Reading Laʒamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations ed. by Rosamund Allen, Jane Roberts, and Carole Weinberg (review)

Pushing toward 800 pages, this collection of essays, Reading Laʒamon’s Brut: Approaches and Explorations, has—as the editors themselves concede in their introduction— ‘cast its net widely’ (17). For editors Rosamund Allen, Jane Roberts, and Carole Weinberg, this wide net seeks to capture ‘the breadth and complexity of Laʒamon’s own vision of the island in which he lived and of its peoples during the history he relates’ (17). It also clearly accommodates the far-ranging but related schools of scholarship drawn to Laʒamon’s Brut: Old and Middle English, Old French, Old Norse, Celtic, Anglo-Norman, among others. The result is a rich haul: a robust, eclectic collection that should excite Arthurianists.

The volume is divided into four sections: ‘Approaching the Brut’; ‘Behaviour and Customs’; ‘Words and Meanings’; ‘Sources and Explorations.’ While the fit between essay and section can be loose at times, these divisions do bring a needed contour and shape to the thirty-essay collection. Perhaps another fruitful way to see the collection is that there are some essays that seek to thicken our sense of Laʒamon’s local, immediate world, his ‘own vision of the island,’ and then others that try to seat the author and his Brut in a wider historical and international milieu.

On the more local front, for instance, Simon Meecham-Jones and Andrew Wehner, a retired Ship Master who lives in Areley Kings, sketch the medieval worlds of the Severn Basin and the Welsh March. Wehner brings us especially close to the river-dwelling, country priest Laʒamon, who he claims (in explaining the maritime term lof, a pole used by thirteenth-century English sailors) ‘would have been familiar with the techniques of sailing sideways on to the wind’ (118). Ian Kirby compares Laʒamon’s treatment of Winchester and London, finding a distinct Mercian preference for the latter. Eric Stanley reminds us that 114 kings appear in the Brut, and that Laʒamon’s notion of idealized royal power as wise, merciful, and peaceable rests at the center of this work. Both Deborah Marcum and Scott Kleinman ask to what degree a man named ‘Law’-man would be acquainted with English legal terminology; and Daniel Donoghue, in an inventive essay discussed in further detail below, considers the presence and persistence of slavery in Laʒamon’s England.

Those scholars pursuing the wider sweep, as it were—historically, textually, internationally—would include Haruko Momma, who offers a promising line of new philology criticism, deconstructing the term ‘Semi-Saxon,’ a label used to identify Laʒamon’s Brut by George Hickes, Frederic Madden, Benjamin Thorpe, and others from the Society of Antiquaries. So too, Margaret Lamont locates Laʒamon’s Brut in its broader Middle English Brut tradition, as she explores the connection between language and national identity in the figure of Hengest. Elizabeth Bryan argues that Laʒamon is no vernacular upstart: his Middle English Brut belongs to an international vogue—the ‘idea of the vernacular’ (663). The volume features several other valuable source-analogue studies that cast light on Laʒamon’s negotiation of tradition, especially as regards his reworking of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his immediate source in Wace. His handling of the figures of King Leir and Julius Caesar are two such examples.

As with most collections, there are a few essays that shine through, ones which might serve as waymarks for future Laʒamon scholarship.

Rosamund Allen begins the collection with a question in her invigorating essay, ‘Did Lawman Nod, or Is It We That Yawn?’ As Allen acknowledges, even the most devoted Laʒamon readers must confront the ‘the boring bits’ (2), the author’s tendency to catalogue the genealogies, the regnal lists, the galleries of combatants. Yet she wonders whether the dullness is ours, a reflex of modern readership which privileges entertainment...