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Historia Brittonum
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Historia Brittonum ("History of the Britons") is a short Latin-language Welsh chronicle. It was compiled around 830 from several older texts of different provenance, loosely connected by an unknown editor. The preface, which is included in most but not all manuscripts, claims that this editor was Nennius, a 9th-century Welsh monk. However, modern researchers regard the preface as a forgery of later centuries to lend greater credibility to the work.Despite its self-designation as a chronicle, the book is pseudohistory rather than history and clearly serves up ample helpings of legend. Nevertheless, as one of the very few sources on the era in British history otherwise known as the Dark Ages, it developed a huge impact over time; specifically, it is the first known work that offers a coherent description of King Arthur's career, and thus can be considered the first work of what would later become Arthurian Legend.The book’s main theme is the struggle of the Celtic-Roman Britons and the Anglo-Saxons for control of Britain, and it does its best to paint the Anglo-Saxons as treacherous cutthroat barbarian riff-raff, while extolling the ancient and glorious history of the Britons. The book’s most extravagant claim - which serves to underpin the superior pedigree of the Britons - is that they are descendants of refugees from Troy, who were led to Britain by one Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas (or is he?), and from whom the island of Britain received its name.According to Historia Brittonum, the culprit for the downfall of the Celtic-Roman Britons was a certain King Vortigern, who grabbed the hegemonial power over the island after the Romans had left. When some exiled Saxons under their leaders Hengist and Horsa asked for asylum in Britain, Vortigern allowed them to settle on the island of Thanet in exchange for their military services against Picts and Irish. But once Hengist successfully sets up Vortigern with his own beautiful daughter, the autocratic king grows more and more dependent on his foreign hirelings. Eventually, Vortigern can no longer satisfy the newcomers' greed, and the scheming king of the Saxons shows his true face when, after inviting them to a banquet, he has three-hundred British nobles massacred, with Vortigern taken prisoner. Vortigern ransoms himself by ceding Essex, Sussex, and Middlesex, having already given away Kent earlier.Fed up with the Saxons and Vortigern alike, the disgruntled Britons rise under Vortigern's more virtuous son Vortimer to make war on the Saxons, while that holy man of God, Saint Germanus, flits around Britain doing miracles and reproaching the king for his plentiful vices. Eventually, Vortigern, having lost all respect from his former subjects, dies two miserable deaths - the book can’t decide which one – and his rival, the noble Ambrosius takes the helm of the Britons, eventually halting the Saxon advance with the help of the Britons' greatest war-hero, the glorious Arthur. The short account of Arthur's heroics contains most of the hard facts that constitute "canon" within traditional Welsh Arthurian lore. Most obviously, Arthur here is not called a king himself, but a military commander (dux bellorum, literally "leader of battles") and a warrior (miles)note though it's been argued that the text does not preclude Arthur from having been a king himself; additional text in a variant manuscript makes his less noble status more explicit, showing there was indeed at least a tradition about a non-royal Arthur.On a minor note, the book also veers into Irish mythology by recounting the legendary traditions about the settlement and early history of Ireland, and dedicates a section to St. Patrick. The final part, strangely enough (obviously just another loosely related appendix tacked on at the end) are genealogies of Anglo-Saxon kings, all of whom are traced back to the god Woden (Odin).While the book was (unsurprisingly) little read outside of Wales, it was, 300 years later, the most important text source for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, who repeated the key points of Historia Brittonum but expanded greatly on its framework.Historia Brittonum at Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. | |
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Offing the Offspring | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_27ab0123 | comment |
Offing the Offspring: Arthur's killing of his own son Amr. The circumstances are not explained, though. | |
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Inbred and Evil | |
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Inbred and Evil: Averted. Faustus is the result of Vortigern and his daughter's marriage. However, Saint Germanus ends up raising him resulting in Faustus becoming the White Sheep of family. | |
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Benevolent Mage Ruler | |
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Benevolent Mage Ruler: Ambrosius, who has supernatural powers, becomes the king of the Britons. | |
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Early-Installment Weirdness | |
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Early-Installment Weirdness: Arthur isn't a king, Ambrosius is considered the most glorious king of the Britons instead, and there's no Merlin, no Guinevere, no Table Round, no Grail, no Excalibur, and no Knights. There's basically nothing of what defines Arthur in the writings of Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory. | |
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Artistic License – History | |
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Artistic License – History: The Historia Brittonum isn't very historically accurate. For example, it claims Ireland used to be a desert and was colonized by Scythians. | |
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Parental Incest | |
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Parental Incest: Vortigern marries his own daughter (his third simultaneous marriage) and has a son with her. | |
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Waif Prophet | |
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Waif Prophet: Ambrosius, a child "without a father", points out to Vortigern the two dragons concealed beneath Dinas Emrys (a fact he couldn't possibly know in a natural way) and prophecies the future of Britain. The episode lived on in Arthurian lore, but from Historia Regum Britanniae onward, the Waif Prophet is always Merlin. Historia Regum Britanniae further says Merlin was "also known as Ambrosius". | |
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Nasty Party | |
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Nasty Party: Hengest invites King Vortigern with three hundred British nobles to talk peace and party, but when they are sitting at table the Saxon hosts pull out their concealed knives, stab all the nobles to death and take Vortigern prisoner. | |
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White Sheep | |
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White Sheep: Faustus ends up becoming this for Hengist's, thanks to doing be raised by Saint Germanus. | |
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Chronic Backstabbing Disorder | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_7c862b8a | comment |
Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Having already betrayed and murdered three Roman governors, the Britons feel they can't hold their ground against the Scots (= Irish) and Picts, so they send an embassy to Rome to ruefully implore the Romans to send another governor. The Romans send an army that drives off the invaders and installs a new governor. Cue the Britons feeling oppressed and massacring the Roman administration. And then ... then they send another rueful embassy to Rome to plead for military aid. | |
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Big Bad | |
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Big Bad: Hengist, the king of the Saxons, personally leads the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. | |
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One-Man Army | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_9e943076 | comment |
One-Man Army: Arthur supposedly personally killed 960*** Or 940 Saxons in the Battle of Mount Badon — "and no one struck them down except Arthur himself", respectively: | |
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Bolt of Divine Retribution | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_a52f8fdf | comment |
Bolt of Divine Retribution: According to death Nr. 1, Vortigern, having refused to better his sinful ways despite the exhortations of St. Germanus, was killed when "fire fell suddenly from heaven" and burned him with his entire castle. Even before Vortigern, the very same thing happened to the pagan king Benlli, who had refused to admit Germanus to his city. You don't snub this saint, or else! | |
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Rule of Three | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_a6cda066 | comment |
Rule of Three: Julius Caesar invades Britain three times, and only the third times he is successful. In reality the Romans only secured Britain under the Emperor Claudius, decades after Caesar's death. | |
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The Usurper | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_b0cac376 | comment |
The Usurper: Maximus (historically better known as Magnus Maximus), who, as military commander of Britain, in 383 AD invaded Gaul to defeat and kill Emperor Gratianus, whose place he took. | |
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Blood for Mortar | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_c3308d09 | comment |
Blood for Mortar: When the building materials for Vortigern's new fortress miraculously vanish each night, a soothsayer tells Vortigern that only sprinkling the walls with the blood of "a child without a father" can break the curse, and Vortigern is ready to do that. However, the boy Ambrosius procured for this purpose can evade sacrifice thanks to his prophetic skills. | |
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Unaccustomed as I Am to Public Speaking... | |
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Unaccustomed as I Am to Public Speaking...: Nennius — or rather the unknown author of the preface who pretends to be Nennius — becomes almost obnoxious with reassuring his readers that he is uneducated, ignorant of foreign languages, and utterly talentless: | |
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Death by Childbirth | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_d29a6629 | comment |
Death by Childbirth: Brutus' mother dies at his birth. | |
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Continuity Snarl | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_df582b0b | comment |
Continuity Snarl: Big time — a testament to the book being glued together from various texts that don't harmonize all that well with each other. The book can't decide whether Brutus, the first King of Britain, is the grandson or the great-great-great-grandson of Aeneas, whether he is identical to Brutus the first consul of Rome, or whether maybe he was descended from Japheth, the son of Noah, and not related to Aeneas at all. The number of the Emperors that visited Britain is variously given as seven or nine. The book acknowledges that there are two quite different stories about Vortigern's death, and just tells them both. | |
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Powered by a Forsaken Child | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_e794cb54 | comment |
Powered by a Forsaken Child: When the building materials for Vortigern's fortress miraculously vanish each night, a soothsayer tells him that only by sprinkling the walls with the blood of a child without a father can break the curse, and Vortigern is ready to do that. | |
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Adaptation Species Change | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_e8497e34 | comment |
Adaptation Species Change: Both Saturn and Woden are mentioned and seem to be just human kings with nothing supernatural about them. | |
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Folk Hero | |
| Historia Brittonum / int_ed7b2907 | comment |
Folk Hero: Judging from Historia Brittonum, Arthur may have been this type of hero in his beginnings — a war-hero of comparatively low birth who kicked Saxon butt and saved the British kings' asses. As none of the surviving manuscripts of the work are identical, an edition known as the "Vatican recension" also includes the following line which makes Arthur's lower birth more explicit: | |
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How the Mighty Have Fallen | |
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How the Mighty Have Fallen: Vortigern's death No. 2 has him reduced to a deserted refuge wandering around Britain: | |
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Historia Brittonum |
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