author, a hand in the creation of the Cycle is not absurd as some critics have thought. His modern reputation no longer must remain at odds with this medieval one.
Using Walter Map as a case study, this book overturns long-established narratives of how Welsh literary material first circulated outside of Wales. Instead of identifying Breton minstrels as the agents of transmission, I show that Walter and others had access to Welsh-Latin documents that circulated throughout a monastic network in southern Wales and western England. Latin literature, and not folktales, brought Arthur out of Wales and into England. I also argue that Walter Map participates in the widespread phenomenon of reworking existing tales in order to fit them into the newly popular setting of ancient Britain, in effect creating faux-Celtic stories. Taken together, these two discoveries suggest a new approach for understanding the “Celtic” element in medieval French and English literature. Rather than the sources-and-analogues approach that has dominated scholarship for decades, I propose an approach that is historically sensitive, one that asks what kind of literary work the concept of ancient Britain does in a culture in which the inheritors of ancient Britain—the Welsh—are often at odds with the ruling elite. Twelfth-century clerics were at the forefront of a vibrant literary culture, collecting Welsh-Latin documents and reshaping the Welsh material they found for their own ends. In the thirteenth century, Walter Map, or at least the figure of Walter Map, became an Arthurian author precisely because he fit the profile: he was a clerical Latin writer with a strong interest in Wales and its past.
Chapter 1 examines Walter’s affiliations with Wales and with the genre of romance, providing important context for how Walter could be seen as someone who worked with the Matter of Britain. Walter took a special interest in Wales and the Welsh, and while these Welsh tales have generally been said to reflect common anti-Welsh stereotypes, they are often more sophisticated than has been assumed. They show that Walter viewed himself as somewhat of an expert on the Welsh; his stories display a relatively nuanced view of Anglo-Welsh politics. This chapter also argues that Walter was a skilled writer of romance. Distinctio 3 of the De nugis curialium contains four polished romances that demonstrate that Walter could write a series of thematically linked stories. While these romances are not set in ancient Britain, they nonetheless show that Walter had read widely in contemporary French literature and that he incorporates many elements of popular romance into his own work.
Chapters 2 and 3 concern the only surviving copy of the De nugis curialium found in Bodley 851. I argue that the De nugis curialium was originally five separate works in various stages of completion that were erroneously taken by later scribes to be a single work. Chapter 2 examines all of the doublets in the De nugis curialium, arguing that Walter was reusing earlier material in later work. This chapter does the meticulous work of comparing all of the doublets found in the De nugis curialium and finds that some of the tales in distinctiones 1 and 2 are indeed polished revisions of their counterparts found in distinctiones 4 and 5. Walter’s work is therefore not a messy collage of courtier notes. Rather, it is a collection of unfinished works, some of which are frozen in the act of revision. Chapter 3 argues that many of the text’s infelicities, which are often attributed to Walter himself, are the result of scribal interpolation. Overall, I suggest that Walter’s work is not as sloppy or “untidy” as earlier critics have assumed.
Chapter 4 examines in detail the process of revision that lies behind the tale of King Herla, one of Walter’s most celebrated tales. This tale is not in fact authentically Welsh, as is widely believed, but is rather a reworking of a continental tale, fitted into Welsh garb—a practice that I argue was widespread. Reworking tales to make them fit into the Matter of Britain could have very specific ideological effects. Walter, for example, has his own way of bringing Henry II into ancient Britain. This chapter also includes an overview of other medieval works that have been incorporated—some skillfully, some sloppily—into the Matter of Britain. Overall, I conclude by arguing that this phenomenon was commonplace in medieval literature and that many instances of Celtic narrative material may in fact be the invention of medieval authors.
Chapter 5 takes up the thorny question of the transmission of the Matter of Britain. How did so many Welsh, Cornish, and Breton characters, themes, and stories make their way into medieval French literature? Walter Map’s De nugis curialium provides a good deal of indirect evidence, as well as some direct evidence, that transmission occurred through written Latin documents, instead of itinerant multilingual minstrels, who are thought to be the usual channel for transmission. It also explicitly details a network of exchange among minor Marcher aristocrats, which Walter took advantage of to find material for his own work. Arguing that Latin clerics like Walter played a larger role in the transmission of the Matter of Britain than has previously been acknowledged, this chapter concludes by examining other instances in which Latin clerics were instrumental in moving narrative material out of Wales. In particular, this chapter argues that Walter obtained the sources for two of his Welsh tales from the monastic archive of St. Peter’s, Gloucester.
Chapter 6 reviews Walter Map’s reception in the thirteenth century and beyond, asking why so many readers and writers ascribed to him parts of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. I argue that the earliest attributions to Walter, written only a decade after his death, do not portray him as the author or translator of any of these Arthurian romances. Instead, Walter is merely imagined as a clerk of Henry II who rummaged through monastic archives to compile the Latin source for the French romances. This image corresponds well to what we know about Walter Map and to our revised understanding of how Welsh material passed into the larger European world. Although Walter almost certainly had no hand in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the author who first introduced him into the Cycle’s list of putative authors knew more about how legends of Arthur and his court circulated out of Wales than he has been given credit for.
Chapter 1
Walter Map, Wales, and Romance
Medieval readers appreciated knowing the pedigree of a story, and medieval authors obliged them, even if their explanations were often well-crafted fiction. It is no wonder then that the Lancelot-Grail Cycle insists that Master Walter Map played an integral role in writing, translating, or discovering these wondrous adventures about ancient Britain.1 But invoking a source, as the Cycle invokes Walter Map, could do more than satisfy the curiosity of readers; it could also perform important literary work. This chapter begins to ask what kind of literary work the name Walter Map might have accomplished for the Cycle’s author and its first readers. In doing so, it recovers Walter Map’s literary reputation, with particular attention to Wales and to the genre of romance. Both of these topics would be of special concern to writers and readers of the Cycle. Texts dealing with the pre-English, Arthurian past of Britain often established a plausible tie with the British past, usually through Wales or Brittany.2 Moreover, early romances tended to position themselves in a larger literary network, sometimes by claiming patronage and sometimes by claiming to be translations or adaptations of earlier romances. Part of the appeal of Walter’s name was that it evoked expertise in both the Welsh and romance. As Chapter 6 shows, these two aspects are not the only reasons that the Cycle claims Walter’s involvement, but they are a good place to begin the investigation.
Walter the Marcher
