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Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Wales History. Geoffrey of Monmouth. Merlin goes mad as he watches a ferocious battle and flees to the forest, thwarting all attempts to make him return to the court, whose follies he bitterly reveals.
This work carries further Geoffrey's concern with the hero who finds antagonism between his own desires and the values of society.
In Geoffrey was designated bishop of St. Asaph on the border of England and Wales. In the years following his death, his Historia became widely, though not unanimously, accepted as factual and influenced serious historians of the Britons and the English for centuries.
The most thorough, though controversial, study of Geoffrey's art is J. Historia Regum Britanniae. Vita Merlini. If the story of Arthur as a national British hero can be attributed to any one author, it is most certainly Geoffrey of Monmouth. The familiar elements of the Arthurian story are the responsibility of this teacher and clerk in Oxford and the Welsh Marches in the first half of the twelfth century.
The wondrous and strange Prophetiae Merlini Prophecies of Merlin, hereafter denoted as PM , composed with the encouragement of Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, whose literary patronage Geoffrey tried to procure, was certainly circulating by PM enjoyed immense popularity as political prophecy; sections of the Prophecies were translated into Middle English and used to signify political events during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Shortly after its composition, Geoffrey's HRB was lambasted as a pack of lies [2] , since it attempted to present, in a chronological fashion with meticulous attention to the conventions of historical writing, the history of the nation of Britain from its legendary settlement by the Trojans up until the Saxon domination of the island. Later, around , Geoffrey wrote the lesser-known Vita Merlini Life of Merlin, VM , a poem describing the madness and restitution of the famous character Merlin.
As is the case with many medieval authors, reliable information about the life of Geoffrey of Monmouth is scarce. Three different sources give us unfortunately scanty accounts of the life of this incredibly dynamic and imaginative writer. Second, seven charters and deeds mentioning his name attest to his role as an active public official in the church, in the schools in Oxford, and in the witnessing of at least one major political event.
Both Geoffrey's work and the charters are contemporary documents which are most likely reliable. Third is a more shady source; this is the Welsh Gwentian-Brut , a text that gives us numerous biographical details that flesh out the skeleton provided by the contemporary documents. The Gwentian-Brut has been generally disregarded by scholars as a reliable source of biographical information on Geoffrey, since it was originally "edited" by the notorious Welsh forger Iolo Morganwg between and Michael Curley also points out Geoffrey's affinity for Wales as, at least once in his re-writing of Nennius into the HRB, he changes scenes to locations closer to the city of Monmouth.
In particular, Geoffrey relocates the death of Vortigern from Demetia to Little Doward in order to locate the scene nearer to his hometown. Asaph's in Geoffrey Ashe points out that Anglo-Norman monarchs were not generally in the habit of appointing Welshmen as bishops ; thus, it seems appropriate to speculate that Geoffrey was descended from a Bretonic family that emigrated to Wales sometime after the Norman conquest During the most prolific period of his life from approximately to , he was in residence at Oford as a clerk and teacher; although Oxford University was not officially established until , Geoffrey was most likely teaching and writing in one of the various small faculties located in the city.
Oxford was important to Geoffrey's writing for three reasons: 1 it was an increasingly volatile and intense center of intellectual and literary activity; 2 it was the location for at least two near crises during the civil war between Stephen de Blois and Empress Matilda , and as such it served as a kind of stage where certain major events in British history unfolded [6] ; 3 most importantly, and related to 2 , it was in Oxford that Geoffrey met Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, and Robert of Chesney, to whom VM is dedicated.
He is best known for his chronicle The History of the Kings of Britain Latin: De gestis Britonum or Historia regum Britanniae ,[1] which was widely popular in its day, being translated into various other languages from its original Latin. It was credited, uncritically, well into the 16th century,[2] but is now considered historically unreliable. The legend of King Arthur provides another story of the construction of Stonehenge. It is told by the twelfth century writer, Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his History of the Kings of Britain that Merlin brought the stones to the Salisbury Plain from Ireland.
Sometime in the fifth century, there had been a massacre of British noblemen by the treacherous Saxon leader, Hengest. Geoffrey tells us that the high king, Aurelius Ambrosius, wanted to create a fitting memorial to the slain men. Merlin suggested an expedition to Ireland for the purpose of transplanting the Giant's Ring stone circle to Britain. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the stones of the Giant's Ring were originally brought from Africa to Ireland by giants who else but giants could handle the job?
The stones were located on "Mount Killaraus" and were used as a site for performing rituals and for healing.
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