Narrative rhythm and narrative content in LaƷamon's Brut

Narrative rhythm and narrative content in La3amon s Brut * 'Were [the Brut] less prolonged and diffuse it would have been more valued' . * This statement made by J. S. P. Tatiock in his Legendary History of Britain is representative of the view traditionally taken by critics of La3amon's epic masterpiece; indeed, the criticism it implies has become commonplace, to the extent that even staunch admirers have felt compelled to express reservations about the excellence of the poem, sometimes in the most unconvincing terms.2 This double charge of inordinate length and 'diffuseness', which implies the mishandling of the narrative structure as well as a fatiure on the level of nanative economy, is not justified by any reasoned argumentation, and, as such, it cannot fad to make one uneasy. Tatiock, not to mention more recent academics, would certainly never have dreamed of saying such a thing about Milton, Vergil, or even the most extensive of Dickens's novels. The situation smacks of misunderstanding, comparable to Emperor Joseph II's statement that Mozart's music had too many notes. The negative response to the length of the Brut can to some extent be ascribedtothe fact that m o d e m readers have learned to associate narrative with prose, and tend to prefer shorter, non-epic verse forms. However, the format in which the poem was first published is an equally important factor. Madden's decision to edit both versions of the Brut in parallel produced three dauntingly thick books, while his numbering by half-lines rather than lines encouraged his readers to think of the Brut as immensely long. Moreover, it was naturally assumed that since they were individually numbered, La3amon's half-lines were units: this induced critics to see the English poem as a massive expansion of a main source (Wace's Roman de Brut) only half its length. This assumption is directiy responsible for the 'prolonged and diffuse' image of the Brut which we find unquestioningly repeated even in very recent publications.3 Yet the contents of the English poem do not differ to any great extent from that of its source, and there are only very few—albeit very noticeable— * A version of this paper was presented at the Conference of the Medievalists of tbe University of Wales, at Gregynog, April 1992. 1 J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain, Berkeley, 1950, p. 485. 2 See for example Carolynn V. Friedlander, The Structure and Themes of Layamon's Brut (Ph.D., Yale, 1973) who, after a book-length demonstration of La3amon's poetic skills, concludes saying that the Brut is 'qualitatively about half-way between excellence and mediocrity'. 3 See, for example, p. xxviii of W . R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg, Lajamon's Arthur. The Arthurian Section of Lajamon's Brut, Harlow, 1989, where we read: 'La3amon's text, at 16,095 long lines, each roughly equivalent to an octosyllabic couplet, is more than twice as long (as Wace's version)'. 46 F. Le Saux expansions of a narrative or rhetorical nature; moreover, the assimilating of La3amon's half-line to Wace's full line is highly problematic. If one merely counts the number of syllables in any onetineof the Brut, as has generally been done uptonow, the long line does certainly appear to be closer to the sixteen syllables of Wace's couplet than to the eight syllables of his single line. But the legitimacy of this procedure is questionable, inasmuch as La3amon's versepattern is not tied to such a rigid syllabic count.4 This was pointed out by Hakan Ringbom: The fact that all sections [of the Brut, as compared with the Roman] show an increase makes one doubt whether the information capacity of Lawman's half-line really was quite the same as that of Wace's line. . . . Although the average number of words is almost as high in Lawman's half-lines as in Wace's octosyllabics, it would in some ways be better to choose the English full line, not the half-line, as the unit most comparable to the French line.5 Wace's lines each tend to be self-contained units, whereas in the Brut...