Roman De Brut

This volume provides an accessible, English prose translation of Wace's Roman de Brut, in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons.

"This is an editions and translation of the first extant vernacular 'history' of Britain, by the Norman-French cleric Wace. His verse chronicle was in turn a translation, from the Latin prose of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1138). It traces British history, part factual, part fictional, stretching from Brutus., the eponymous founder of the nation, up to seventh century, when Anglo-Saxon invaders took control of the island. Some well-known stories appear here for the first time, such as that of King Lear and the earliest full-blown 'biography' of King Arthur. The Normans were keen to discover, and where they could not discover, invent, the history of the land they had conquered. Geoffrey's work filled that need, and Wace continued the process by making such history still more accessible and memorable, putting it into French verse and presenting it to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the cultivated wife of his king, in 1155. This volume provides the French text en face, revised from Ivor Arnold's 1938 edition and restoring many readings from his base manuscripts. It includes a full introduction by the translator." -- Publisher's description

'Whoever wishes to hear about, and to know about, kings and heirs, about who first ruled England and which kings it had, Master Wace, who is telling the truth about this, has translated this.' Wace's Roman de Brut (1155) can be seen as the gateway to the history of the Britons for both French and English speakers of the time, and thus to Arthurian history, as the first complete Old French adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain (late 1130s), in which Arthur appears for the first time as king of the Britons. The Roman de Brut was a foundational work, an inspiration for a series of anonymous verse Bruts of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries and for the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut -- the most widely read French vernacular text on this material in medieval England -- as well as a forerunner of the Middle English Brut tradition, including Layamon's Brut (c. 1200). Wace's poem thus inaugurates and shapes Brut traditions, including Arthurian tales, in verse and in prose, in historiography and in literature, including Wace's innovation of King Arthur's Round Table. This volume contains an English prose translation of Wace's Roman de Brut, accompanied by an introduction and notes, a select bibliography, a summary of the text, a list of manuscripts, and indexes of personal and geographical names.

The poet Wace produced a remarkable epic poem known as "Roman de Brut" in the 1100s. The poem combined a sweeping history of Britain, along with elements of Arthurian legend and folktales. This twentieth-century translation of Wace's poem provides historical context for the work, as well as a prose rendering that is accessible to modern-day readers.

'The Brut' or 'Roman de Brut' by the poet Wace is a loose and expanded translation in almost 15,000 lines of the Norman-French verse of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain. Its genre is equivocal, being more than a chronicle but not quite a fully-fledged romance.The book narrates a largely fictional version of Britain's story from its settlement by Brutus, a refugee from Troy, who gives the poem its name, through a thousand years of pseudohistory, including the story of king Leir, up to the Roman conquest, the introduction of Christianity, and the legends of sub-Roman Britain, ending with the reign of the 7th-century king Cadwallader. Especially prominent is its account of the life of King Arthur, the first in any vernacular language, which instigated and influenced a whole school of French Arthurian romances dealing with the Round Table – here making its first appearance in literature – and with the adventures of its various knights.