La Matière de Bretagne
Matière de Bretagne, La. The ‘Matter of Britain’ is the term used to describe the corpus of Celtic, more specifically Arthurian, legend that provided the narrative framework for so much medieval French romance. How it reached the Continent from Britain is not known. Equally unclear is who Arthur was, and how a chieftain of the Britons who apparently distinguished himself against the invading Saxons at the Battle of Mount Badon early in the 6th c. came to be rescued from historical oblivion in the second quarter of the 12th c. by the inventive genius of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Whether or not Arthur lurks behind the name of Ambrosius Aurelianus celebrated by the 6th-c. historian Gildas, and however authentic or otherwise the appearance of his name may be in the Old Welsh Gododdin (c.600), the Annales Cambriae (9th-10th c.), and the Pseudo-Nennius (9th c.), it seems certain that he must have lived on as a folk hero in the collective memory of the Celts for many centuries.
Transmogrified by Geoffrey's Historia regum britanniae (1135-8) into the glorious monarch of a resplendent Golden Age, fit to rival Alexander and Charlemagne, Arthur the king makes his debut in French literature in Le Roman de Brut (1155), a rhymed translation and adaptation of Geoffrey's Latin text by the Anglo-Norman poet Wace. He considerably amplified that part of his Latin source devoted to Arthur, portraying the king as a paragon of chivalry and dwelling in particular on the splendours of his coronation and the courtesy of his court. He also added (from where it is not known) the Round Table. A scholarly and critical writer, Wace, in the wake of William of Malmesbury, drew attention to the many fables relating to Arthur circulating amongst the Britons at the time, and to their belief in his eventual return from Avalon. Wace clearly gave these stories little credence and did not see fit to embroider any into his narrative, which remains by and large faithfully close to Geoffrey's.
Chrétien de Troyes, the earliest and best exponent of French courtly romance, certainly read Wace, but his works exploit a great deal of Celtic material which does not figure in either Wace or Geoffrey, and he clearly had access to sources other than these. Marie de France, a Continental poet writing at the English court of Henry II, also had access to Celtic material. This, she tells us, she obtained from oral sources, from narrative songs (lais) that she heard from the lips of ‘Bretuns’. Unlike ‘Bretaigne’ (Britain) that could be distinguished from ‘Bretaigne menur’ (Brittany), no linguistic differentiation was made in medieval French between Britons and Bretons, and we cannot therefore know whether Marie's sources were Cymric or Armoric—or both. But since in any case the Welsh and the Bretons shared a language which, though no longer common, may still presumably have been mutually intelligible in the 12th c., it is probably unnecessary to attempt to make any further distinction. When, however, Geoffrey of Monmouth used the term ‘Britannici sermonis’ to describe the language of ‘the very ancient book’ which he claimed as his source, he could only mean Welsh, as his contemporary Gaimar confirms.
The existence, at all events, of Celtic legend circulating orally in 12th-c. Britain provides an alternative source to that of written Latin and French texts to explain the availability of such material in Champagne and beyond. Indeed, the Matter of Britain had already reached Italy in the first two decades of the century, as the Arthurian-inspired archivolt of Modena Cathedral shows. Whatever the intermediary here, transmission to France in particular may very well have been made by itinerant, Celtic-speaking story-tellers such as Bleheris/Bledri, whose literary activity is referred to by 12th-c. contemporaries, or by bilingual Anglo-Norman versifiers plying their cross-Channel trade. Equally probable candidates for the role of intermediaries were the professional interpreters attached to the royal and baronial courts, who assured communication between the Celtic-speaking and francophone inhabitants of 12th-c. Britain. Some of these channels might have passed through Brittany, others need not have.
Another, and more direct, source of contact would, of course, have been Welsh literary texts, but these, preserved only in much later copies, are difficult to date. Apart from some brief and possibly early mentions of Arthur in, for example, the Black Book of Carmarthen (early 13th c.), the first significant texts are those of the Mabinogion. The oldest of these, and probably the only one to pre-date Chrétien de Troyes, is Culhwch and Olwen, a bride-winning tale featuring Arthur, Kay, Bedevere, Gawain, and Guenièvre. The Dream of Rhonabwy dates from the 13th c. As for Gereint Son of Erbin, it has very clear narrative affinities with Chrétien's Erec et Enide; the Lady of the Fountain stands in the same relation to Yvain, while Peredur has links, but less close, with Perceval. More French than Celtic, in fact, these 14th- and 15th-c. Welsh texts appear to have themselves undergone the influences of Chrétien's romances.
Even if the problems of defining what the Matter of Britain actually consisted of, and in what forms it could have been transmitted to France, remain unresolved, it is clear that the imaginative appeal of Celtic legend to French romance writers and their audiences was real and, in literary terms, highly productive. The matière de Bretagne was to persist into the great prose romances of the 13th and 14th c., ultimately to return to the land of its birth at the end of the Middle Ages with Malory.
[Ian Short]
Bibliography
- J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (1950)
- R. S. Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (1959)
- C. Bullock Davies, Professional Interpreters and the Matter of Britain (1966)
