The Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Wales

The influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth on medieval Welsh vernacular literature was pervasive. Since many of the themes, characters, and events in Geoffrey’s work had been drawn in the first instance from stories and texts emanating from medieval Wales, it was natural that the Welsh should feel an immediate affinity with Geoffrey’s writings. Although Geoffrey openly disparages the latter-day Welsh at the end of the De gestis Britonum, he did succeed in providing them with a long and glorious past in which the ancestors of the Welsh, the Britons, were associated with the original founding and naming of the kingdom of Britain. Geoffrey helped to confirm prior Welsh historical assumptions and to provide a coherent organizational framework for the mass of inherited Welsh literary-historical tradition. An early manifestation of Geoffrey’s influence may be seen in the pedigree of the kings of Gwynedd and Deheubarth, which absorbed some of Geoffrey’s legendary kings of Britain within only a few decades of the completion of Geoffrey’s DGB around 1138.1 But it was only with the translation of Geoffrey’s DGB into medieval Welsh that his work began to infiltrate popular conceptions of Welsh and British history at a more fundamental level. The translation process may have begun with an attempt to identify Welsh equivalents for the many characters named in the work, as may be evidenced in a poem composed by Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr around 1187.2 By no later than c.1250, however, there had been several attempts at translating the entirety of Geoffrey’s DGB into Welsh. These translations are known collectively as Brut y Brenhinedd (“History of the Kings”).