This Mordech, who kept the guard of king Artur’s land and wife, as soon as the king left the land (sc. of Bretanha to wage war against Lucius Liber) seized it and wished to sleep with his (sc. Artur’s) wife. The king, when he learned about it, returned with his hosts and came against Mordech. And Mordech, when he learned about it, took all his company and left to face him in battle. And they had their divisions stationed for battle on mount Camblet, and Mordech remembered that he had performed a great treason and that he would be defeated if he were to enter battle.[1]
The narrative above was translated not from Galfridus (Geoffrey) of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, but from a Portuguese chronicle preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript: the Nobiliario ou Livro das Linhagens do Conde D. Pedro (Nobiliarium or Count D. Pedro’s Book of Pedigrees). As evidenced by the presence of King Lear and other British monarchs in it, Galfridus was D. Pedro de Barcellos’ indirect source for the second título (“book”) of his chronicle.
In the course of a very few years Galfridus’ narrative became famed throughout Europe, from England to Portugal and beyond. In its verisimilar description of the politics of petty kings and battle scenes it rivalled the earlier Greek, Roman, and Christian historians, and inspired the writing of other fabled national histories (Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum comes to mind).[2] It was undoubtedly a medieval bestseller, with almost 200 manuscripts known to us, written from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.
The History of the Kings of Britain lacks the “novelties” introduced by Wace (the Round Table) and Chrétien de Troyes (Lancelot and Percival and the quest for the Grail), and except for the episode of the giant of Mont Saint-Michel there is not much in it that calls to mind the fantastic and romantic scenes of later, chivalry retellings. The disposition of foot soldiers and cavalry divisions matters more than the prowess of individual warriors, and in his warring abroad Galfridus’ Arthur has his moments of ruthless, unjustified violence, not different from the brutality displayed by Julius Caesar while conquering Gaul:
Victoria igitur potiti, civitates accumulata flamma invaserunt dispersisque pagensibus saevitiae indulgere non cessaverunt donec totam Norguegiam nec non et Daciam dominio Arturi summiserunt (chapter 154).[3]
That said, the framework and some of the basic elements of what was to become the Legenda Arthuriana were already there (like the island of Avalon), and Galfridus’ success was responsible for sparking Arthur’s lasting fame, despite the several murder attempts against it—both by humourless scholars like William of Newburgh and by laughing mockers like Rabelais and Monty Python. Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers may have threatened the popularity of the Knights of the Round Table here and there, but nowadays the Frankish paladins are almost forgotten outside the borders of France and the sadly restricted circle of readers of Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto.
But, despite Arthur’s continuing fame, Galfridus’ History seems to have fallen out of favour with readers from the Renaissance onwards. Later authors (like Shakespeare) who made obvious use of matter first presented by him for the most part accessed his text through some intermediary, vernacular source. It did not help Galfridus that all editions of the Latin text until the twentieth century were quite faulty, and that translations were few and of poor quality.
It was only in 1929 that two scholars, Acton Griscom and Edmond Faral, working separately, edited single manuscripts of the History, which they then annotated with variants from a small number of other copies. If not yet the desired full recension — for Griscom and Faral consulted a very small percentage of the 200 odd remaining manuscripts — at least a reliable text was made available. New editions appeared in the course of the following decades, some of the so-called “(first) variant version” (Jacob Hammer, Neil Wright, Michael Reeve, David Burchmore), as well as new translations that finally made the text widely available to a reading public with little or no knowledge of Latin.[4]
To the above is now added C. T. Hadavas’ pedagogical edition of the Arthurian chapters of the History of the Kings of Britain, aimed at students of Latin “assumed to have a basic acquaintance with Latin grammar,” but “not assumed to have acquired much Latin vocabulary” (p. v), completed with a brief introduction, vocabulary and glossary, and explanatory notes.
Hadavas manifestly seeks to present to students of Latin an “unaltered . . . text of rather significant length as soon as possible after (or even during) the first year of instruction in the language,” at the same time “engaging and lively,” and reflecting “certain aspects of the culture of Western Europe during the Middle Ages” (id.). And Galfridus’ Arthurian tales were, “at least in terms of their grammatical, syntactical, and lexical accessibility, perhaps the most engaging and (in terms of name recognition at least) familiar of Medieval Latin narratives” (id.).
The ideal student is then clearly told “how to use this book” (pp. v–vii) before being presented with a general survey of the peculiarities of “Medieval Latin” (pp. ix–xi). Short as this last section is, it is nevertheless quite informative. However, those interested on the textual history of the work, the forming of the Arthurian legend, or the critical fortune of Galfridus’ text will be a little bit disappointed by the meagreness of information given in hardly a page and a half (pp. xii–xiii). But I guess a didactic edition centred in the text itself has not much room for extratextual matters, and the spare bibliography (six works listed in the “bibliographic abbreviations,” p. viii, plus seven in the bibliography itself, pp. xiii–xiv) offers a nice introduction for those interested on those subjects.
Hadavas claims the edition of the Latin text to be his own, but, with permission of Boydell Press, “based heavily on the one edited by Michael Reeve” (p. xiii). He also says, “the vast majority of changes” consists “of orthographic modification to classical Latin norms” (id.). I therefore compared some random passages of Hadavas’ text with Reeve’s and found his claim to be true—but there are very few changes apart from the conversion of semi-vocalic minuscule u to v (uero → vero), of vocalic majuscule V to U (Vrbs Legionum → Urbs Legionum), and from the reinstatement of the etymological y (tirannidem → tyrannidem).[5] As for the names of characters and places, besides those obviously unknown to classical writers (like Modredus, Gualguainus and Arturus) Hadavas’ leaves unaltered the spellings e.g. of Affricanorum and Ypolitus.
The vocabulary is simple in the sense that it gives only the meanings suggested by the text as a whole or by specific passages of it. For example: “officium, –ii, (ML) authorized form of service or worship, divine office.” A small number of entries seems to be there only for the sake of completeness and of presenting the genitive form of a name (e.g., “Caesar, –aris, Caesar”). At times the entry indicates when a certain meaning belonged exclusively to Classical, Late or Medieval Latin. A glossary (pp. 191-221) at the end lists all words employed more than three times in the text.
Most of the notes deal with grammatical aspects of Galfridus’ Latin, but a minority are dedicated to characters (e.g., those about Gawain and Mordred on p. 96), objects (e.g., on Excalibur on p. 86), places (e.g., on Urbis Legionum on p. 29), or events. At times, such information is given in the vocabulary (e.g., on the tribe of the Allobroges on p. 132). Some notes are copied with due credit from Lewis Thorpe (p. 131) and Faletra (pp. 33, 78–80, 88, 97, 108, 111, 147, 181, 183).
In summary, Hadavas’ “one-man-show” edition is very well-conceived and produced, and most likely to arouse interest in Galfridus’ text among students of Latin, perhaps even encouraging a couple of them to engage more deeply with it as a post-graduate and senior researcher.[6]
I was disappointed only with the cover, for I expected something more creative from the man who designed the best cover ever created for a work from ancient Greece and Rome—(Xenophon of Ephesus’ An Ephesian Tale), and who lists among his research interests animation.[7]
Notes
[1] « Este Mordech que auia a terra em guarda de rrey Artur e a molher, quando elrrey foy fóra da terra alçousse com ella e quislhe jazer com a molher. E elrrey quando o soube tornousse com sa oste e veo sobre Mordech. E Mordech quando o soube filhou toda sa companha e sayo a elle aa batalha. E elles tiinham as aazes paradas pera lidar no monte Camblet, e acordousse Mordech que avia feito gramde traiçom e se emtrasse na batalha que seria vençido. » My translation (I kept the Portuguese spelling of names. The chronicle seems to be from the twelfth- or thirteenth-century).
The edition consulted (Alexandre Herculano (ed.), Portugaliae Monumenta Historica a saeculo octavo post Christum usque ad quintumdecimum: Scriptores, vol. 1, fasc. 2, p. 243. Lisbon: Typis Academicis, 1860) can be downloaded from the National Library of Portugal website. Count D. Pedro’s text occupies pp. 230–280 of fasc. 2, and pp. 281–390 of fasc. 3 (available online). The second título runs from p. 236 to p. 245.
[2] See John Burrow’s nice analysis of Galfridus’ text as pseudo-historyin A History of Histories (London, 2007).
[3] In Neil Wright’s translation (2007, p. 206): “Once victorious, they assaulted the cities with fire at the ready, and scattered the country-dwellers with unabated fury until they had subjected the whole of Norway and Denmark to Arthur’s control.” See next note for full citation.
[4] Edited by Ivo Cavellatus, the editio princeps of the History was published in 1508 by Josse Bade in Paris (reprinted in 1517). Then, up to 1854, it was published in 1587 (ed. Jerome Commelin), 1844 (ed. J. A. Giles), and 1854 (ed. A. Schulz). Acton Griscom’s 1929 edition was published in London; Edmond Faral’s, in Paris. The “(first) variant version” was edited at least three times so far, by Jacob Hammer (Cambridge, MA, 1951), Neil Wright (Cambridge, UK, 1988), and David Burchmore (Cambridge, MA, 2019). Michael Reeve’s edition, with a translation by N. Wright, appeared in 2007 (Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY). As for the translations, besides the ones indicated above, we can notice Lewis Thorpe’s (1966, reprinted several times), and Michael Faletra’s (Peterborough, Canada, 2008).
[5] For example, this is how the text is edited by Michael Reeve:
« Adueniente uero aestate, dum Romam petere affectaret et montes transcendere incepisset, nunciatur ei Modredum nepotem suum, cuius tutelae permiserat Britanniam, eiusdem diademate per tirannidem et proditionem insignitum esse reginamque Ganhumaram uiolato iure priorum nuptiarum eidem nefanda uenere copulatam fuisse. »
And here is Hadavas’ adaptation:
« Adveniente vero aestate, dum Romam petere affectaret et montes transcendere incepisset, nunciatur ei Modredum nepotem suum, cuius tutelae permiserat Britanniam, eiusdem diademate per tyrannidem et proditionem insignitum esse reginamque Ganhumaram violato iure priorum nuptiarum eidem nefanda venere copulatam fuisse. »
Reeve already reverted in some spellings to Classical Latin (see mainly pp. li–lv of his edition). Neil Wright, on the contrary, followed more closely the spelling of his manuscript source. For example, in this passage he wrote estate instead of aestate, and nephanda instead of nefanda (but tyrannidem instead of tirannidem).
[6] Perusing the page of credits one discovers the book to be edited, annotated, seemingly produced, and published by C. T. Hadavas, I assume with the initial aim of using it in his own classes at Beloit College.
[7] Having studied cinema myself before embarking on Classical Studies (and majoring in animation, none the less), my sympathy for Hadavas is complete.