the early 1130s with the intent of ingratiating the Celtic part of the population with the
new Norman rulers by stressing the Britons’ claim to Britain, tracing its history back to
the Trojans, in particular to Aeneas, with the help of early Welsh chronicles and Nennius.
According to these sources, Brutus (folk etymology of Brytt ‘Briton’), Aeneas’s great-
grandson, led the Trojans out of Greek captivity to Britain; the Liber vetustissimus then
depicted the legendary history of Brutus’s descendants on this island through the 8th
century, when the Celts had to abandon all hope of reconquering the country from the
Anglo-Saxons. It was this text that Geoffrey reedited and brought to renown thanks to the
interest of the Norman dynasty in the predecessors of the Anglo-Saxons, renown that also
had its repercussions on Wace’s Roman de Brut, or Geste des Bretons (1155), since
scribes of later manuscripts constantly altered the text by increasingly modeling it on
Geoffrey’s work. In the critical edition, the Roman de Brut is narrated in 14,866
octosyllabic verses; the manuscript Durham Cathedral C. iv. I (Anglo-Norman; 13th c.)
inserts 670 decasyllabic verses containing the prophecies of Merlin related by a certain
Elias; Lincoln Cathedral 104 (Anglo-Norman; 13th c.) adds 640 Alexandrines of the
same prophecies by a certain William; and B.L. Add. 45103 (Anglo-Norman; 13th c.)
contains yet another version of the prophecies, also in Alexandrines, and anonymous.
B.N. fr. 1450 (Picard; 13th c.) goes even further and inserts between lines 9,798 and
9,799 Chrétien de Troyes’s romances Erec, Perceval, Cligés, Yvain, and Lancelot, in that
order.
Wace is remarkably critical of his source, frequently stressing that he is not certain of
a fact; conversely, he romanticizes the dry events of history in order to make them
palatable to an audience of noble laypersons. In particular, his work contains several
episodes that presage the spirit of courtly love, such as King Aganippus’s love “from
afar” for Cordeïlle, King Leïr’s youngest daughter, or Uther Pendragon’s love from
reputation only for Ygerne; but he also stresses the catastrophic consequences of passion,
illustrated, for example, by the episodes of Locrin’s and Mordred’s adulterous
relationships. Though he eliminates the most fantastic elements in his source, such as
Merlin’s prophecies, he adds many picturesque details, among them a mention of the
institution of the Round Table, a detail that to date has not been satisfactorily explained.
Wace’s work was enormously popular (twenty-six manuscripts have preserved it in
complete or fragmented form), and ca. 1200 the priest Layamon of Raston in
Worcestershire adapted it into Middle English, swelling it to nearly 30,000 lines; it is
Layamon who reports that Wace had dedicated his work to Eleanor, which is possible
though not mentioned in the text.
While in the Roman de Brut Wace was highly successful in converting pseudohistory
into narrative fiction, he was less so in the Roman de Rou (i.e., Rollo), or Geste des
Normands (11,440 octosyllabic lines; plus a prologue of 315 lines and the first 4,425
lines of the work, in Alexandrines; in addition, there exists the first draft of a prologue in
750 octosyllabic lines). The work was commissioned by Henry II, who wanted a poem
similar to the Brut with respect to the history of Normandy. Wace especially had recourse
to Dudo de Saint-Quentin’s unreliable De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae ducum,
from the first years of the 11th century, Guillaume de Jumièges’s Gesta Normannorum
ducum of 1071, Guillaume de Poitiers’s Gesta Guillelmi (ca. 1078), and William of
Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum of the first half of the 12th. Wace began the
project in 1160. He was uncomfortable with real history and its sources, excelling only
The Encyclopedia 1833