text—that is, the many coinages and poetic compounds
with a distinctly Anglo-Saxon ring about them and the
marked preference for words of Anglo-Saxon origin
(many of which have been replaced in the Otho text by
French loanwords).
In subject matter and method La3amon imitates
Wace so as to be able to afford his readers a history of
the Britons from the time of Brutus, great-grandson
of Aeneas, to the ascendancy of the Saxons over the
Britons during the reign of Cadwalader in the 7th cen-
tury. Lazamon’s additions to and modifi cations of his
Anglo-Norman source have much to tell us, however,
about his purpose in adapting Wace’s poem into Eng-
lish: as scholars have been quick to notice, Lazamon’s
numerous accounts of feasts, sea voyages, and battles,
many of which have no counterparts in Wace’s poem,
evoke the ethos of OE poetic accounts of such events and
seem to have been intended to do so. Similarly Wace’s
interest in love, courtesy, and the ideals of chivalry is
not one that La3amon shares: indeed, in his adaptation
of many of the events described in Wace’s poem, we
fi nd La3amon attempting to recreate the ethos of the
heroic, as opposed to the chivalric, world. His Arthur,
for example, is not a Norman king presiding over a
chivalric court as in Wace, but a Saxon chieftain as
disposed to committing acts of brutality and violence
as to rewarding his faithful retainers, after a battle, with
rings, garments, and horses. As in the meadhalls of OE
poetry, there are scops in Arthur’s court and dream (joy)
when a victory is being celebrated; by the same token
here and elsewhere in the poem there prevails, as in OE
verse, an overwhelming sense of the role played by Fate
in the human lives, but especially in the lives of those
destined to enter the fi eld of battle.
Further evidence of La3amon’s familiarity with and
desire to imitate the verse of OE poets can be discerned
in his use of formulas, not simply as tags and line fi llers
but also to advance his narrative in a manner in keeping
with the formulaic practices of OE poetry. Not surpris-
ingly, perhaps, the Brut is most noticeably formulaic
in passages tliat have no counterpart in Wace and in
which La3amon seems to have been particularly eager
to recreate the ethos of the past, such as his accounts of
feasts, sea voyages, and battles. Equally indicative of
La3amon’s admiration for the verse of the OE poets is
his use of certain rhetorical tropes and patterns found
in their poetry. With an unmistakable sense of what
he is about La3amon employs, with varying degrees
of frequency, the kenning, the descriptive epithet, the
simile, litotes, variation, chiasmus, and more complex
structural repetitions, such as the envelope pattern,
repetition parallels, and balance parallels.
La3amon’s unmistakable nostalgia for the pre-
Conquest period is refl ected not only in the poem’s style
and content but also in its verse form. He patterns his
verse, like his language and themes, after that of the OE
poets. La3amon’s basic metrical unit is the alliterative
long line consisting of two two-stress hemistichs linked
by alliteration, rhyme, or both. His use of rhyme as well
as alliteration, of a longer line (to accommodate the
hypotactic constructions of ME), and of some metrical
patterns that do not conform to the metrical patterns of
OE verse suggest that La3amon was working within
a much more fl exible prosody than that governing the
composition of OE poetry; however, his verse should
not be relegated, as some of his critics have suggested,
to the ranks of “popular” poetry. Rather it is an evolu-
tionary form of the “classical” alliterative verse of the
English Middle Ages.
See also Geoffrey of Monmouth; WaceFurther Reading
Primary Sources
Brook, G.L., and R.F. Leslie, eds. La3amon: Brut. 2 vols. EETS
o.s. 250, 277. London: Oxford University Press, 1963–78.
Bzdyl, Donald G., trans. Layamon’s Brut: A History of the Brit-
ons. Binghamton: MRTS, 1989.
Secondary Sources
New CBEL 1:460–63
Le Saux, Françoise H.M. La3amon’s Brut: The Poem and Its
Sources. Cambridge: Brewer, 1989.
Le Saux, Françoise H.M. The Text and Tradition of La3amon’s
Brut. Cambridge: Brewer, 1994.
Reiss, Edmund, et al. Arthurian Legend and Literature: An An-
notated Bibliography. Vol. 1. New York: Garland, 1984, pp.
79–80.
Stanley, E.G. “Layamon’s Antiquarian Sentiments.” MÆ 38
(1969): 23–37.
James NobleLEO III, EMPEROR
(c. 680–741, r. 717–741)
Leo III (Conon) was a Byzantine—i.e., eastern Ro-
man—emperor. In older works he was mistakenly called
“the Isaurian,” but research has now established that
he was from Germanicea (modern Marash or Maraš
in southeastern Turkey). His native tongue was Syriac
or Arabic, and as regards religion he was most likely a
Jacobite (Syrian Monophysite).
Conon probably changed his original name to the
more “Roman” Leo and became religiously orthodox
when he joined the Byzantine army. As a young man
he became a protégé of Emperor Justinian II during
Justinian’s second reign (705–711), and he continued
to rise during the short reigns of emperors Philippicus
(711–713) and Anastasius II (713–715). When Theodo-
sius III (715–717) deposed the latter, Leo marched on
Constantinople to avenge Anastasius. With a large Arab
land and naval force also approaching Constantinople,LEO III, EMPEROR