(Robert John) Wace (c. 1100 - c. 1174) was an Anglo-Norman poet, who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy. Roman de Brut (c. 1155) was based on the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Its popularity is explained by the new accessibility to a wider public of the Arthur legend in a vernacular language. Wace was the first to mention the legend of King Arthur's Round Table and ascribe the name Excalibur to Arthur's sword, although he on the whole adds only minor details to Geoffrey's text. The Roman de Brut became the basis, in turn, for Layamon's Brut, an alliterative Middle English poem, and Piers Langtoft's Chronicle.
The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages - Power, Faith and Crusade
These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating “fact” and “fiction” in the Middle Ages.
The Grail legends have been appropriated by novelists as diverse as Umberto Eco and Dan Brown yet very few have read for themselves the original stories from which they came. All the mystery and drama of the Arthurian world are embodied in the extraordinary tales of Perceval, Gawain, Lancelot and Galahad in pursuit of the Holy Grail. The original romances, full of bewildering contradictions and composed by a number of different writers, dazzle with the sheer wealth of their conflicting imagination.
In his quest for the real King Arthur, Rodney Castleden uses up-to-date archaeological and documentary evidence to recreate the history and society of Dark Age Britain. He offers a more complete picture of Arthur than ever before.
The Arthurian legend has inspired European writers and artists for almost fifteen hundred years. From shadowy beginnings in early medieval chronicles and poems, it has developed through medieval romance to modern films and TV series. What can account for the evergreen popularity of the ‘Once and Future King’? There is no simple answer, but the Companion outlines the evolution of the legend from the earliest documentary sources to Spamalot and analyses how some of the major motifs of the legend have been passed down in both medieval and modern texts.
