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Narrators, Messengers, and Lawman's "Brut"Author(s): JOSEPH D. PARRYSource: Arthuriana, Vol. 8, No. 3, Lawman's Brut (FALL 1998), pp. 46-61Published by: Scriptorium PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27869363 .

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Narrators, Messengers, and Lawman's Brut

JOSEPH D. PARRY

As Lawman uses the messenger motif in his BruthoiYi to facilitate and to

interpret the role that knowledge and power play in British history, the

poet also imagines his own role as history's authorized messenger.

Messengers model and endorse Lawman's gestures at writing himself a

place next to the people of British history and, perhaps more importantly, to the places in which that history occurred. (JDP)

Messengers

figure quite prominently in Lawman's Brut. Cataloguing the

text's 'messenger' motif from the many apparently insignificant messengers to Merlin, the prophet/messenger, Fran?oise Le Saux admits that most of the poem's messengers are plot functionaries Lawman uses in order 'to present events in a logical sequence, with clearly perceptible motivations

for a given act, the consequences of which must in turn be explicitly defined'; for example, messengers who announce a king's wish to raise an army for a

battle or call a 'husting' make 'explicit' the 'motivations' behind the narrative's battles and political initiatives (Sources 48). Yet messengers may also give the narrative 'the opportunity to give extra depth to the psychology of a given character, and to introduce direct speech'; Le Saux's examples for this are the

many instances when 'Arthur's invincibility and power' become more evident

by his use of messengers as he pursues his several successful military campaigns (Sources 50). The messenger motif is, in fact, Lawman's

major device for providing explicit causal relationships between the actions and decisions of given characters. It is frequently (in fact, nearly always) used to introduce speeches.... It may also serve as a

delaying device to create tension....

It is the major single expanding device of the whole English Brut. (Sources 56)

Le Saux has done some crucial groundwork for exploring the significance of

messengers to the Brut's narrative design, as Dennis P. Donahue, building on

Le Saux's work, has already shown with his examination of the knight messenger who brings to Arthur the news of Modred's and Wenhaver's treason

(170-71, 219-20).

ARTHURIANA 8.3 ( 1 9 9 8 )

46



NARRATORS, MESSENGERS, AND LAWMAN'S Brut 47

What is particularly striking about Le Saux's analysis, however, is that, as

she describes what messengers do specifically in the Brut, she is also describing more generally many of the foremost activities narrators perform in crafting,

manipulating, and guiding a story. Lawman's messengers render conspicuous in the text the activity of narrating itself. I wish to argue in this essay that

Lawman's use of messengers displays his thinking about the activity in which

he is engaged as writer and narrator. In his messengers?the knowledge they

convey, the power with which they are associated?Lawman imagines the

strategies by which his text authorizes itself as a true narrative brought back, as it were, from the past by someone intimately familiar not only with the

history, but more importantly, with the land on which that history occurred.

The Bruis messengers are deeply invested in the role that power, knowledge,

knowledge as power, and power as knowledge play in the text. Though, as Le

Saux indicates, most are 'subordinated to their message' [Sources 51), that very use of messengers provides the text with a means by which to represent and

authorize images of power. Messengers thus become themselves images of

that power. Messengers enhance the importance of the politically powerful, not only of an Arthur, as Le Saux notes, but also of a Vortiger, who uses them

skilfully, duplicitously, but always with increasing effectiveness that corresponds to the increase of his power on his path to Britain's kingship. Where Wace

relates that Vortiger counsels Constant to send for the Picts of Scotland to

'serve as embassy between us and our foes,' which advice Constant readily

accepts (4), Lawman depicts Vortiger himself choosing messengers and sending them to the Picts. Their departure is marked by the employment of the same

sonde.. .sende verbal pair (6675ff.)1 to which Lawman characteristically resorts

to describe Arthur's use of messengers, a use which, as Le Saux argues,

contribute^] towards the feeling of Arthur's invincibility and power' (Sources

50). Lawman draws attention to the presence and use of messengers to signal the presence of power; messengers are in the Bruta, necessary means by which

power communicates itself and extends itself to the community of the

governed. In that sense, messengers uphold and realize the power of a ruler.

But perhaps more significantly, messengers become powerful figures themselves because of what they know. Lawman is more interested in the

messengers who come to, for instance, an Arthur with crucial information, information which, in turn, Lawman uses to reveal not only plot, but also

insight into character. As Donahue demonstrates, the messenger who brings the tidings of Modred's and Wenhaver's treason to Arthur not only possesses the truth about the narrative's plot, when Arthur does not, but also reveals, or

at least emphasizes on behalf of the narrator, Arthur's inadequacies and



48 ARTHURIANA

ignorance, and thereby conveys the truth about Arthur's fall (219). This knight messenger, like Arthur's dream, is an instrument of dramatic irony in this scene and is, therefore, attached to the narrative's sense of what Arthur does

and does not, should and should not, know. Later in this essay I will develop more fully this notion of the messenger's attachment to?as I will style it, his

proximity to?the narrative's sense of knowledge, power, and ethics. Arthur's

relationship to the power of knowledge is of particular interest to Lawman.

Le Saux notes that 'it is at the turning-points of Arthur's career that the

potentialities of the "messenger" theme are exploited to the full' (Sources 54). She briefly examines Lawman's use of 'the "messenger" theme' in the scene, after the battle of Lincoln, in which the Saxons counsel together about

submitting to Arthur and send to him a delegation of twelve knights. The

messengers, she argues, 'motivate' Arthur's 'first major speech in the Brut,' a

speech that will characterize him as hunter and predator, but will also point to 'an underlying irony that the hunter should have let his prey get away, in

this case' (Sources 54). Le Saux has very nicely sketched out here what we will

often see in Arthur?messengers accompanying and, in some cases, facilitating important revelations about what Arthur does and does not know, therefore

what Lawman knows, and what he thinks we should know, about Arthur.

The scene that Le Saux examines here is part of the larger collection of scenes that delineate Arthur's establishment as king. Messengers are a

conspicuous part of the process in which Arthur engages to consolidate and

solidify his power. These scenes, of course, open with those '|)at hsest wes on

londe' [those who were highest in the land] agreeing to 'senden sonde' [send

messengers]?three bishops and seven knights 'raei^e on wisdome' [excelling in wisdom]?to retrieve Arthur from Brittany to be king (9893^). Unlike

Wace, Lawman lingers in the narrative to let these messengers deliver their

message, which, with its greetings, requests, and instructions about being a

good king, contains information the narrative has not made explicit, namely that Uther had 'baed' [commanded] Arthur to become king. These messenger scenes, as well as the messenger scene not many lines later involving Maurin, kin to Arthur, (Maurin's identity by name and relation to Arthur are unique to the Brut) amplify Arthur's right to the kingship not only by bloodlines, but

also by racial loyalty. But these noble messengers also set the stage for the

narrative to dramatize Arthur's initial response to the call. In response to the

weighty and gracious message he receives, Arthur 'saet fui stille / aenne stunde

he wes blac and on heuwe swi?e wak, / ane while he wes reod and reousede

on heorte' (9923-25) [Arthur sat quite still; one moment he was pale and

quite lacking in color, next instant he was red, with heartfelt grief (513)].2




Arthur's capacity to feel grief and anxiety is forcefully rendered, modeling for us how he read the lines we have just read. Lawman outlines here, before we

see his fateful act of mercy after the battle of Lincoln, Arthur's intense and

complex emotional constitution. Indeed, his capacity to feel grief and anxiety seems to form, at least in part, the foundation of his proclivities towards mercy to the Saxons and later to the Scotish women who come to Arthur as embassies

of their people to plead not only for themselves, but also for their children

and for the surviving men. These scenes endow Arthur's character with a

sophisticated sense of tragedy?he is a hero whose choices toss on a sea of

conflicting desires and constricted agency; his capacity for good, his rashness, his innocence, and his destructiveness co-exist in his grand visions, actions

heroic and dubious, and fateful errors in judgment. In such scenes Lawman is keen to show us how deeply affected Arthur can

be when he receives new information or when he alters his vantage point.

Messengers are a key element of Lawman's affective style of narration. Arthur's

particular responses to these messengers reflect the complexity of his emotions

and desires and give us a character whose complex responsiveness opens the

door to our involvement as readers in his emotional life. Messengers, therefore, are not only an important means by which Lawman shows his interest in the

complexities and paradoxes that drive his characters (especially, but not only, Arthur), but also an important way by which Lawman puts himself as narrator

in the center of the process by which we as readers become involved in the

logic that informs his narrative's plot and characterization. Ultimately, perhaps, Lawman adds very little to the plots in which the figures of chronicled British

history move. What is greatly amplified, if not new, in Lawman, however, are

the responses of these figures to the situations in which they find themselves.

Their responses afford us a narration of the narrative processes of chronicle

writing itself.

With Arthur especially, Lawman more forcefully situates his power not in

recounted demonstrations of his capacity to destroy, but in scenes in which

language about his power?in songs, threatening messages?symbolizes his

authority, or becomes itself the power to conquer. After Arthur has driven the

Saxons from Britain, Lawman notes that Arthur's men sing, as they march

away from Scotland with him,

seolcu?e leo?es of Ar?ure [)an kinge and of his here-J>ringen, and sadden on songe to \)isse worlde longe neore neueremaere swulc king ase Ar?ur \>\irh alle J^ing, king no kaeisere in naeuere nare ku??e!

(11017-11021)



50 ARTHURIANA

[wonderful songs of Arthur the king and his warrior host, proclaiming in song that to

the end of the world there would never again be such a king as Arthur was in every

respect, never such a king or emperor in any land! (567)]

Immediately after his successes in Britain, Arthur's power over his fellow

Britons is both represented and acted out in the gesture of warriors singing Arthur's praises. Moreover, Arthur's power has already become fit matter for

poetry. Yet Arthur is not content only listening to songs about his past. After

setting up the laws and the administration of his kingdom, including the

marrying of Wenhaver, Arthur sets his sights on further conquests, for

conquest, not maintenance, defines and expresses Arthur's sense of power. Lawman will take Arthur through a series of conquest narratives, yet only in

the first of these will Lawman have us watch Arthur conquer by armed

aggression. We witness the stages by which Arthur takes over Ireland, watching Arthur first gain military advantage over the Irish king, Gillomar; then we

hear Gillomar utter terms of surrender and words of submission; and, finally, we hear Arthur extend mercy and friendship to Gillomar, thus securing his

loyalty. After this conquest, however, Arthur will need to fight very few battles to enjoy the same results with the kings of Iceland, Orkney, Jutland, etc. In

the remaining conquest narratives the text displays Arthur's might not only in

messages that precede his presence, but also, more forcefully, in the responses of those conquered by his reputation; news of Arthur's arrival and intent to

conquer is enough to evoke the same kind of submissive language and terms as Gillomar delivers to Arthur, without, significantly, battle or bloodshed. In

fact, at the end of this series of conquest narratives, Lawman relates that in

Arthur's extended, 'heh' empire, knights base their reputations on their ability to convey their own firsthand knowledge of Arthur and his court in speech and song and themselves borrow his power to move through this world, even

to Rome (11476-88). The Brut takes us through Arthur's rise in power and fame with an affective,

even empathetic, narrative style, giving us a narrator and characters, like Arthur, who show the capacity to care deeply (moreso than do their counterparts in

Lawman's sources) about the events and figures of British history that Lawman

imports into his text. This narrative strategy, consequently, enhances our own

engagement with Lawman's Britain. It is, of course, a commonplace of Lawman

scholarship to note the ways in which he shows his deep affiliation with the

Britons in his text, but Lawman scholars have recently begun to reassess and

detail how complex the significance of this affiliation is and how it plays out

in his relationship to Saxons, Normans, and the English (whatever this last

term means).3 Yet I wish here to assess the relationship of Lawman's affective

style to his desire for narrative authority.



NARRATO RS, MESSENGERS, AND LAWMAN'S Brut 51

Lawman is careful to show at this point in the narrative that Arthur becomes,

pardon the cliche, a legend in his own time, especially as the Brut makes

explicit that Arthur is the prophesied character of a preexisting legend that

Merlin has already told (for example, ii49off.). But though Lawman is never

slight in his praise of and enthusiasm for Arthur, and though his Arthur seems

not only to enjoy but also to foster his power as represented power with

minstrels (11327?331, 454?55), public ritual (12097 ff.), etc., Lawman becomes

conspicuously ambivalent'4 about the character of Arthur's power at the

moment that power seems unassailable. Lawman seems uncomfortable that

the language, the message concerning Arthur's invincibility that has gone before

him, fought, as it were, his battles for him, has taken on a life of its own.

Arthur's knights gather for the first time around the Round Table and tell

'lesinge' [fables] about Arthur, an event which prompts Lawman to enter into

lengthy commentary on the impulse to lie about another: men will lie for

someone they love in order to praise him, but they will also lie about someone

they hate to blame him (11456-11464). Lawman follows this comment with

the statement:

Ne al soh ne al les J?at leod-scopes singe? ah f)is is J>at so??e bi Ar?ure {Dan kinge. Nes nseuer ar swulc king, swa duhti |}urh alle f)ing; for ]}at so?e stod a J?an writen hu hit is iwur?en, ord from J?an senden, of Ar?ure {?an kinge, no mare, no lasse, buten alse his la^en weoren.

Ah Bruttes hine luueden swi?e and ofte him on li^e?, and sugge? feole Ringes bi Ar?ure {?an kinge l?at nagu?re nes iwur?en a J)issere weorlde-richen.

Inoh he mai suggen )pc so? wule uremmen seolcu?e Ringes bi Ar?ure kinge.

(11465-75)

[What minstrels sing is not all truth nor all lies; but this is the truth about King Arthur.

Never before was there such a king, so valiant through thick and thin; for the truth of

what befell King Arthur from beginning to end has been recorded in the writings, his

acts just as they were, no more, no less. But the Britons loved him greatly and often tell

lies about him, and say many things of King Arthur which never happened in this

mortal world. He who is willling to speak the truth can tell many marvellous things

about King Arthur. (589, 591)]

Lawman has made the truth about Arthur, including his own offerings on

the subject, a bit murkier here; many things one hears about Arthur might not be true, particularly when they come from sources enthusiastic about

Arthur, a claim which provides an interesting, skeptical counterpoint to the

myth Lawman himself seems enthusiastically to promulgate. Yet he asserts



52. ARTHURIANA

that it is absolutely true that, despite some overwrought details and stories

that might filter through, Arthur is a king unparalleled in British history, not

only in the public estimation of him, but also in his very deeds:

t>a wes Ar?ur swi?e heh, his hired swi?e hende,

|?at nas na cniht wel itald, no of his tuhlen swi?e bald'

(11476-77)

[Arthur was then supreme, his court resplendent, so that there was no knight so well

esteemed nor so bold in his deeds (591)].

The truth about those deeds, moreover, is available in what Lawman posits here as the true emplotment of Arthur's life and doings, which includes

'seolcu?e Ringes' [marvelous things], an emplotment that stands in written sources. Presumably, Lawman is referring to the sources he self-consciously describes at the beginning of the Brut, sources which he renders himself reading and redacting for his own chronicle. The truth about Arthur exists before and

outside the individual messengers that deliver the Arthur 'story' in various

forms; it dwells in reliable, authoritative, written places that Lawman refers to

as he writes. The bearer of truth, he impersonally argues here, must subordinate

himself to the sources of truth?the chronicled Arthurian tradition. This is, of course, simply an expression of Lawman's textual strategy for creating his own reputation as truth-bearer: he endorses himself as messenger by

identifying, endorsing, and then following the source of the message. As the renarrator of a received sense of history, as authorized history's

messenger, Lawman, the chronicle writer, is and, indeed, must be an extremely self-conscious auctor. Even when, and perhaps especially when, Lawman seems

merely to rehearse what Wace wrote, he is performing the crucial operation of

authorizing his narrative, that is to say, casting his narrative in terms that will

be recognized, as he says at the beginning of the Brut, as 'truthful' or already known. Lawman's most

original, revisionary, aggressive, therefore, self-assertive,

act?translating British history into English?has its authorized precedent in

the very text the Brut reads so closely, self-consciously, and conspicuously (i.e., Wace translating Geoffrey of Monmouth). Lawman's conveyance of his

message is an act that implicitly reimagines and reenacts in his narrative the

process (which I examine more carefully below) introduced to us in his

Proem?the 'obtaining' of the knowledge of history [and biwon J>a ae?ela boc

|}a he to bisne nom 15]?a process doubled in the very sources he obtains to

write his history and made explicit in the messenger motif Lawman so amply uses. It is crucial to Lawman's sense of authority that his readers follow the

Bruis ordering of British history with an open copy of Wace close by.




A knowledge of history is the currency of Lawman's narrative, and therefore, Lawman's authority finally depends on his ability to be the wise steward of

history, investing that history with value for his own audience. But Lawman

does not simply manage the particular figures and events of British history in

order to secure a greater return for his audience. He recreates the kind of

knowledge that informs his own authority as historian?a knowledge of the

complex ways of people, races, and how they interact with the societies they form and the land itself that they inhabit?as that which is of most value

within the world of the history he retells, that which must be sought after in

order to be obtained. This, of course, is the knowledge that a Merlin above all

possesses, and Lawman is most interested in the messenger' who must be

sought out because his knowledge is so valuable to the politically powerful. This is not necessarily to argue, as Lesley Johnson has warned us against doing, that Lawman fantasizes himself into Merlin's narrative seat. Johnson is perhaps

right to say that Lawman himself 'does not assume the prophet's mantle, to

reveal a pattern of divine judgment' (159),5 but Lawman, I would argue, sees

in Merlin's power of knowing the ultimate expression of the power he seeks

simultaneously to convey in, and borrow for, his narrative?that is to say, the

power of insight. He expands the power and function of the prophet (as

Johnson also notes) to privilege the power and value of insight. For Lawman

there is truly power in this kind of knowledge. The most powerful figures of

his text, good, evil, and in-between, have insight into the people, the customs,

the laws, and the land of Britain itself. The weak and ineffectual, like Constans,

expressly do not (6627, 37).

By degrees, the Bruis messengers are conspicuously both proximate and

privy to the power that this kind of knowledge commands in the text. Through the Bruis messengers, and especially through Merlin's value to the powerful, Lawman seeks his own proximity and privileged access to this power. Yet he is

careful not to erode the knowledge and power he wishes to convey by

identifying himself too closely or conspicuously with the knowledgeable,

powerful figures of his narrative. He preserves the power to which he is attracted

and which he seeks to transmit by keeping it other, mysterious, legitimate. As

Le Saux points out, Merlin, though in many ways a messenger himself, is

accessible to Lawman's Uther, although not to Wace's Uther, by means of

another intermediary?the 'hermit living in the same forest as Merlin.. .who

fulfils the "sonde" function of the "messenger" theme' (Sources 53). Lawman is

the messenger, the bearer of the truth of what happened and what happens in

Britain, to an audience who requires him to teach them how to understand

what he brings them. His authority depends upon his ability not to be the



54 ARTHURIANA

truth's origin but its interpretive conduit. He is conspicuously honest with us

that he is first and foremost a reader of histories as he narrates. As the opening lines of the poem relate, Lawman has 'gon li?en wide gond \>as leode / &

biwon |)a ae?ela boc ]}a he to bisne nom' (14?15) [travelled far and wide

throughout this land, / and collected the excellent books which he took as a

model (3)]. Then he chooses these books one by one and tells us how he reads

and rewrites the three books into one. Naming himself,

La^amon leide )peos boc & \>a. leaf wende he heom leofliche biheold lij)e him beo Drihten.

Feieren he nom mid fingren and fiede on boc-felle and j}a solere word sette togadere and |}a \>re boc [)rumde to are.

(24-28)

[opened these books and turned the pages; he looked upon them with pleasure?God be gracious to him! He took a quill pen in his hand and wrote on parchment, and,

putting together the truthful words, combined the three books into one. (3)]

Lawman envisions himself in the act of reading and rewriting his reading. As Rosamund Allen has so insightfully pointed out, Lawman, in fact, 'inserts'

the construct of author and audience, as well as the book he writes itself, into

the fiction by means of his 'apparently' autobiographical gesture here of

bifurcating author and narrator (126). But this 'implied author' is conspicuously a rewriting author: Lawman renders conspicuous from his text's opening lines the roles that reading and rewriting play in the way that 'Lawman,' the text

producing character, comes into possession of his historical matter and

reproduces it for his audience, real and implied. This is a crucial feature for Lawman to make obvious because he must endorse the authority of the texts

he finds, collects, reads, and redacts. Among the fictions that are most

important for him to realize here in his initial narrative moves are textual

renderings of his desire for, his work with, and, above all, his own proximity and privileged access to, the sources of truth.

But though Lawman will at the outset establish this authority by figuring his own hands handling books, parchment, and pens, the material images of

text and writing dissolve into the text that he wishes to read for his audience most conspicuously?the land of Britain itself. Lawman enacts his authority to read and rewrite British history by imagining his proximity to the land

upon which the events and figures of that history act themselves out. Allen

(126), Barron and Weinberg (Iii), and many others have pointed out that the

land itself is the hero, the prominent subject of the Brut.6 The Bruis narrator

repeatedly and conspicuously situates himself within the British landscape of




his audience, with at least some didactic inclination to map the world of the

past, its heroism and its tragedy, onto the coordinates of his contemporary world. Lawman is not precisely a prophet as he constructs an itinerary that

traces an historical route still viable for the recently dispossessed Britain of his own day, but he is part guide and part librarian of British history.7 He founds

his authority within his narrative on a knowledge of books and of British

geography and topography that underscores his ability to guide us through the cycles of history. Again, the historical insights Lawman leads his audience

towards are complex, ironic, and ambivalently' presented, especially with

respect to Lawman's disposition towards the races that inhabit his text and

the Britain of his day. Perhaps Le Saux is ultimately right in suggesting that, after one traces out Lawman's ambivalences and conflicts with race, gender, and humanity itself, 'if truly there is a moral to be derived from the English

poem, it would be contemptus mundi (Paradigms 205). Perhaps Lawman ends

up, in fact, renouncing the world, by being so interested, perhaps too interested, in positing for himself a close, even intimate, relationship with the phenomenal

world of historical Britain. Yet before we trace the ways in which the very

meanings, authorities, strategies Lawman intently constructs deconstruct

themselves?a critical gesture that could become suspiciously easy to do with

Lawman?we must first ponder why narration for Lawman is so much an

activity that is both in the world and of the world.

Lawman's account of Constantin's accession to the throne is a good example of his manner of situating himself as narrator in the narrative. Whereas Wace

recounts the great council at Cirencester, as he himself says 'with no long

tarrying' and 'To make short a long matter,'8 Lawman expands Wace's one

narrative event into several distinct events?the Britons' emergence from their

hiding places, their march to London, Constantin's reaction to this show of

loyalty, and the overthrow of the 'heathen' oppressors Wanis and Melga?and tags them with the narrator's invitation to view the scene with him:

\)c man \>c ise^en J)at gomen hu for? gengden f)a quenen

geond wudes & gend feldes geond huiles & geond heldes whserswa heo funden asine mon atwunden

\)e weore mid Melga f)an hae?ene kinga {?a quenen l?de logen al hine to drohen

& beden for j}ere seole j^at hire neuere sael nere.

(6420-25)

[Anyone who witnessed what followed saw how the women rushed on through forests

and fields, over hills and downs; wherever they came upon any fugitive who had been

with Melga, the heathen king, the women laughed aloud and tore him to pieces, praying that no good should ever come to his soul. (329)]



56 ARTHURIANA

Lawman articulates the scene so as to become the readers' eyes, and he even conveys what he seems to have overheard; he invites his audience to

adopt the narrator's view, the narrator's emotions, the narrator's subjectivity.

Through this slower, mimetic narration of recreated experience, Lawman's

narrative voice privileges its place of observation within the narrative.

Yet even when he compresses his renarration of Wace, one still sees

Lawman's strategy of authorization. The lines in the Brut that correspond to

Wace's lines about Constantin's crowning are fewer than Wace's, but they illustrate the narrator's place in the narrative:

& Constantin \>c ohte ferde to Selechaestre & heold his hustinge of alle his Brut ̂ ringen alle f>a Bruttes bugen to {?an mote &C nomen Constantin a?eling and makeden hine Bruttene king

Muchel wes |)a mur?e {^at waes a mancunne.

(6428-32)

[And the valiant Constantin marched to Silchester and held his assembly of all his

British warriors. All the Britons came to the council and, choosing prince Constantin, made him king of Britain; there was great rejoicing among the people. (331)]

Though Lawman follows closely Wace's portrayal of this scene?the

assembling of all British thanes, the crowning of Constantin, the joyous response of the people?his language conveys one significant difference. After Lawman's narrator says, as does Wace's, that all the British nobility attend the

husting, he then says that alle \>a Bruttes' came to the meeting and made

Constantin king, suggesting a more inclusive, even democratic process to

Constantin's accession than does Wace. In this entire scene Lawman places much more emphasis than Wace does on the common people's response to

Constantin's coming; he expands the narration of their emotions, enumerates

how many were there, and shows them joining forces with a gratified Constantin to overthrow their enemies (6403-18). Wace mentions none of

this. Again, Lawman's narrator wants us to sense the proximity between himself

and the collective body of Britons he describes in such sympathetic, joyous detail by articulating the scene event by event, and describing both what his

audience is seeing and what it should be seeing. Moreover, Lawman elaborates upon the topographical details of the scene.

Wace remains general about the 'secret places' from which the Britons emerge to greet Constantin: 'When the Britons heard these tidings they drew, thick as rain, from the woodlands and the mountain, and came before the host in

troops and companies' (1). Lawman expansively renders his narrative landscape as follows:




I>et iherede Bruttes j)er heo wuneden i jân puttes inne eor?en &C inne stockes heo hudden heom alse brockes i wude i wilderne inne hae?e & inne uasrne

jât ne mihte wel neh na man nenne Brut iuinden

buten heo weoren in castle o?er y burhge iclused uaste

f>a heo iherden of Rissen worde Jât Constantin wes an aerde

|)a comen ut of munten moni jausend

monnen

heo leopen ut of |?an wuden swulc hit deor weoren.

(6395-402)

[The Britons heard of that where they were living in the caves; they had hidden

themselves like badgers in the earth and among the tree-ttunks, in forests, in wastes,

among heath and bracken, so that scarcely a Briton could be found save those who

were closely shut up in towns or fortresses. When they heard of this, heard that

Constantin was in the country, many thousands of men emerged from the mountains,

springing out of the forests like deer. (329)]

To be sure, the topography of this scene is still rendered in relatively broad

brushstrokes, as is much of Lawman's geographical rendering as well, and he, of course, inherits the geography, etymologies of place names, etc., from

Geoffrey of Monmouth via Wace. Yet the impulse behind these gestures is

significant in terms of Lawman's sense of his own authority. His desire to

elaborate the detail he inherits from his sources and to render those elaborations

accurately9 in order to 'root' his history 'in known places, a familiar

landscape'(Barron and Weinberg Hi), represents the desire for rhetorical

proximity to the story he narrates. Le Saux is quite right to question J.S.P. Tatlock's claim that Lawman's Irish and Welsh geographical knowledge derives from 'personal' travel experience (Sources 130, 145).10 However, Tatlock's

'misreading,' as it were, is the very response the narrator of the Brut hopes

to

evoke from all of his readers.

The narrator of the Brut, that is to say, desires to be found by his readers,

standing right next to the places and people of British history. To this end he

catalogues with even greater effort than do his sources the places and names

of places his audience knows well. To this end he vividly portrays with rich and 'immediate' detail the world in which he narrates. And to this end he

makes Merlin an extremely valuable messenger and, unlike Wace's Merlin, one who must be found before he will prophesy (Le Saux Sources 52-53).

Merlin, of course, is the most important of the text's messenger-narrators. He

is the avenue by which the text announces the coming of its greatest hero and

Britain's greatest savior, Arthur; the text also foretells through Merlin its greatest

tragedy?Arthur's death?and expresses its greatest hope in anticipating the return of Arthur (9403-9418; 14288-97). Merlin's first 'wunder' is explaining to Vortiger how to secure the wall he is trying to build, which keeps falling



58 ARTHURIANA

down. Merlin explains that there is a water' underneath where they are digging, and at the bottom of the water are two dragons who nightly fight each other

(7942ff). Lawman's narrator is one whose readerly and experiential knowledge of the very character of the land, as well as the people and events that make up British history, allows him to look beneath the surface of contemporary Britain

to explain its rises and falls. What is underneath its surface, of course, is for

Lawman's readers their own cyclical history of triumph and dispossession. When Vortiger asks Merlin what the two dragons 'bitacnie?,' Merlin replies, after castigating him for his foolish curiosity because of his own and his people's eventual doom, 'heo tacne? kinges |>a sunde to eumene / & heore fiht, heore

uare & heore uasi uolc' (7999-8000) [they betoken kings that are yet to

come, their fight, their adventure, and their fated folk (413)]. As Merlin will

explain in more specific detail in the succeeding lines (up to 8041), British

history will be marked by see-saw struggles for royal power between British

and foreign (in this case, Saxon) rulers.

Vortiger is willing to pay Merlin well for his knowledge and for the power his knowledge offers. Merlin becomes the narrative's most valuable source of

knowledge. With his knowledge and help he can fulfill the desire of the

narrative's major characters for knowledge and power. When Uther wishes to

find Merlin to fulfill his desire for Ygerne, he must pay Ulfin 'fritti solh of

londe' [thirty ploughlands of land] to find the hermit who had said he knew

Merlin's whereabouts; to the hermit Uther must also make recompense?in this case, seven ploughlands of land (9361?9402). Land and insight converge here as rewards, as desired possessions, but both remain for Uther, as they do

for Arthur and Vortiger, slippery, elusive objects of desire. Each powerful figure of the story wishes to possess land and insight, predictably, in order to control

the events and the outcome of the story in which they are involved. Land and

knowledge function differently for Merlin and for Lawman: possession does

not equal control. Land and knowledge, in fact, represent Lawman's

investments in the logic of desire that informs British history, investments

that go far deeper, I would argue, than those to be found in his sources. Lawman

and Merlin are both conspicuously locatable narrative presences within this

realm of desire in the voice that more fully and precisely envisions the land

and the knowledge for which history's major figures perpetually search, and

that, therefore, gives the search in the Brut more urgency, poignancy, and

tragic futility. Lawman, like Merlin, wants to be known as a knower of history, not as an

agent of history. He is one of the 'scopes swi?e sele' [most excellent poets] whom Merlin prophesied would sit at Arthur's table, enjoying meat, drink,




and winscenches ut teon of \>eos kinges tungen' (11495-97) [an(l draw draughts of wine from that king's tongue (591)]. Here once again, Lawman, Arthur's

poet, also wishes to maintain Merlin's authority, like Wace's authority, as that

which exists outside and before his own rewriting of history, because he wishes to lay claim to what his text can posit as established, already authorized truth.

Lawman therefore writes himself a place next to the actors, the prophets, the

writers of history, as he conveys to his own readers what they have done and

said; it is a place that deserves honor and protection,11 but a place occupied by one who knows his place. In this self-conscious proximity to the origins of

history, perhaps Lawman's sense of authority is, to use this word one more

time, an especially conspicuous, if not better, instance of a medieval sense of

authority than that possessed by many others with which we spend time in

medieval studies: he is a writer whose authority is constructed in the text by self-aware, conspicuous acts of self-effacement before the text's own images of

extratextual authority. As the messenger of history, Lawman, perhaps more

convincingly, though no less complexly, than the figures literary scholarship knows better?a Dante or a Chaucer, for instance?writes himself in the

Brut as receptor, reader, and rewriter of the texts that have shaped our sense of

the cities of God and humans. This is why he is easily ignored, but this is

especially why he should be read.

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

Joseph Parry is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Classics,

and Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. He has published on

issues of narrative authority and structure in Chaucer, Malory, Margery Kempe, and Renaissance annunciation paintings.

NOTES

1 I will use the Caligula manuscript in Brook and Leslie for all Brut citations. 2 I will use the Barron-Weinberg translations for all modern English renditions of

Lawman throughout the text.

3 See especially Donoghue on the cultural complexity of Lawman's stylistic and

ideological stance on Britain and Nobles important response to and refinement

of Donoghue's argument.

4 The cultural ambivalence Donoghue examines (537-63) is part of the multivalent ambivalence in the narrator's voice here, though, of course, Donoghue is primarily concerned with how that ambivalence registers itself in Lawman's stylistics and

linguistics. Lawman identifies himself in this passage, somewhat obliquely, to be sure, with a narrative textual tradition that is multi-ethnic. For that matter, as so

much fine Lawman scholarship has recently shown, he relies for the poetry, the

language, the color, of his text much more conspicuously on many texts and



6o ARTHURIANA

traditions than does Wace, his major source for narrative ordering. Lawman's

narrative, somewhat like Arthur's kingdom, enlarges its power by integrating the

variety of peoples and traditions that have occupied the British Isles into its

apparently ethnocentric story of British destiny and tragedy. Lawman, of course,

is ambivalent about many things in this passage?prominently, about his authority as narrator and about written and oral textual tradition, though each of these

matters, again, bears on questions of cultural orientation.

5 Lawman, however, explicitly aligns Merlin's power with God's: when Lawman

catalogues the kings and armies that accompany Arthur to conquer Paris, he says that there were so many soldiers present 'j^at nas nauere na swa witful mon.. .J)at

mihte |>a {?usend telle / bute he hauede, mid rihte, wisdom of Drihtene, / o?er he hafde mid him |}at him hafde Mserlin' [that there was no man...so skilled in numbers that he could reckon the thousands unless he had, in truth, the wisdom of the Lord, or had in him that skill which Merlin possessed (11895-99)].

6 In this context, Gerald of Wales resembles Lawman in his desire to convey in his narrative proximity to British geography and topography and a sense of authority in which the ability to read texts and the ability to read landscapes interanimate and endorse each other.

7 Medieval maps, as PDA. Harvey reminds us, are highly chronological in

orientation, when they exist at all in the form we would call 'maps.' What few

maps existed were 'diagrams?diagrams of the world and are best understood as

an open framework where all kinds of information might be placed in the relevant

spatial position, not unlike a chronicle or narrative in which information would be arranged chronologically' (19). Much more common in the Middle Ages were 'written descriptions' of places and routes, for instance, itineraries (7).

8 Wace, Roman de Brut, 1.

9 Roland Blenner-Hassett states that, given 'the often chaotic nature of geographical

knowledge in the Middle Age [sic\ it is a 'wonder.. .not that so many errors were

made but so few' by Lawman and later scribes (8). 10 See Tatlock (514-22). Though Tatlock strongly asserts Lawman's uncosmopolitan

orientation, he believes that Lawman had seen Ireland and Irish ways firsthand,

basing that claim on Lawman's treatment in the Brut of Irish costume, saints,

and personal names. See also Tatlock, 'Irish Custom' (587-93). 11 Kenneth Tiller reminded me recently of the incident when Arthur alone steps in

to protect the Roman messengers, who have just delivered the emperor's demand

for Britain's submission to the rule of Rome, from what promised to be a vicious murder (12392-12411).

WORKS CITED

Allen, Rosamund. 'The Implied Audience of Lazamon's Brut' The Text and Tradition

ofLajamons Brut. Ed. Fran?oise H. M. Le Saux. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994.

121-140.

Barron W.R.J. and S.C. Weinberg. 'Introduction.' Lajarnon's Arthur: The Arthurian

Section ofLajamoris Brut. Harlow: Longman, 1989. viii-lviii.



NARRATORS, MESSENGERS, AND LAWMAN'S Brut 6l

Blenner-Hassett, Roland. A Study of Place Names in Lawman's Brut. Palo Alto: Stanford

UP, 1950.

Donahue, Dennis P. Lawman's Brut, An Early Arthurian Poem: A Study of Middle English Formulaic Composition. Studies in Medieval Literature. Vol. 9. Lewiston, NY: Edwin

Mellen P, 1991.

Donoghue, Daniel. 'Lagamon'i Ambivalence.' Speculum 65 (1990): 537-63.

Harvey, P.D.A. Medieval Maps. Toronto: Toronto UP, 1991.

Johnson, Lesley. 'Reading the Past in Lagamon's Brut.' TheText and Tradition of Lajamon's Brut. Ed. Fran?oise H. M. Le Saux. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994.

141-60. Lawman. Brut, or Historia Britonum. Eds. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg.

New York: Longman, 1995.

Lajamon: Brut. 2 vols. Eds. G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie. London: Oxford UP,

1963-78. Le Saux, Fran?oise H. M. Lajamon's Brut: The Poem and Its Sources. Cambridge UP,

1989. -.

'Paradigms of Evil: Gender and Crime in Lagamon's Brut.' The Text and

Tradition ofLajamon's Brut. Ed. Fran?oise H.M. Le Saux. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,

1994. 193-206.

Noble, James. 'Lagamon's 'Ambivalence' Reconsidered.' The Text and Tradition of

Lajamon's Brut. Ed. Fran?oise H.M. Le Saux. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994.171?

82.

Tatlock, J.S.P. 'Irish Custom in Lawman.' Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 587-93. -. The Legendary History of Britain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1950.

Wace. 'Wace's Roman de Brut' Arthurian Chronicles. Trans. Eugene Mason.

Everyman's Library Series 1578. London: Dent, 1962.



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