Wace

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the British archaeologist, see Alan Wace .

Wace (pronounced: [vas]) (* around 1110; † after 1174), also called Guace , Gaice (South Norman and French) and Robert Wace , was a Norman poet who was the court of King Henry II of England and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine . Its importance lies above all in conveying Arthurian material from Latin sources to vernacular (Norman patois ) or French-language literature (cf. Chrétien de Troyes ).

Modern plaque to Wace in Royal Square, St. Helier, Jersey

Wace came from the Channel Island of Jersey , which today still holds a special position as the crown property of the British Crown . He received training as a cleric on the mainland in Caen , an important city in the Duchy of Normandy , and later studied temporarily in the French heartland ( Île de France ). He began his writing career in Caen around 1130; he wrote in Norman scripta , d. H. a kind of French that was influenced by the Norman dialect. His audience were therefore mainly aristocratic lay people.

He began as a poet of legends of saints, three of which have survived: the life of St. Margaret (around 1130), the life of St. Nicholas (around 1150) and La conception de Notre Dame ("Mary's Conception", around 1130–1140) .

Roman de Brut

Page from a "Roman de Brut" manuscript from the 14th century (British Library MS Egerton 3028 f.25)

Wace's most important work became the Roman de Brut . Between 1135 and 1140 he was likely to have come into contact with the Latin Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), which Geoffrey von Monmouth had dedicated to the English governor in Caen, Robert of Gloucester, an illegitimate son of Henry I of England . Shortly after 1150, Wace began translating the Historia into French and apparently even traveled to England to familiarize himself with its topography.

In 1155 its transmission in the form of a rhyming chronicle was completed. It is known under the name Roman de Brut (or Brut for short ), comprises 15,000 eight-syllable, paired rhyming verses and has come down to us in around 32 complete or fragmentary manuscript copies. This is quite a high number and indicates a great success.

The Brut connects the history of Britain / England to the Troy myth, similar to what French chroniclers did with the history of the Frankish Empire. The representation ranges from the arrival of one of "Brutus" , an alleged great-grandson of Aeneas who escaped from Troy , to the island through the Roman period to the loss of British rule to the Anglo-Saxons. The high point of "British" history is the reign of King Arthur. Wace took this pseudohistoriographic framework from his Latin model. But its presentation also takes a number of liberties. He enriched the Arthurian story of fabulous descriptions, among other things, the idea of the round table ( table ronde , Round Table ), the ranking excludes disputes, and the myth of the Rapture Artus ' by Avalon .

Neither the Historia Geoffreys nor Waces Brut can be considered histories in the modern sense. The term roman does not designate the genre of the novel in the later sense, but a work that was written in Romance (French) language, i.e. H. not in Latin, which around 1150 still dominated scholarly poetry.

Wace dedicated his work to Queen Eleanor, whose consort Henry II had just become King of England (1154) after several years of succession to the throne.

The English (- Norman) rulers, who did not want to feel like their neighbors, the King of France, as upstarts devoid of history and tradition, had long shown a strong interest in a 'national' history - both Norman and British (cf. Wilhelm von Malmesbury , Heinrich von Huntingdon , Geffrey Gaimar). With this most welcome contribution to the Transfiguration of Britain, Wace achieved a comfortable position as chronicler at the English court for several years. Between 1165 and 1169 Heinrich procured him a benefice as a canon in Bayeux, Norman .

The Roman de Brut , in turn, became the basis for Layamon's Brut , an alliterative poem in Middle English .

Roman de Rou

A later work by Wace, the unfinished Roman de Rou , A History of the Dukes of Normandy , was commissioned by King Henry II of England around 1160 . It covers the Norman rulers from Duke Rollo ( Rou ) to the present day. Norman chronicles in Latin (including Dudo von Saint-Quentin , Wilhelm von Jumièges and Ordericus Vitalis ) served as sources . The work on this chronicle did not go off without problems. Wace seems to have started with several approaches: a first short, "prehistoric" part about the Viking Hasting (751 verses), then - with the change to a longer verse meter (ten-syllable Alexandrians ) - a short retrograde chronicle ( Chronique ascendante des ducs de Normandie , 315 verses), finally a more extensive part about the foundation of Rollos and the history of the first dukes up to 965 in the same meter (4425 verses). After that, the rou stayed for several years. When Wace resumed work in the 1170s and was now writing in octosyllables again , Benoît de Sainte-Maure, a younger rival, had won the favor of the royal couple. Benoît had dedicated his Troy novel ( Roman de Troie ) to the queen between 1160 and 1170 and had now been commissioned to write a Norman story. From 1170 Benoît worked on a Histoire des ducs de Normandie , but after more than 44,000 verses he only got as far as the events around 1135. Wace's Roman de Rou was also incomplete with around 17,000 verses, only reaching up to 1106. In 1174 or a little later, Wace added an account of the siege of Rouen that year.

In a document from 1174 Wace is mentioned again as Wascius canonicus . The year of his death, sometime after 1174, is unknown.

notes

1. ↑ http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24519/24519-h/24519-h.htm accessed on August 9, 2013
2. ↑ Si l'on demande que ço dit, qui ceste estoire en romanz fist, jo di e dirai que jo sui Wace de l'isle de Gersui, qui est en mer vers occident, al fieu de Normandic apent. En l'isle de Gersui fui nez; a Chaem fui petiz portez, illoques fui à letres mis, pois fut longue en France apris. Quant jo de France repairai, à Chaem longues conversai; de romanz faire m'entremis, mult en ecris et mult en fis. If anyone asks who wrote this story in French verse, I answer and I will answer that I am Wace from the island of Jersey , which lies in the sea to the west ..... As a child I went to Caen ( Chaem is the French form) where I studied at school and then I studied in France (i.e. Île-de-France ) for a long time. When I came back from France, I stayed in Caen for a long time. I started writing in French ... Roman de Rou (III, 5299–5317)

literature

• Wace's Roman de Brut. A history of the British. Text and translation, rev. edition by Judith Weiss. Exeter 2002. ISBN 0-85989-734-6
• Guillaume le duc, Guillaume le roi: extraits du Roman de Rou de Wace , René Lepelley. Center de publications de l'Université de Caen, 1987. ISBN 2-905461-23-3
• Cristian Bratu, “Je, auteur de ce livre”: L'affirmation de soi chez les historiens, de l'Antiquité à la fin du Moyen Âge. Later Medieval Europe Series (vol. 20). Leiden: Brill, 2019, ISBN 978-90-04-39807-8 .
• Cristian Bratu, “Translatio, autorité et affirmation de soi chez Gaimar, Wace et Benoît de Sainte-Maure.” The Medieval Chronicle 8 (2013): 135-164.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wace in the catalog of the German National Library