Historia regum Britanniae
The Historia regum Britanniae ("History of the Kings of Britain") is a 12-book pseudo-historical work on early English history written in Latin by Geoffrey von Monmouth around 1136 .
Content, sources, reception
The work begins with the alleged first settlement of Britain by Brutus , a descendant of the Trojans , and then offers a largely fabulous chronicle of about 2000 years of the British kings until the Anglo-Saxons came to power over a large part of the island in the 7th century . The final point is the death of King Cadwallader of North Wales in 634 AD. The book enjoyed great popularity, so that more than 200 manuscripts of him have survived. It is one of the central pieces of the Matière de Bretagne .
Nowadays Historia regum Britanniae is viewed as historically worthless. While Geoffrey claims that he used a very old book in vernacular as his source, most modern researchers do not take this claim seriously. Geoffrey seems to find his material rather from Gildas ' De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae written in the 6th century , Beda's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum written in the early 8th century , the Historia Brittonum compiled around 830 and attributed to Nennius , the Annales Cambriae and written in the 10th century to have drawn and imaginatively expanded upon other sources such as Welsh genealogies . Above all, Geoffrey's almost completely fictional description of King Arthur became extremely influential for the further reception of the mythical material.
Wace translated the Historia regum Britanniae as early as 1150 under the title Roman de Brut into Old French and Layamon around 1200 as Brut into Middle English. In the middle of the 13th century it was received by Icelandic scholars and translated into Icelandic under the title Breta sögur . In the 13th and 15th centuries was Historia under the title Brut y Brenhinedd [ British ə bren'hineð ] in the medium or frühneu welsh processed. More than 60 manuscripts have come down to us.
Among the many rulers mentioned in the Historia regum Britanniae , the most famous are:
- Brutus of Britain - founded the British colony and named the island after himself
- King Lear - romanticized in Shakespeare's play King Lear
- Cassivellaunus - British king at the time of Caesar's invasion
- Mandubracius / Androgeus - opponent of Cassivellaunus at the time of Caesar's invasion
- Cymbeline - parodied in Shakespeare's tragic comedy Cymbeline
- Lucius of Britain - first Christian king in Britain
- Eudaf Hen - King in Britain
- Coel - the namesake for the king "Old King Cole" from the English children's song
- Constantine the Great - first Christian Roman emperor
- Vortigern - the British king from many medieval stories
- Arthur - the most famous of the legendary British kings
- Gwendolen - mythical British queen
- Elidurus - legendary British king
expenditure
- Michael D. Reeve (Eds.), Neil Wright (Translator): Geoffrey of Monmouth. The history of the kings of Britain: an edition and translation of "De gestis Britonum" ("Historia regum Britanniae") , Woodbridge 2007, ISBN 978-1-84383-206-5
literature
- Laura C. and Robert T. Lambdin: Geoffrey of Monmouth , in: Same (Eds.): Arthurian Writers. A biographical encyclopedia , Westport (Connecticut) / London 2008, pp. 30-36
See also
- Collected works from Wales and Britain
- Breta sögur (there is also a schematic representation of the course of the story)
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ a b c Geoffrey of Monmouth . In: Rudolf Simek : Artus-Lexikon , Stuttgart 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-010858-1 , p. 135.