Walter Map and the Matter of Britain
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Why would the sprawling thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands known for his stinging satire, religious skepticism, ghost stories, and irrepressible wit? And why, though the attribution is spurious, is it not, in some ways, implausible? Joshua Byron Smith sets out to answer these and other questions in the first English-language monograph on Walter Map—and in so doing, he offers a new explanation for how narratives about the pre-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, including King Arthur and his knights, first circulated in England. Smith contends that it was inventive clerics like Walter, and not traveling minstrels or professional translators, who popularized these stories. Smith examines Walter's only surviving work, the De nugis curialium , to demonstrate that it is not the disheveled text that scholars have imagined but rather five separate works in various stages of completion. This in turn provides new evidence to support his larger contention, that ecclesiastical networks of textual exchange played a major role in exporting Welsh literary material into England. Medieval readers incorrectly envisioned Walter withdrawing ancient Latin documents about the Holy Grail from a monastery and compiling them in order to compose the Lancelot-Grail Cycle . In this detail they were wrong, Smith acknowledges, but a model of literary transmission that is not vernacular and popular but Latinate and ecclesiastical demands our serious consideration.
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Walter Map and the Matter of Britain
Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor
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The Welsh nursed their loss of the island of Britain by cultivating a rich body of prophetic lore that told of a national savior who would come to destroy the English and restore the sovereignty of the island to its rightful holders. Gerald of Wales was not the only one to observe that the Welsh “foretell and boast with the utmost confidence—and their entire populace wondrously holds to this hope—that soon their countrymen will return to the island, and, in accordance to the prophecies of their own Merlin, both the foreign nation and its name will perish, and the Britons will once more rejoice in their old name and privilege in the island.”104 Walter was familiar with the figure of Merlin as a prophetic figure, and his description of Llywelyn’s omen humorously undercuts Welsh pretensions.105 Not only is Llywelyn’s prophecy amusingly mundane—a pot of beef stew in the place of dragons and other allegorical beasts—but it fails to produce a great national redeemer. While Llywelyn does become an outstanding Welsh leader, in Walter’s eyes that simply means that he is the best thief and raider in a land full of thieves and raiders. This anecdote speaks to an English perception that plunder, and not noble claims to recovering the crown of the Island of Britain, is what truly motivates Welsh rulers, in spite of what their grand prophecies may say.
Walter’s description of Llywelyn’s reign bears this assumption out. He ruled peacefully, with the sole exception of “the suffering that he inflicted upon his own people.”106 Llywelyn proceeds to murder and maim any promising young man that he sees, adopting the proverb “I kill nobody, but I blunt the horns of Wales so that they do not harm their mother.”107 Sensing that his nephew Llywarch will grow to be his rival, Llywelyn finally corners him and, asking why he has fled his presence, he offers to provide guarantors in case he is afraid. Llywarch then proceeds to name as guarantors several promising young men whom his uncle has already slain. Violence and treachery were common aspects of medieval aristocratic life, but Anglo-Norman and Angevin dynastic politics were relatively tame compared to the constant bloodshed of Welsh petty kings.108 Walter’s Llywelyn therefore embodies two salient aspects of Welsh political life that would have been recognized by English readers: prophecy and violence.
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