Students of the Middle Ages know The History of the Kings of Britain, as its title has come down to us, in its so-called "Vulgate" version, the massively popular and influential text authored by a canon of Oxford named Geoffrey of Monmouth (d.c.1155). That book and its author have been rightly credited with inaugurating the vogue for Arthuriana that dominated the medieval European imagination for generations, and they provided Britain with a historiographical template that, despite manifest shortcomings, would die a hard death only in the seventeenth century. And yet the genesis of Geoffrey's work has always been unclear and often controversial. Geoffrey claimed that his history--which he likely titled De Gestis Britonum but which became better known as the Historia Regum Britanniae--was itself a translation from "a certain very ancient book in the British language" given to him by Walter, the Archdeacon of Oxford. The loose consensus among scholars who study Geoffrey of Monmouth is that this "British" (or Welsh, or Breton, or Cornish...) source volume never existed, at least not as a single continuous history, and that instead, cleverly and mendaciously, Geoffrey wove together information from a variety of different types of texts, including Welsh and/or Breton genealogies and regnal lists, Welsh and/or Cornish political prophecies, and (heavily) from a number of quite recognizable Latin sources, including Gildas, Bede, pseudo-Nennius, and Landulphus Sagax.
David W. Burchmore's new edition of The History of the Kings of Britain: The First Variant Version provides medievalists with an eminently useful and highly readable translation (the first into English) of the "First Variant Version" of the text, which is extant in eight of the 217 known manuscripts. In addition to presenting the text and translation, Burchmore also provides a very significant and polemical challenge to scholarly models of the origin and importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's work. The 1988 edition of the Latin text of the First Variant Version, edited by Neil Wright, had both reflected and consolidated the growing agreement among scholars that the First Variant was derived from the Vulgate text. After a sixty-seven-page introduction cataloguing and categorizing the differences between the two versions, Wright concluded that the First Variant was an abbreviation and adaptation of the Vulgate text, and that it was not even written by Geoffrey but by a redactor of much lesser talent. Burchmore, who bases his translation on Wright's edition (though he also consults the older Jacob Hammer edition of 1951), dismisses Wright's analysis in a much briefer (twelve-page) discussion, and proposes instead a radical alternative: that the First Variant Version is not only the older of the two texts, but that it is in fact Geoffrey of Monmouth's source and was penned by no one less than Geoffrey's colleague Walter of Oxford. There is much that is plausible and even attractive about this theory, though it is not airtight and would need far more discussion than Burchmore gives it in his very brief introduction to be truly compelling.
What is clear is that the First Variant Version of The History of the Kings of Britain is, in essence, a very different book than Geoffrey's Vulgate. It is noticeably shorter, and particularly terse in its inset speeches and rhetorical descriptions; it leans more heavily on biblical phraseology and references; and it lacks many of the Vulgate's Latin sources and all of its authorial asides. And although it expounds almost exactly the same plot as the more familiar Vulgate Version, it is markedly different in wording on a sentence-by-sentence level. I reviewed many chapters of Burchmore's new edition in parallel with Michael Reeve's 2007 edition of the Vulgate, and can confirm that, overall, there is barely one sentence in six or seven that is worded the same in both versions; there are innumerable variations in diction and syntax. An example, chosen at random from the beginning of §144, is representative:
Vulgate Version: Paruit igitur Arturus domesticorum suorum consilio recepitque sese infra urbem Lundoniarum. ["Arthur deferred to the views of his retainers and retired to London."]
First Variant Version : Paruit igitur rex Arturus seniorum consilio et dimissa obsidione Londoniam adiit. ["Accordingly, King Arthur heeded the advice of his elders and, after the siege was abandoned, he went to London."]
The narrative situation described here is identical across the two versions, and yet the Vulgate Version, here and almost invariably elsewhere, is more elegant and well balanced. In this example, the omission in the Vulgate of the siege and of the fact that his advisers were "elders" is also more graceful, as the previous sentence in both versions had already mentioned these facts. In a sense, the Variant Version is quietly repeating itself.
I draw attention to these stylistic differences because readers not already familiar with both texts need to see what is at stake in Burchmore's edition. As Burchmore claims, "If the Variant came first, then its author deserves much of the credit for the content and organization of Geoffrey's work, while Geoffrey's principal accomplishment was to supply the further narrative elaboration and rhetorical polish that ensured its widespread impact and enduring popularity" (ix).
The fact that Geoffrey's Vulgate version is, for modern readers (myself included), a richer and more rewarding text gives credence to Burchmore's thesis that Geoffrey reshaped and smoothed out what now appears to us as the First Variant. But we should be duly cautious about imposing our own aesthetic expectations about what the "better" text should look like: it could well be that whoever penned the First Variant with, hypothetically, Geoffrey's Vulgate before him imposed a quite different aesthetic and intentionally abbreviated the longer descriptions and the rhetorical set pieces in favor of a more biblically resonant and less idiosyncratic historical account. There are other possibilities as well about the relationship between the two versions that neither Burchmore nor Wright have explored. For instance, one gets the impression, from reading the texts in tandem, that the almost perverse degree to which they never fully agree with each another might possibly be not the result of one reworking the other (after all, why rewrite almost every single sentence?) but rather the product of two different writers making parallel versions of a common source--maybe even Geoffrey's putative "certain very ancient book."
I do not propose this last theory very seriously, and even if I did, a book review is hardly the place to make it. But one could argue that the introduction to a volume in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, a series aimed at a broad non-specialist audience ("the English-speaking world," according to their website), is also not the place to present an argument that could affect scholarship for decades to come about the authorship and origins of a major medieval text. Nevertheless, despite the infelicity of his chosen forum, Burchmore's hypothesis has considerable explanatory power. It explains, for instance, how both Geffrei Gaimar and Wace in their Anglo-Norman adaptations could have had access to the text at such an early date. It also accounts for why the only section that appears verbatim identical in both versions is the Prophecies of Merlin, which the manuscript tradition attests circulated independently as early as the 1130s; the author of the First Variant Version, Burchmore argues, simply added that text in when it became available. Burchmore's hypothesis also accounts for some irregularities in the use of biblical synchronisms. Probably the most intriguing idea Burchmore advances, however, is the claim that Walter of Oxford authored the First Variant Version. This is, of course, dependent on the claim that the First Variant is both earlier than, and the source of, the Vulgate, but, if true, it explains much of the awkwardness of Geoffrey's coy references to Walter: by Burchmore's reading, Geoffrey becomes Walter's younger and much more talented protégé, and his book became an international sensation while his master Walter's was not translated into English until 2019.
But, again, as attractive as Burchmore's theories are, there are problems they do not explain. They do not satisfactorily explain why, if Geoffrey's source was Walter's First Variant Version, Geoffrey refers to this as a book in sermone Britannico and not Latin. They also do not explain why borrowings from the Latin historians Gildas and Bede aremore integrated into the text of the First Variant than into Geoffrey's Vulgate: if the First Variant were the source, could Geoffrey have taken pains to integrate these sources lesscarefully? And Burchmore's views also do not explain why the First Variant actually claims Geoffrey of Monmouth as its author: ego … Galfridus Arturus Monemutensis(442). Burchmore dismisses this attribution as a later addition, but it occurs in manuscripts from both major branches of the First Variant's textual tradition (see Wright cxii). There are no easy answers here, and this edition of the First Variant is surely a clarion call to scholars of Geoffrey of Monmouth to review many of their long-held assumptions about the text, its author, and his sources. One only wishes that, in this otherwise very excellent edition and translation, Burchmore's intriguing but polemical claims had not been presented as a done deal.