History of Literature






English literature

Lawamon flourished 12th century early Middle English poet, author of the romance-chronicle the Brut (c. 1200), one of the most notable English poems of the 12th century. It is the first work in English to treat of the “matter of Britain”—i.e., the legends surrounding Arthur and the knights of the Round Table—and was written at a time when English was nearly eclipsed by French and Latin as a literary language. Lawamon describes himself as a priest living at Arley Kings in Worcestershire. His source was the Roman de Brut by Wace, an Anglo-Norman verse adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. In about 16,000 long alliterative lines (often broken into short couplets by rhyme), the Brut relates the legendary history of Britain from the landing of Brutus, great-grandson of the Trojan Aeneas, to the final Saxon victory over the Britons in 689. One-third of the poem deals with Arthurian matter, but Lawamon’s is not a high chivalric treatment: mass war is the staple, with Arthur the splendid war leader of Germanic tradition.