| | References added: 24, 29
"Gerald of Wales thought much of the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas."
The priest known as Gerald of Wales was quite a character. Of mixed Norman and Welsh ancestry, mostly Norman (but with, importantly, ancestors in common with contemporary Welsh princes), he descended from families sent by the Norman kings of England to subdue the Welsh. In much of his writing he seems to view the Welsh as barbarous children. And yet he is proud of them, of their supposed descent from Aeneas of Troy, of what he describes as their dishonesty and savage natures. He dreams of an archbishopric in Wales, at St. Davids, independent of Canterbury, he gives up three offers of bishoprics elsewhere in the course of his life because he dreams of ruling St. Davids, and yet in the journey he describes in "The Journey Through Wales," he gladly accompanies the Archbishop of Canterbury through Wales, the first such Archbishop to visit that wild country.
Gerald, aside from perhaps a few edits made in later editions to tone down the rhetoric against a powerful lord close to his own home, isn't afraid to say exactly what he thinks. He thought himself the foremost Latinist of his age, and writes in frequently flowery and convoluted phrases, interspersed at times with his often misquoted quotations from Biblical or Roman authors. He detested the petty wars of the Welsh lords of his day, nominally free for the moment from the Anglo-Normans. He hated the clumsy persecutions of the British monarchs. And he gives them all heaping mouthfuls of it (although he probably didn't count on the Welsh reading much of his Latin).
Gerald's account, as he details the daily lives of the Welsh, contains much humor. Despite his own frustrations and animosities, he is hardly the firebrand preacher that his idol Gildas was (see entry 29). Although he professes to love nothing more than his humble deaconry in the Welsh mountains, you get the feeling that he likes the good life, likes visiting the royal court, likes hobnobbing with the powerful people of his day, likes showing off his spotty knowledge of history and literature. And although he likes to take a highbrow tone, he spends much of his time in these two books recounting local folk tales of saints, miracles, outlaws and battles.
It makes for highly entertaining reading, and let's not forget that Gerald is the only source for much of this particular pocket of history. It can be amusing to read his misrepresentations (he pretends to hate Geoffrey of Monmouth, but swallows whole his folklorish fictions of the past Welsh hegemony of King Arthur--see entry 24), but it can also be painful to read of his real anguish for the persecutions of the Welsh, or the sad state of education and learning in his day. The Description of Wales, tellingly, culminates in three powerful chapters: "How the Welsh can be conquered," "How Wales should be goverened once they are conquered," and "How the Welsh can best fight back and keep up their resistance." You see here Gerald playing both sides of the fence; he is torn, he wants Wales to be goverened well, it matters less who is doing the governing.
The two prefaces to The Description of Wales are brilliantly, and sometimes unwittingly, illuminating essays on Gerald's outlook and methodology as a writer. One of my favorite passages from the second goes like this:
"The words one speaks fly off on the wind and are heard no more: you can praise or condemn, but it is soon forgotten. What you write down and then give to the world in published form is never lost: it lasts for ever, to the glory or ignominy of him who wrote it. As Seneca says: 'The critical reader mulls over what is said well and what is ill-expressed, enjoying them both, for he is looking for faults. He wants to find good things which he can praise, but he is only too ready to laugh at anything ridiculous.'"
Typically, Gerald, so anxious to give his writings to posterity (he gave copies of his books to nearly every powerful person he knew who couldn't outright refuse them), so afraid of being seen as ridiculous, has quoted the passage rather differently than the original, and has even attributed it to the wrong author. You can't help but like this guy for the effort he put out.
The Penguin Classics edition I have, with very able translation of both works by Lewis Thorpe (who also happens to have written the translations of Gregory of Tours (entry 13) and Geoffrey of Monmouth that I have read), includes in the back Gerald's two accounts of the "discovery" of "King Arthur's" tomb in 1190. These are short, and interesting, particularly if you read them suspiciously and start of wonder if Gerald was merely championing an elaborate subterfuge by the British kings designed to kill the Welsh dreams of Arthur's second coming, and thus help bring peace to the troubled area. |
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