The Arthurian Wing · Reading Path
The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology
Movement II — The Invention of Britain · Unit 10 of 36
Wace and the Round Table
What changes when the Latin chronicle becomes a French courtly poem — and why does the Round Table first appear here?
The Argument
In 1155 the Norman clerk Wace finished his Roman de Brut, a verse translation of Geoffrey into the French of the Anglo-Norman court — according to Laȝamon, he presented a copy to Eleanor of Aquitaine. Translation is transformation. Wace's couplets move the matter from the study to the hall: he expands feasts, courtships, and ceremonies, softens the annalistic grimness, and lets an ideal of courtly conduct — cortoisie — settle over Arthur's reign. Most consequentially, he adds a piece of furniture: Arthur, he says, made the Roöne Table, at which all his barons sat equal and none could boast precedence. Whether Wace took the image from Breton conteurs, as he claims, or built it himself, the fellowship of the table — the tradition's great social sacrament — enters literature in these lines.
Wace is also the tradition's first honest reporter of its own reception. Of Arthur's survival he writes that the Bretons still await him, that Merlin said only that his death would be doubtful, and that "men have ever doubted, and — as I am persuaded — will always doubt whether he liveth or is dead." And of the marvels of Broceliande he reports, deadpan, that he went to look for them and found none: "a fool I returned; a fool I went." That mixture — carrying the wonder while auditing it — makes him the most companionable of the chroniclers, and the direct source for both Laȝamon (Unit 11) and, in matter and manner, the courtly romances of Movement III.
The Texts
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Roman de Brut (the Arthurian portion) — the Arthurian portion · Wace
Geoffrey in French verse for a Norman court — and, in passing, the invention of the Round Table.
Edition ed. & trans. Judith Weiss, Wace's Roman de Brut: A History of the British (2002); Eugene Mason's translation free online
The Scholarship
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Wace's Roman de Brut: A History of the British · ed. & trans. Judith Weiss
Edition and facing translation; the introduction is the best short account of what Wace added.
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The New Arthurian Encyclopedia — s.v. "Round Table" · ed. Norris J. Lacy
The table before and after Wace, in one page.
The Practice
Lectio Set Wace's Round Table passage beside Geoffrey's plenary court at Caerleon. Identify precisely what social anxiety the table is invented to solve.
Scriptio Write the table's founding charter in three sentences, as Arthur's clerk would: who sits, what equality means, what is forbidden. Keep it; the Queste will break it in Unit 21.
In the Anatomy
Movement II — The Invention of Britain