, Geoffrey arbitrarily located at Bath, and with characteristic ingenuity explained how the Saxons turned up at a place so far from their late defeat in the wood of Celidon by teling how they broke their promise to return to Germany, sailed round to Totnes, and advanced on Bath from the south.

The shield Pridwen, the sword Caliburnus, and the lance Ron which Arthur bore in the battle of Bath were derived more or less directly from Welsh sources, for in Culhwch and Olwen [another of the tales in The Mabinogion, and the first text to mention Arthur] Arthur mentions his sword Caledfwch and his spear Rhongomyniad, and both in Culhwch and the Spoils of Annwfn he voyages in a ship called Prydwen. From Welsh tradition also Geoffrey took over the concept of Arthur as a king at whose court assembled the notable men of his time, for this concept had been anticipated in Culhwch. But, as always, he was not content merely to adopt without change the materials provided. He made Arthur's court a glorification of the courts he knew. Instead of the fantastic warriors named and described in the Welsh tale, Geoffrey surrounded Arthur with nobles and barons assembled from many parts of Western Europe, and added others whose names he picked at random from old Welsh pedigrees.

According to the Historia [meaning Geoffrey's history], Arthur's victories over the Saxons were followed by his subjugation of Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and Denmark, and one may guess that this career of conquest was inspired by even wilder flights of the Welsh imagination about the military exploits of Arthur, such as one finds in the speech of Glewlwyd in Culhwch. But these triumphs only prepared the way for greater. Frollo, tribune of Gaul, felt the weight of Caliburnus and perished in single combat; thus all Gaul was added to Arthur's dominions. The great climax, which Geoffrey carefully prepared, was the humiliation of Lucius Hiberus, Emperor of Rome....

A hero as great as Arthur could not be conceived as falling except by treachery, and so Geoffrey introduced Modred. It is possible that there was a story about him, for the Annales Cambriae [Annals of Wales], we know, have the entry 'Battle of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell'. There is no indication whether the two were friends or enemies, but the triads [short Welsh historical poems] and Rhonabwy's Dream [an early thirteenth century satire on Arthur, now part of the Mabinogion] refer to the battle in terms which show no dependance on Geoffrey's narrative.

For Geoffrey's contemporaries this story of Arthur seems to have been the high point of the book, as it is for moderns, and Geoffrey clearly intended it to be. some of the interest in the Arthurian section was no doubt the result of the tremendous vogue of current stories, but much is also the result of the author's artistry. As Tatlock says: 'It is hard to think of a single medieval work of any extent with such foresighted, indeed classical symmetry; it recalls the structure of good tragedy.' Here, as in the work as a whole, Geoffrey employed a plain style with few deviations from classical Latin, though he could be pompous and rhetorical, as in the dedications, when the occasion seemed to demand ornament. The verses he introduced into Book I were so good that John Milton, no mean Latinist himself, could hardly believe that they were authentic....

Geoffrey's avowed purpose in composing his magnum opus was to provide the descendants ofthe Britons with a history of their race from the earliest times. The French, the Normans, and the Saxons had theirs, but the Welsh and Bretons had only the meagre scraps provided by Nennius and the hostile narratives of the Anglo-Saxons and the Romans, before whom there was only a blank. Here was an opportunity which a man with Geoffrey's gifts–and lack of historical conscience–could hardly miss. If the account was not true, something like it was–or should have been.

The various dedications, it is obvious, were designed to gain the more personal end of securing the favour of patrons. the complimentary portrait of Eldol, Earl of Gloucester, was surely intended to please the living Earl Robert, and the pictures of good and highly capable queens were probably written to prepare the way for rule by Matilda, whom Henry I had first designated as his heir in 1127.

Geoffrey seems also to have desired to help the English kings in their effort to assert their independence of the kings of France. As dukes of Normandy they were vassals of the French kings, who ruled as heirs of Charlemagne. But if Brutus, ravaging nearly all of Aquitaine and building Tours, had defeated the kings and peers of Gaul, if Bellinus and Brennius had reduced 'the whole kingdom to submission', and if Arthur had again conquered France, all before Charlemagne's time, then the French kings should be subject to those of England. Another point brought oout by the book was that all the king's subjects, no matter what their race–Geoffrey conveniently ignores the Anglo-Saxons–were kindred, for both Celts and French were descended from Trojan exiles. This would apply equally well to the subjects of Henry I or Matilda or Stephen, and when Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine came to the throne, its application was far broader than Geoffrey could have imagined when he first thought of the idea....

The history proved to be a great success, even if a serious chronicler like William of Newburgh denounced its patent falsehoods, and Giraldus Cambrensis, with more humour, showed that he recognized Geoffrey's fantastic narrative for what it was. According to Giraldus, in his Itinerarium Cambriae..., there lived in the neighbourhood of Caerleon a certain Meilerius, a familiar of evil spirits, through whose aid he could predict the future, distinguish truth from falsehood, and, even thoug he was illiterate, pick out the false passages in a book. 'It happened once, when he was being abused beyond measure by foul spirits, that the Gospel of John was placed on his breast; the spirits vanished completely, at once flying away like birds. When it was later removed and the History of the Britons by Geoffrey Arthur [apparently Geoffrey's father's name] substituted for it, by way of experiment, they settled down again, not only on his entire body, but also on the book itself, for a longer time than they were accustomed to, in greater numbers, and more loathsomely.' But Giraldus could also on occasion cite the Historia, and for the most part it was accepted as both authoritative history and interesting reading.

The number of manuscripts (about 200) that have come down to us is exceedingly large for a work of this period, and there are few medieval historians after 1150 who do not show extensive traces of Geoffrey's influence. Even before his death Alfred of Beverley based his own history upon it, and Henry of Huntingdon, the early form of whose work Geoffrey had probably used, drew from it in the later recesions of his own Historia Anglorum [History of the English]. Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffydd justified his title to Wales by pointing out his lineal descent from Camber, to whom Brutus had given all the land west of the Severn. King Edward I, in his dispute with Pope Boniface VIII over the sovereignty of Scotland, cited, with the approval of his barons, Geoffrey's narrative as proof of his claim. A monk of St. Albans, when he came to describe the wedding feast if this king Edward and Princess Margaret of France, copied almost verbatim Geoffrey's account of Arthur's Pentecostal feast....

In conclusion, one may say of Geoffrey of Monmouth that he was a scholar with a very wide range of reading, a stylist of high competence in both prose and verse, a bold and imaginative writer of fiction in the guise of history. With such talents it needed no Merlin to prophesy that he would be read for generations to come. But even Merlin himself could hardly have foreseen that Geoffrey's work would affect the politics of Great Britain for five centuries, and that the greatest poets of England would drink from his fountain.

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Last Updated on 14 February 2000.