LAYAMON'S "BRUT".
Thanks to Geoffrey, at last, some time about 1200-1220, came an English poet, Layamon, a true poet (now and then), whose work reminds us occasionally at once of the Greeks whom he had never read, of masters whom he did not know; and of the things most romantic in the verses of the last great poet of England. Layamon, the author of "The Brut," had no ambition; he had no hope of gain; the king and the courtiers would never hear of him.
Layamon was an English priest in a quiet country parish, not far from the Welsh Border, at Ernley, near Radestone, on the Severn, as he tells us. Yet the new French culture had reached him and inspired him; he gave it to Englishmen in their own English language and he is therefore readable: is more than a mere name. It "came into his mind" to tell the history of England, in verse, and he says that he travelled far to get the books of Bede (in Anglo-Saxon), "the fair Austin and St. Albin," in Latin, and the book made in French by a French clerk, Master Wace, "who well could write". "Lovingly he beheld these books," but, in fact, he only used one of them, namely Wace's French version (1155) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's romance. Wace had altered Geoffrey as he pleased, and Layamon took the same liberty with Wace; his book is twice as long as that of the French clerk; he also inserted many things not to be found in the text of Wace as now printed, but derived partly from still unprinted manuscripts of Wace, partly from other sources; perhaps from Welsh legends known to this priest who dwelt beside the Severn. Wace added to Geoffrey's account of Arthur, the story wherever he found it, of "The Table Round," so shaped that the knights could not quarrel about the highest place. Layamon adds that the Fairy ladies came to Arthur's birth—as in a very old belief, found in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt—and that they later carried him away to Avalon, there to be healed of his wounds.
He calls the fairy Queen "Argante," possibly a French corruption of a Breton name. His account of the birth of the enchanter Merlin, "No man's son," is romance itself. Merlin's mother, who had become a nun, knew not who was her child's father, only that in her dreams there came to her "the fairest thing that ever was born, as it were a tall knight, all dight in gold. This thing glided before me and glistened with gold. Oft me it kissed, and oft embraced."
What can be more romantic than this tale of the golden shadow of love that glides through the darkling bower—told by a nun with bowed head, shamefast! We are reminded of the lines in which Io, in Æschylus, tells of the shadowy approaches of Zeus, the king of gods; and the voice that spoke to her in dreams.
The Greeks had another such tale of the gold that fell in the tower of Danaë before the birth of Perseus. The origin of Layamon's story may be in some ancient Celtic myth of the loves of gods and mortal women, and of Merlin, son of a god.
From his shadowy nameless father, Merlin received his gift of prophecy, and, from the first, foretold the Passing of Arthur.
In Layamon's poem we find what does not occur in the older Anglo-Saxon poems, such as "Beowulf," the use of similes in the manner of Homer, whose warriors charge like lions, hungry, and beaten on by wind and snow. Thus, too, in Layamon's verse,
"Up caught Arthur his shield, before his breast, and he 'gan to rush as doth the howling wolf when he cometh from the wood, flecked with snow, and thinketh to seize what beasts he will."
Arthur defeats the Saxons, and drives them from the ford of the river, through the deep marshland,