Layamon (Critical Survey of Poetry, Second Revised Edition)
Other Literary Forms
Layamon is known only as the author of the partially translated poetic chronicle known as Layamon’s Brut.
Achievements
Layamon’s Brut, which J. S. P. Tatlock describes as “the nearest thing we have to a traditional racial Epic.
is the first major literary work in Middle English, and the first version in English of the stories of King Arthur and of King Lear. Assessing Layamon’s achievement is difficult because his Brut is a much expanded translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut (c. 1155), itself an...
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