The British Hope

“Arthur himself, our renowned King, was mortally wounded and was carried off to the Isle of Avalon, so that his wounds might be attended to,” records Geoffrey of Monmouth in his The History of the Kings of Britain (261). Geoffrey, a twelfth century cleric, writes this line detailing the mystical disappearance of his most popular figure, King Arthur, from historical recollection. Using liberally both established historical writers before him—such as Nennius, Bede, and Gildas—and other mysteriously hinted at sources, Geoffrey attempts to fashion a tale that will provide a history for the island of Britain and her people, the Britons. It is patterned after the style of romance literature, a popular trend increasing in influence at the time, and is crowned with Geoffrey’s tragic figure of King Arthur (Gransden 186). King Arthur provides Geoffrey the element of a war-like, fiercely individual hero needed for his historical work. Arthur enabled Geoffrey to achieve his own personal purposes in writing the history and to generate an energizing character of national identity for the Britons, who is celebrated and remembered even today. Though Arthur has been proven to function as a literary character more than a historical figure in Geoffrey’s The History of the Kings of Britain, he is still a crucial element in this account that retells and reinvents the medieval past of Britain.

The history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, like that of his renowned King Arthur, is one filled with shadows and gaps, adding to the questions surrounding his writings. Nothing at all is known about his early life, and a birth date of about 1100 is considered more of an educated guess than a hard fact (Loomis 72). The identity “Geoffrey of Monmouth” has been construct...

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... Britons a source of hope and racial unity. Without his renowned King Arthur and his legendary tale of heroic deeds, Geoffrey of Monmouth would not have become an important portion of the development of English literature, and the Britons would not have their “once and future king.”

Works Cited

Geoffrey. The History of the Kings of Britain. Trans. Lewis G. M. Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Print.

Gillingham, John. “The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain,” Anglo-Norman Studies 13 (1990).

Gransden, A., Historical Writing in England c. 550–c. 1307 (London, 1974).

Loomis, Roger Sherman, ed. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959. Print.

Nennius. British History and The Welsh Annals. Ed. John Morris. Vol. 8. London: Phillimore, 1980. Print. Arthurian Period Sources.