[In the following essay, Shichtman contrasts the way Wace and Layamon portray Sir Gawain and narrate his history, and argues that the difference in their approaches is the result of their disimilarities in class, location, and historical perspective.]

Among historians who see the ultimate goal of historical discourse as the conveyance of “truth,” historical writings of the Middle Ages have been often found suspect, even ignored, because of their tendency toward literariness.¹ Contemporary historiographical theory argues, however, that the search for objective historical truth is a delusion. Historical writing is, it suggests, subject to the same forces that give form to all narrative. This position, with its insistence that, in Hayden White's words, “historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group, society, or culture's conception of its present tasks and future prospects,” presents a context for a reevaluation of the histories produced during the Middle Ages.²

Many medieval historians seem to have been aware of, and intent upon making use of, the literary/historical tension in their endeavors. As early as the seventh century Isidore of Seville, influenced by the work of Latin grammarians, wrote that “Historia est narratio rei gestae per quam ea quae in praeterito facta sunt, dignoscuntur” [History is the narration of events by which those things which were done in the past are sorted out].³ Amid the intellectual upheaval of the twelfth century, Hugh of Saint Victor created a controversy by reasserting Isidore's position and arguing for a narrative view of history: “Historia est rerum gestarum narratio” [History is the narration of events].⁴ For Hugh, as M. D. Chenu notes, “the term historia … embraced the same ambiguity which it retains in our modern languages, where it designates at the same time the facts, as the stuff of history (objective sense), and the intellectual discipline which treats these facts (subjective sense).”⁵ Like Isidore, Hugh recognized the medieval historian as a literary stylist, a writer of narratives who, in sorting out the facts of history, was given a chance to demonstrate both his individuality and his artistry.

According to Northrop Frye, “most historians would prefer to believe … that history is one thing and poetry another.”⁶ Such historians see their discipline as the objective, undistorted reporting of “reality”; they believe their prose directly imitates actions, reproducing what has actually occurred. Frye casts some doubt on the notion that history can be perfectly imitative of reality, suggesting instead that “when a historian's scheme gets to a certain point of comprehensiveness it becomes mythical in shape, and so approaches the poetic in nature”;⁷ at this point history becomes metahistory. Hayden White even more specifically denies the possibility of a “scientific knowledge” of history. In fact, he insists on history as metahistory, on the historical text as literary artifact. White maintains that historical narratives are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have as much in common with their counterparts in literature [as] they have with those in the sciences.”⁸ For White, the historical narrative reveals as much about the process of writing history as it does information concerning past events.

Like Frye and White, Michel Foucault writes of the historian as structuring received materials. Commenting on a recent shift to a “new form of historical study,” Foucault focuses on the notion of discontinuity:

And the great problem presented by such historical analysis is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, assumptions, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given—the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.⁹

Foucault claims that the “new history” challenges earlier principles of cohesion “when it speaks of series, divisions, limits, differences of level, shifts, chronological specificities, particular forms of rehandling, possible types of relations.”¹⁰ It provides for a way of reseeing history and ultimately liberates the historian from the continuous tracing back to origins. As White notes, for Foucault “events gain the status of ‘facts’ by virtue of their susceptibility to inclusion within the set of lexical lists and analysis by the syntactical strategies sanctioned by the modes of representation prevailing at a given time and place.”¹¹ The writing of history is thus the transcribing of the illusions of an age. The “new historian” recognizes these illusions, recognizes that traditional historiography is continuously frustrated in its efforts to comprehend similitudes, and therefore searches for the differences in things.

For many historians during the Middle Ages, and particularly from the twelfth century onward, the writing of history involved the revision of materials received, the perception of data from new perspectives. These historians emphasized not similitude, not their ability to reproduce precisely events that had already taken place, but rather differences, their purpose being to retell history in a new manner. As Raymond Klibansky notes of the twelfth-century cleric Peter Abelard, “In the Historia clamitatum he portrays himself as a man with singular powers, able to rely on his genius (ingenium) when others depend on laboriously acquired learning. In each field of knowledge he can, trusting in his own powers, penetrate more deeply than others who, not daring to challenge accepted doctrines, have become slaves to tradition.”¹² Robert W. Hanning maintains that “Abelard's exaltation of ingenium puts him firmly in touch with that main current of twelfth-century culture that stressed the manipulation of institutions and situations to impose a favorable order on them.”¹³ Abelard voiced the attitudes of an emerging group of medieval historians who refused to subordinate their individuality and cultural identity to their discipline, refused to privilege solely the historical “facts” that they had inherited. For these historians, historical discovery and invention merged as their narratives took shape.

Most writers of twelfth-century Arthurian chronicles either directly or indirectly followed Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, but efforts were made to undermine its authority. According to Robert Huntington Fletcher, “the history of the Arthurian material in the chronicles after Geoffrey is the history of the treatment to which Geoffrey's version of the story was subjected by later writers.”¹⁴ For Geoffrey's followers, his text functioned as the “story,” a “primitive” element in the ongoing conceptualization of the historical work. White suggests that “when a given set of events has been motifically encoded, the reader has been provided with a story; the chronicle of events has been transformed into a completed diachronic process, about which one can then ask questions as if he were dealing with a synchronic structure of relationships.”¹⁵ The questions that the historian asks of the story give direction to his discourse. The answers that he discovers, or perhaps even invents (and White admits that discovery and invention are often difficult to tell apart), allow for an explanation by emplotment, the creation of a newly formed narrative.

Both Wace and Laȝamon were indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth for the information appearing in their chronicles: Wace followed Geoffrey, Laȝamon followed Wace. But neither was a slavish imitator. Both chronicled the Matter of Britain poetically (Wace in octosyllabic couplets, Laȝamon in alliterative lines), yet it seems doubtful that either writer would have described himself as strictly a poet or a historian. More likely, they would have seen themselves as historians who used vernacular language and popular poetic forms to make their histories accessible to audiences with very specific—and different—demands and agendas, historians who emplotted their received materials to create new narratives differing from those of their predecessors. The achievements of Wace and Laȝamon are not to be found solely in their skills as poets or as historians, therefore, but in their abilities to present history literarily, to write metahistory.

Geoffrey's discussion of Gawain's career, though sketchy, demonstrates the author's skill in the creation of historical biography, and it forms the story on which successors based their modes of emplotment. What Geoffrey learned about Gawain from Celtic sources is impossible to determine; his Latin sources say little about the knight. Geoffrey might have been responsible for making Gawain an important Arthurian figure, creating for him a personal history highlighting important moments in the knight's life. Gawain's being born to Loth, duke of Lothian, and Anna, sister of Arthur, is recorded for the first time in the Historia. At the age of twelve Gawain is sent by Arthur into the service of Pope Sulpicius, from whom he eventually receives his arms. As a young man Gawain becomes Arthur's ambassador to the court of Lucius Hiberius, emperor of Rome. Still impressionable, he is influenced by youthful comrades to create an incident that will bring the already feuding nations of Britain and Rome to war. In fact Gawain murders Lucius's nephew, Gaius Quintillianus, during his visit to the court—an act of aggression that Geoffrey appears to endorse. Gawain proves himself a great knight and leader of men in the conflict that follows. When several of his fellow commanders are killed in battle, Gawain rallies their retreating troops and routs the Roman forces. He also engages Lucius in single combat, fighting him to a draw. At the height of his career, however, Gawain learns that his brother, Mordred, has treasonously usurped Arthur's throne. He returns home to fight in the war against Mordred and becomes an early casualty.¹⁶

A study of Gawain's characterization in Wace's Roman de Brut and Laȝamon's Brut indicates the directions that these works take as metahistories. The changes that Wace and Laȝamon make in their received Gawains, and in their received histories in general, are small, but they are sufficient to individualize their works. In transforming Geoffrey's Historia, both authors re-view history and demonstrate their poetic artistry. Wace's Roman de Brut is emplotted as a romance, as the type of history that according to White “is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero's transcendence of the world of experience.”¹⁷ Wace's Gawain, while living in a brutal world, is witty and charming, endowed with an urbane sophistication reflecting the attitudes of the author's twelfth-century, courtly Norman audience. Laȝamon's Brut is emplotted as a tragedy, demonstrating the “resignation of men to the conditions under which they must labor in the world … conditions … asserted to be unalterable and eternal, and the implication is that men cannot change them but must work within them.”¹⁸ Laȝamon's Gawain is dark and brooding; he stoically endures a savagely cruel existence. He is a hero for a defeated English people, a people who, though they must struggle to retain even their national language, persist in producing a poetry filled with intensity. Wace's mode of emplotment offers a powerful legitimation of the ruling-class's deeds and aspirations; this is history written for winners. Laȝamon presents explanations for those who have lost.

Wace selected his mode of historical emplotment to appeal to the tastes of twelfth-century Norman nobility. Certainly the Roman de Brut, completed in 1155, was a departure from his earlier religious writings. As Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., claims, “it is surprising that Wace even undertook the Brut, for he was undoubtedly a sober man, a hardheaded moralist.”¹⁹ Between the years 1140 and 1150 Wace composed at least three saints' lives: a Life of Saint Nicholas, a Conception Nostre Dame, and fragments of a Life of Saint Marguerite (he may also have been responsible for a Life of Saint George, though there is little evidence attesting to his authorship). But Wace found the writing of secular history more rewarding than hagiography; in an autobiographical section of the Roman de Rou, Wace would later admit that he specifically directed his discourse toward

la riche gent,
ki unt les rentes e le argent,
kar pur eus sunt li livre fait
e bon dit fait e bien retrait.

rich folk who possess revenues and silver, since for them books are made and good works are composed and well set forth.²⁰

The return that Wace received for writing the Roman de Brut was considerable. According to Laȝamon, Wace presented a copy of the Roman de Brut to Eleanor, the new queen of England.²¹ In 1160 Henry II, Eleanor's husband, commissioned Wace, then a clerk at Caen, to compose a chronicle of the dukes of Normandy, the Roman de Rou. By 1169 Wace had been awarded the canonry at Bayeux. Eugene Vance suggests that “the late twelfth century was a period when even the upper class was preoccupied with the order of discourse as a matter of status.”²² Wace clearly appreciated the power of historical writing and understood that his role as historian involved favoring the positions of an influential audience.

In the Roman de Brut, Wace continuously colors received material with the prevailing attitudes of Norman France. He transforms Geoffrey's story—the Roman de Brut was primarily influenced by two versions of the Historia regum Britanniae, the so-called Vulgate and the abbreviated Variant—into a romantic history suited to an audience familiar with the marvelous tales of conteurs and partial to narratives concerning chivalry, lady love, and the glorification of the individual. He also transforms Geoffrey's story into a romantic history suited to an audience anxious that its own status should be endorsed. For the Norman nobility, the twelfth century was both a time of culture, during which the pleasures of courtoisie might be pursued, and a time for expanded military adventurism.²³ Henry II and Eleanor were characteristic of a new aristocracy that was literate, interested in reading, and willing to patronize poets who wrote in the vernacular of such matters as would validate the assumptions and ambitions of their society. In the Roman de Brut, Wace took upon himself the challenge of producing a history that would not only be faithful to the “facts” of his sources but also present them in a manner appreciated in an age of romantic vision, an age when the possibility for human achievement seemed boundless.

Wace transforms Geoffrey's Gawain into an articulate spokesman for the new romantic age. Wace first mentions Gawain's greatness at the time of Arthur's birth, that is, before Gawain himself is even born. He tells the reader that Gawain, a knight known for his prowess, will be the son of Anna (Arthur's sister) and her husband, King Lot. Like Geoffrey, Wace mentions that Gawain is sent to Pope Sulpicius to be trained, but Wace elaborates on Gawain's education by describing the young man as he returns to Arthur's court. Garbed in a mantle bestowed on him by Pope Sulpicius, Gawain “Preuz fu et de molt grant mesure, / D'orguel ne de sorfet n'ot cure. / Plus volt fere que il ne dist, / Et plus doner qu'il ne promist” [was valiant and endowed with great moderation, concerned with neither pride nor excessiveness. He did more than he said he would and gave more than he promised] (1317-20).²⁴ Although he has not yet actually proved himself, Gawain is presented as both the perfect Christian and courtly knight. His birth, training, dress, and demeanor are the best that Arthurian society can offer. The suggestion is that this young knight represents the future, and an exceptional one it is.

Wace adds some material that changes Gawain from the unwavering, unthinking warrior of the Historia to a more civilized French knight. When Arthur's council meets to discuss a response to Lucius's demand for tribute, Cador, an elder of the court, urges war, arguing that his countrymen have grown soft from an extended peacetime. Gawain tempers Cador's inflammatory remarks with the good-natured statement:

Bone est la pes anprés la guerre,
Plus bele et miaudre an est la terre.
Molt sont bones les gaberies
Et bones sont les drueries.
Por amistiez et por amies
Font chevalier chevaleries.

Good is peace after war; the land is much more beautiful and better for it. Very good are the pleasantries, and good are the amorous pleasures. For love and ladies knights perform chivalrous deeds.

(2219-24)

Wace sides with Gawain's position in this dialogue, and by doing so he simultaneously endorses the romantic emplotment of history and sets his text apart from Geoffrey's story. In the exchange Wace's Gawain becomes the youthful romance hero confronting and ultimately overcoming the advocate of tradition.²⁵ Gawain now clearly represents an emerging order in both Arthur's society and Norman society. He belongs to a generation that has learned the pleasures of courtly living. Cador's attitude would have appealed to Geoffrey and to the audience of the Historia regum Britanniae: Cador loves war for its own sake. Gawain, who, significantly, is the final speaker to address Arthur's council, sets the tone for a new code of knightly behavior, one that Wace's readers would have found comforting: he relishes thoughts of battle because he enjoys the delights of victory. Gawain voices, for the first time in French literature, the notion that knightly deeds are performed at least in part to gain the appreciation of women, and thus he distances himself from the vulgar spokesman of an older, fading point of view.

In the Roman de Brut, Gawain is again made an ambassador to Lucius's court in Rome, but Wace supplies a reason for the knight's appointment. According to Wace, Gawain “a Rome ot longues esté” [had been in Rome a long time] (3104), and like his fellow emissaries, Guerin and Boso, he was “bien prisié, / Bien coneü, bien anseignié” [well-praised, well-known, and well-educated] (3105-6). The delegation sent by Wace's Arthur is not only forceful but diplomatic; Gawain is chosen because, despite his tender years, he has already gained respect in Rome. Following Geoffrey, Wace depicts the young men of Arthur's court attempting to convince Gawain that he should incite a war, but this time their arguments seem ineffective. When Gawain, Guerin, and Boso arrive in Rome, it is Gawain who takes charge of the mission. Demonstrating the maturity of an experienced statesman, Gawain presents Arthur's position to Lucius and the Roman council. For both Arthur's society and Norman society, he is a model of ambassadorial decorum. Only after Lucius's nephew, Quintilian, remarks that Britons are a vainglorious people does Gawain resort to violence. Michael Herzog notes that “in Geoffrey's Historia, Gawain was goaded into a hostility towards the Romans that he may or may not have felt. In Wace's Brut, [he] is the willing, self-motivated voice of his young companions.”²⁶ Wace's Gawain is aware of his position and the implications of his actions—Wace even seems to emphasize the knight's initial restraint. Gawain kills Quintilian because the Roman has behaved badly and broken the protocol of diplomacy. Quintilian disrupts the negotiations; he, like Cador, prefers war to more civilized forms of intercourse. Gawain puts Quintilian's argument to rest in a manner that Wace's audience would have applauded; from its own situation, this audience would have understood that at times the maintenance of authority (and, ultimately, the status quo) demands that appropriate steps be taken to destroy the unruly.

Wace follows Geoffrey's Historia in his discussion of Gawain's involvement in the war against Lucius. He eschews Geoffrey's restrained approach, however, enlarging upon the single combat between Gawain and Lucius. Wace focuses on the possibilities for individual glorification, closely describing and admiring each of the combatants. War becomes a courtly spectator sport as Gawain and Lucius engage in an evenly matched contest that in some ways resembles the tournaments of later Arthurian romances. Margaret Houck maintains that Wace “seems to dislike the expression of barbarous feelings, and he usually abridges or omits passages which indicate motives for cruelty.”²⁷ But Wace seems more purposeful than squeamish in softening Geoffrey's violence. Wace isolates Gawain in the battle with Lucius from the remainder of the Arthurian forces and thus shows him to be a new type of fighting man: Gawain is raised up above the fray, presented not as a rude warrior but as a chivalric knight. By conquering Rome, the Arthurian empire reaches its apogee, and its success is, in part, attributable to men like Gawain, civilized heroes of the new romantic order who have refined war, transmuting its ugliness and horror to a form of art. The portrayal of Wace's Gawain makes imperialism seem respectable—the beautiful and rightful activity of those with romantic vision—to an audience itself bent on empire.²⁸

As Geoffrey concludes the Arthurian section of the Historia, Gawain's is just another name in a catalogue of the dead; but Wace takes special care to elaborate on Gawain's demise. Having elevated Gawain to the status of a hero, Wace allows him to die like one. Killed by an unknown assailant at the beginning of the war against his brother Mordred, Gawain is mourned by Arthur, “Car il n'amoit nul home tant” [for he loved no other man so much] (4536). Following Gawain's burial, Arthur “Son mautalant torna et s'ire / Sor Mordret, molt bee a l'ocirre” [turned his wrath on Mordred; much he desired to kill him] (4581-82). In the Roman de Brut, Gawain's murder is the rallying point for those who desire Mordred's ruin. Gawain simultaneously transcends and lends inspiration to Arthurian society. He becomes more than a knight; he becomes a symbol. Wace specifically notes that Gawain's burial site remains unknown, and in the context of Wace's romantic history this “factual” remark takes on added significance. For those who succeed and admire him, Gawain is more than a man whose remains can be exhumed, examined, and verified. He is the eternal, living spirit of the romantic dream. For Wace and his audience, Gawain is proof that “historical” man can aspire to the romantic ideal.

Laȝamon claims that his Brut, written in England at the beginning of the thirteenth century, was influenced by Wace's Roman de Brut, Alfred's English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, and a book written in Latin by Saints Augustine and Albin. In fact, Laȝamon relied almost entirely on Wace for his “historical” material, which he augmented by an imaginative emplotment that both expanded and radically altered Wace's story. If Wace emplots Arthurian history as romance to celebrate the values of the Norman aristocracy, Laȝamon's history is tragedy, consolation to a conquered people. White, at least in part, defines a tragic conception of history as one in which “man springs from nature, creates a society adequate to his immediate needs out of his reason and will, and then engages in a fatal combat with this, his own creation, to provide the drama of historical change.”²⁹ The Brut contains none of the celebration of courtly values so central to Wace's work, primarily because these values would have close associations with French (especially Norman) culture. According to J. S. P. Tatlock, when Laȝamon “ignores French culture, we may attribute this not only to his inexperience of the great world but to his poetic tact in adapting to an audience which would have found it unintelligible and disturbing.”³⁰ Laȝamon was a priest to a vanquished people; he wrote to an audience that had to tolerate but never fully accepted the authority and enthusiams of its French conquerors. He wrote in English, making his work accessible to those who persisted in rejecting French as the official language of their land. For Laȝamon and his audience, daily witnesses to the effects of foreign occupation, the Arthurian legend held little hope. Whereas Wace describes the glorious emergence of an assertive, glittering, courtly society, Laȝamon captures the elegiac strain of his Anglo-Saxon ancestors. He produces a tragic history, cognizant of the smallness of all men, even the greatest, in a world that is fallen, transitory, meaningless. In Laȝamon's hands the Arthurian story is turned into a somber history lesson demonstrating the futility of all human gestures to improve earthly existence: “Nu bidde[ð] Laȝamon alcne æðele mon. / for þene almiten Godd. / þet þeos boc rede [and] leornia þeos runan” [Now Laȝamon asks each noble man, for Almighty God, that he read this book and learn this counsel] (29-31).

Wace depicts Gawain as a good-humored young man; Laȝamon focuses on the solemn side of his personality. When Laȝamon's Gawain responds to Cador's war-affirming speech, there are changes both in the mood of the incident and in the knight's remarks. Rather than providing amusing repartee, Laȝamon's Gawain is angered and insists:

Cador þu ært a riche mon þine ræddes ne beo[ð] noht
idon.
for god is grið and god is frið þe freoliche þer haldeð wið.
and Godd sulf hit makede þurh his Godd-cunde.
for grið makeð godne mon gode workes wurchen.
for alle monnen bið þa bet þat lond bið þa murgre.

Cador, you are a powerful man, but your counsels are not good. Good is peace and good is concord to the one who freely holds with it. And God Himself made it through His Divinity. For peace makes a good man perform good works; and all men are better and the land is happier.

(12454-58)

These are not the words of a romance hero. The confident assertiveness of Wace's Gawain is gone, and in its place are the more resigned perceptions of a man who recognizes his insignificance in the universe, a man who does the best he can with what he has. Laȝamon's Gawain understands how tenuously his society is held together, and he becomes the voice of religious pacificism in an attempt to strengthen social bonds. But even Gawain cannot long live by his words, for religious ideals and earthly exigencies are no more compatible in Gawain's world than they are in Laȝamon's Britain. Despite his eloquence in rebuking Cador, Gawain soon assumes the role of the traditional Anglo-Saxon warrior; he becomes like Cador, and his pacificism gives way to rash, proud, brutal action. Laȝamon modifies the incident involving Gawain's ambassadorial mission to Lucius, emphasizing the knight's helplessness to alter the conditions that he endures. Gawain demonstrates a fiery temper from the very onset of his negotiations with the Roman emperor. No sooner does he meet Lucius than the two men begin exchanging boasts and threats; there is an ever-present atmosphere of conflict. In Wace's text, Quintilian's insults undermine a tense dialogue; Laȝamon presents these remarks as the logical extension of an already heated debate. It is as if, for Laȝamon, the skirmish that breaks out was always unavoidable.

This sense of inevitability dominates Laȝamon's Brut. There is consolation in tragedy, as the audience, which has never known a society of its own, is constantly apprised of the inadequacy of secular institutions to relieve suffering. Perhaps Laȝamon's most significant addition to Gawain's characterization is his strengthening of the bond between the knight and his evil brother, Mordred. Gawain is portrayed as a man torn in two directions. On the one hand he is responsible to his community and the dream of King Arthur; on the other hand are the loyalties of kinship owed to his demonic, destructive brother. Despite the noblest of human intentions, Laȝamon's Gawain cannot reconcile the forces that divide him. While he struggles to maintain that vision of society through which he defines himself as a person, his efforts are confused and undermined by devotion to Mordred.³¹ From Gawain's introduction into the Brut, he appears burdened by Mordred. Unlike Wace, who makes predictions about Gawain's future achievements, Laȝamon first presents him as only a “lute child” [little child] (11082). He chooses instead to dwell on Gawain's brother, warning his audience: “Wale þat Moddræd wes ibore muchel hærm com þerfore” [Alas that Mordred was born; much harm came from that] (11084). Laȝamon hints at Gawain's coming sufferings, not his triumphs. He hints at the disappointment entailed in Gawain's failure to build and be part of a thriving, uplifting Arthurian society.

Laȝamon's readers no doubt felt betrayed by the turn of events that had allowed the French to overrun their land. Even after 150 years, they must have resented being deprived of the rich legacy that was rightfully theirs. But it is the nature of earthly society, Laȝamon insists, to betray those who put their greatest faith in it, and the tragedy of Gawain makes his point. The military career of Laȝamon's Gawain corresponds to that of Wace's Gawain. He proves himself a capable leader of men and distinguishes himself in a closely contested single combat with Lucius (from which neither of the well-praised participants emerges victorious). But Gawain's sterling reputation, both on and off the battlefield, proves, in some sense, a liability in Laȝamon's Brut. Mordred's treason goes unsuspected because

Ah al hit wes stille in hirede and in halle.
for na man hit ne wende þat hit sculde iwurðe.
ah men to soðe i-wenden for Walwain wes his broðer.
þe alre treoweste gume þe tuhte to þan hirede.
þurh Walwain wes Modræd monnen þe leouere.
It was all secret in court and hall, for no man believed that
it should be. In truth, men believed him, for Gawain, the
truest of all men who came to the court, was his brother.
Because of Gawain, Mordred was more believed by men.

(12717-21)

Laȝamon is the first writer to stress Gawain's close family ties. Thus it is a particularly intense moment when Gawain learns of Mordred's treachery. Asked to choose between his brother and Arthur, Gawain dramatically declares, in a speech original to Layamon, “to-dæi ich atsake hine here biuoren þissere duȝeðe, / and ich hine for-demen wulle mid Drihtenes wille” [today I forsake him here before this assembly, and, with the Lord's will, I will destroy him] (14080-81). The choice is not an easy one, because Gawain obviously loves his brother, but responsibilities to society come first. Order must be protected from constantly encroaching evil. However, Gawain and his society are as much doomed by the tragic progression of history as they are by Mordred's scheming. Mordred is simply that irrational force, relentless in its efforts, which even the most organized social institutions cannot completely control. In terms of Laȝamon's overall historical vision, Mordred represents the inherent evil that undermines all gestures of fallen mankind.

To Wace's narrative Laȝamon adds Arthur's allegorical dream concerning Mordred's uprising. In his dream Arthur sees himself raised up on a hall, with Gawain sitting before him; Gawain is armed with Arthur's sword. Mordred then destroys Arthur's hall and breaks Gawain's arms. In this dream not only is Gawain recognized as Arthur's main line of defense, he almost comes to represent the doomed Arthurian society. Secure in his victories against foreign foes, Gawain is blind to the enemy that lurks at home. Both Gawain and the Arthurian community, once vital and triumphant, are easy victims of Mordred's undetected corruption. When Gawain is killed in the war against Mordred, Arthur laments, “wa is me þat ich was mon iborn” [woe is me that I was born a man] (14147). The king realizes that he must continue the struggle in order to defeat Mordred; the impulse to bring order to chaos persists in him. But he also understands that the Arthurian dream has died with Gawain. By showing the tragic fall of the Arthurian court, Laȝamon brings into focus the hopelessness of all secular human endeavor. For Laȝamon, history bears out the theological position that the things of this world are the temporal reflections of human vanity. In Laȝamon's Brut, those living in historical time, those committed to earthly institutions, those who have not performed the necessary ceremonies returning them eternally to what Mircea Eliade refers as “mythical time”—when celebrants enjoy the “continual reactualization … [of an] atemporal mythical instant”³²—are, like Gawain, tragically destined to fail. Laȝamon, the stern priest of western Britain, presents his history to demonstrate that there is no hope in history, there is salvation only in God. To Laȝamon's audience, already betrayed by the course of history, the alternative, the spiritual life, may have been a reasonable one.

Contemporary historiographical theory allows us to regard the historian in a new light, not as an objective communicator of “truth” but rather as a writer whose reliability is necessarily compromised by the nature of discourse itself. This theory clouds the differentiation between history and fiction; it suggests that all histories are fictive, controlled in part by literary modes of emplotment and all that gives rise to these modes. Contemporary historiographical theory may, therefore, allow us to see medieval historians much as they might have seen themselves, not as scholars committed to an illusory scientific method but rather as writers who appreciated and made use of the literariness of their productions. The real value of history, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, lies “in inventing ingenious variations on a commonplace theme, in raising the popular melody to a universal symbol and showing what a world of depth, power, and beauty exists in it.”³³ To judge properly the Roman de Brut and the Brut one cannot think of them as failed histories, tarnished by their literariness, or as fictions weakly disguised as histories. Such judgments are too easy and ultimately inappropriate. Interest in the Roman de Brut and the Brut must be directed not at the historical information they include but at how the writers handled this information. Wace and Laȝamon re-viewed the materials they inherited and reshaped them into new narrative forms. In emplotting their histories to meet the demands of their audiences, Wace and Laȝamon created individual works that comment on the practice of historical writing. For Wace, living in the affluence of Norman France, history was a means to show the infinitude of human potential. For Laȝamon, living in Norman-occupied Britain, history was a means of showing his audience the way to God.

Notes

1. A case in point involves the work of William of Malmesbury, a medieval historian who took great pride in the accuracy of his investigations and the laboriousness of his research, a medieval historian quick to condemn colleagues for excessive literariness. William has been criticized for the lack of objectivity in his historical method. Antonia Gransden, a scholar generally sympathetic to William's efforts, argues in Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 176: “He had a great gift of imagination, which appears in his numerous excellent stories. … But sometimes this led him to extremes. One slender fact or unauthenticated rumor could rouse the story-teller in him.”

2. Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (1986), 487.

3. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, in Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, 82, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1850), p. 122. The translation is from M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 167.

4. Hugh of Saint Victor, De sacramentis fidei Christianae, in Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, 176, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1880), p. 184. The translation is from Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, p. 167.

5. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, p. 166.

6. Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 55.

7. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

8. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 82.

9. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 5.

10. Ibid., p. 10.

11. White, p. 257. Also see Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 257-58. Lévi-Strauss similarly claims: “What makes History possible is that a sub-set of events is found, for a given period, to have approximately the same significance for a contingent of individuals who have not necessarily experienced the events and may even consider them at an interval of several centuries. History is therefore never history, but history-for. It is partial in the sense of being biased even when it claims not to be.”

12. Raymond Klibansky, “Peter Abailard and Bernard of Clairvaux: A Letter by Abailard,” Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (1961), 21.

13. Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 30.

14. Robert Huntington Fletcher, The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles (1906; rpt. New York: Franklin, 1966), p. 116.

15. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 6.

16. On Gawain's role in the Historia, see Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae, ed. Acton Griscom (London: Longman, Green, 1929), pp. 444-97.

17. White, Metahistory, p. 8.

18. Ibid., p. 9.

19. Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr., “Norman Literature and Wace,” in Medieval Secular Literature, ed. William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 62.

20. Wace, Le Roman de Rou, ed. A. J. Holden (Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1970), I, 167. The translation is from Charles Foulon, “Wace,” in Arthurian Literature of the Middle Ages, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 94.

21. See Laȝamon, Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, EETS, O.S. 250 and 277 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963 and 1978). In citing his sources, Laȝamon claims: “Boc he nom þe þridde leide þer amidden. / þa makede a Frenchis clerc. / Wace wes ihoten þe wel couþe writen. / [and] he hoe ȝef þare æðelen Ælienor. / þe wes Henries quene þes heȝes kinges” [He took the third book and laid it there among the others. It was made by a French clerk named Wace, who knew how to write well, and who gave it to Eleanor, queen to the high king, Henry] (19-23). All further quotations from the Brut are cited in the text. All translations from the Brut are my own.

22. Eugene Vance, “Love's Concordance: The Poetics of Desire and the Joy of the Text,” Diacritics 5 (1975), 47.

23. On the varied concerns of the Norman nobility, see J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), p. 465.

24. Wace, La partie arthurienne du Roman de Brut, ed. I. D. O. Arnold and M. M. Pelan (Paris: Klincksieck, 1962). All further quotations from the Roman de Brut are cited in the text. All translations from the Roman de Brut are my own.

25. In his discussion of Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century writer of romantic historiography, White maintains that “Michelet emplotted his histories as dramas of disclosure, of the liberation of a spiritual power fighting to free itself from the forces of darkness.” Metahistory, p. 152.

26. Michael Herzog, “The Development of Sir Gawain as a Literary Figure in Medieval German and English Arthurian Romances” (diss., University of Washington, 1971), p. 19.

27. Margaret Houck, “Sources of the Roman de Brut of Wace,” University of California Publications in English 5 (1940-44), 185.

28. On Arthurian romance as a literary basis for imperialism, see Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the 12th Century (New York: New American Library, 1927), p. 260.

29. White, Metahistory, p. 226.

30. Tatlock, Legendary History of Britain, p. 489.

31. White points to Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century author of Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution, to demonstrate how a tragic vision of history functions: “Man remains as Tocqueville put it, ‘on the verge between two abysses,’ the one comprised of that social order without which he cannot be man, the other comprised of that demonic nature within him which prevents his ever becoming fully human. It is the consciousness of this existence ‘on the verge between two abysses’ that man constantly returns at the end of every effort to raise himself above the animal and to make thrive the ‘angel’ which resides within him, suppressed, tethered, and unable to gain ascendency in the species.” White, Metahistory, p. 193.

32. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 46 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 76.

33. The translation is from White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 54.