Laȝamon: The English Arthur

At Areley Kings on the Severn, a priest named Laȝamon ("Lawman") set himself to tell "the noble deeds of the English" and produced, around 1200, the first English Arthur: a Brut of roughly sixteen thousand long lines, translating Wace but transposing him from courtly octosyllables into a rolling, formulaic, half-alliterative verse that deliberately sounds a century older than it is. The transposition is tonal as much as metrical. Where Wace is urbane, Laȝamon is elemental: battle rendered with Anglo-Saxon relish, speeches oath-heavy, similes drawn from wolves and floods. And where Wace trims the marvellous, Laȝamon restores and invents it: at Arthur's birth, elves take the child and give him gifts — strength, kingship, long life — and at his end it is Argante, "fairest of all maidens," an elf-queen in Avalon, who will heal his wounds; two women arrive in a boat, and the king passes to them. The Breton hope becomes an English promise: "the Britons believe yet that he is alive... and shall come again."

Laȝamon poses this movement's question in its sharpest form: what is a translation? His Brut is the third telling of the same matter you have now read (Geoffrey, Wace, Laȝamon), and by holding one scene across all three you can watch national temperament, meter, and audience each remake the story. It is also a preview of Movement V's deepest current — the alliterative line sleeping in English verse, which will wake again in the fourteenth century carrying this same matter.