Malmesbury’s opposition of “false myths” to “truthful histories,” moreover, raises an issue important to readers of history and literature both in Monmouth’s time and in our own. The relation of historical narrative to imaginative literature has been the subject of rich and persistent analysis for at least a quarter of a century; Arthurian scholars and devotees continue to debate Arthur’s historicity, and their discussions frequently complicate the standard opposition of fact to fable. Malmesbury’s remarks suggest, however, that there may be other issues at stake in this opposition than a simple search for the truth.
William of Malmesbury alludes to the cultural power of Arthur’s image, invoking the historic king as support for a tottering fatherland and praising Arthur’s monumental greatness, a hero who can “kindl[e] the broken spirits of his countrymen to war” (quippe qui labantem patriam diu sustinuerit, infractasque civium mentes ad bellum acuerit). Truthful histories need figures like Arthur, Malmesbury implies, sovereign icons to inspire and captivate their countrymen. Yet a captivating Arthur, Malmesbury also suggests, has a dangerous relation specifically to the “trifles” of the raving Welsh (Britonum nugae hodieque delirant).3
Emphasizing Arthur’s popular appeal, Malmesbury insists that Arthur’s popularity can sponsor his nation’s endurance. Though deeply admired, Arthur’s popularity is also suspect: Arthur apparently inspires excessive ravings among the Welsh. Malmesbury’s condescension toward the “trifles” of the Welsh, the strength of his rhetoric in casting Welsh stories as delirium, intimates disquieting elements to Arthur’s power. Arthur’s apparently dangerous inspirations, Malmesbury anxiously implies, need to be constrained by historical accounts officially sanctioned as “true.”
In this chapter I will argue that this anxiety about popular belief haunts the denigration of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s imaginative history as “false.” I will suggest, moreover, that accounts of early British history that pit the excesses of Monmouth’s extravagant fiction against other, more sober truths implicitly encode fears about the popularity and the cultural power of his text. Such charges work anxiously to disavow the somewhat disturbing fact (one hinted even by Malmesbury) that popular “ravings” can indeed change the world. Yet Malmesbury’s assertion that some popular fantasies are advantageous while others are simply false requires a very delicate negotiation of the categories of truth and fiction he deploys. If Malmesbury disavows Welsh fantasies as delirious falsehoods, he also reminds us that fantasy itself (and the widespread inspiration it provides) is useful to governments, offering the stirring of hearts that move a populace to fight a war, or support, at great personal sacrifice, a sovereign’s claim to the throne.4 This paradox of popular fantasy means that governments will work hard to produce and manage, as well as to constrain, the popular power of belief.
The enduring popularity of Monmouth’s captivating story indicates the power of Arthur for belief in British sovereignty. What is not often emphasized in accounts of Arthurian romance in England is the extent to which the meaning of British sovereignty in Arthur’s story (the cultural uses made of Arthur for various political projects) was contested throughout England, Wales, and Scotland from Monmouth’s time well into the late medieval period. Fantasies of Arthur and his return fueled diametrically opposed, as well as intimately related, political agendas: Edward III’s imperial pageantry, along with both Owain Glyn Dŵr’s rebellion against the English crown, and Henry Tudor’s (later Henry VII) battle for it. In the context of that history, efforts to identify some Arthurian sovereign fantasies as “untrue” despite their popularity will obscure, rather than reveal, the histories of political, social, and cultural exchange in medieval Britain. We need instead to consider what medieval “popular” and “official” accounts of Arthur might suggest about the process by which some beliefs about Britain were transformed into national fact, while others were rendered literally outlandish, increasingly unimagined and, thus, unimaginable.
Fantasy’s role in processes of cultural identification, and the historical legitimization of some, and not other, fantasies of Arthur can help us understand the importance of myth and legend to the history of British community. I begin with a brief account of the contributions medieval studies has made to our understanding of history’s relation to the fantastic. I follow medievalists who argue that psychoanalysis can help us to interpret the desires, the pleasures, and the powers embedded in historico-legendary texts. Unlike approaches to myth that oppose legend to historical realism, and unlike traditionally psychological approaches to Arthuriana that link specific stories or story cycles to transcendental processes of a universal or collective unconscious, I engage psychoanalysis with historical specificity, so as to understand the fascination and popularity of certain tales at particular historical moments. Psychoanalysis can help us see the material consequences of belief, reminding us that fantasies, even in the absence of what could be identified as historical fact, can and do affect the world.
To remark that fantasy does not require fact to have effects upon the world does not mean, of course, that fantasy is the opposite of history. I will suggest below a way to understand the relation between history and popular fantasy. Following this discussion, I turn my attention to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fantasy of a British past. In the second and third sections of this chapter I argue that Geoffrey’s deft use of ambiguity and imagination makes the outlandish traditions of a linguistic minority useful-indeed, crucial-to the rulers of Anglo-Norman England. Geoffrey’s ingenious history recasts largely ignored Welsh literary-historical traditions into the authoritative form of Latin manuscript culture; in so doing, Geoffrey renders Welsh traditions useful to those in the very centers of power. The consequences of this are multiple and long-standing. Geoffrey’s acts of translation, alongside Geoffrey’s own historical method, suggest that we might view him as an historical innovator, an intellectual who offers an important intervention into twelfth-century historiography, and crafts an influential fantasy productive for an oppositional history of British identity.
Fantasy, Fact, and Popular Pleasures
The debate between Malmesbury’s “truthful history” and Geoffrey’s “false myths” no longer dominates conversations among scholars of early Britain; yet the questions implicitly raised by Geoffrey’s text are as hotly debated today as they apparently were in the twelfth century.5 The categories of history and textuality have been important to medieval literary studies, a field itself long associated with an opposition between textual methodologies (New Criticism) and historicist ones (Exegetics). As a result medievalists have had much to say about these questions.
In the last twenty years, medievalists have complicated our understanding of the relation between history and imagination, arguing against a strict opposition between the truth of history and the power of the fictional.6 Paul Strohm, for example, suggests that fictionality is “no embarrassment to history,” since “fabulists and romancers conceive episodes within imaginary structures or value systems their audiences embrace as true, and lies accepted as a basis for actions gain retrospective truthfulness through their influence on events” (3). Stressing a reciprocity between fictionalizing activities and history making, Strohm insightfully insists that “a text can be powerful without being true” (5). Strohm’s work reminds us that authors consolidate (and legitimize) the power of their texts through the truth-claims they make. Such truth-claims can obscure the political interests embedded in official versions of the past.
Despite this nuanced approach to history’s relation to fiction, however, even Strohm’s important reconceptualization of the power of romance links fictionalizing with lying. In the context of Arthurian traditions and given late-medieval disagreements over the meaning of Arthur’s sovereignty (evident in Malmesbury’s critique of the raving Britons), slippages between “fiction” and the “lie” prove especially disabling. When late medieval English sovereigns, anxious about the stability of their claims to the throne, commission fictional genealogies that trace their lineage back to King Arthur, they are, I would argue, doing something more complicated than lying. They are imagining the possibility of their future rule through a fictionalized identification (hardly itself an innocent act) with an imagined community
