Scholarly concern with Geoffrey’s extravagant fictions may, in fact, displace anxieties about his extravagant popularity. Scholars have consistently, if implicitly, linked the problem of Geoffrey’s authority to his text’s popularity. Gransden’s (once very influential) account of medieval historiography critiques the apparent problem of Geoffrey’s popularity in terms that denigrate the pleasures of his text. Describing Geoffrey as “a romance writer masquerading as a historian” (I, 202), Gransden classifies the Historia as romance because it was so delightfully amusing and so remarkably popular (Gransden I, 207; II, 459).22 More recently Julia Crick has revised this opinion, reminding modern readers of the importance of pleasure and delight for historians writing during the Middle Ages, a time when “history was not a free-standing discipline, but an auxiliary one” (225). Crick continues, “Lacking a niche in the academic world, historians … had to catch their audiences in a way that writers of technical literature generally did not…. In such a market content, style, and general appeal to the reader were essential to success” (225–26). By such standards, as Crick concludes, Geoffrey of Monmouth “was an exceptional artist fully governing and not governed by his material. His choice of subject was a brilliant success” (226). Crick reminds us that Geoffrey was not writing from a position of textual authority and disciplinary influence. Her remarks imply that critical condescension toward Geoffrey’s artistry and brilliance remains linked to his success. Indeed, the Historia was far more influential than the authorized “technical literature” of the time.
For his part, Geoffrey of Monmouth evinces his own anxiety about the pleasures of his text. He endeavors to ensure that those pleasures not be identified with himself as a writer. Geoffrey’s prefatory remarks (cited as epigraph to this chapter), explicitly link Arthurian pleasures with Welsh culture. The “old British book” drawn from Welsh oral tradition was, Geoffrey insists, invested with enjoyment: stories of Arthur were handed down joyfully (“a multis populis quasi inscripta iocunde & memoriter predicarentur,” emphasis mine), his source “book” of British traditions was an aesthetic delight (“ex ordine perpulcris orationibus pro-ponebat” [Griscom 219, emphasis mine]). In contrast to the joys of the Welsh tradition, Monmouth insists upon his own modest and unpretentious style. The following quotation (from Lewis Thorpe’s translation) addresses those issues:
I have taken the trouble at [Archdeacon Walter’s] request to translate that [old British] book into Latin, although I have been content with my own expression and my own homely [rustic] style and I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other’s gardens. If I had adorned my page with high flown language I should have bored my readers, for they would have been forced to spend more time discovering the meaning of my words than following the story.23
Perhaps such a statement amounts to the standard trope of authorial humility; perhaps, too, it offers rhetorical concessions to competing traditions of historiography (like that of the Venerable Bede or William of Malmesbury) narrating the history of the English people or of their church.24 Monmouth’s investment in rhetorical modesty, here again, situates him firmly within the status quo. But what would Monmouth gain by identifying the aesthetic pleasure of his text with the Welsh stories he chose to “translate,” rather than with his own imagination? Might his humility signal something more than another standard topos?
To answer these questions we turn to a central section of Geoffrey’s text that will serve as an important source for late-medieval political propaganda. In the center of the Historia—wedged in between two episodes in the history of Constantine—Geoffrey “translates” “The Prophecies of Merlin.” Up to this point, the account of British history has moved forward in chronological progression: beginning with the story of Brutus, continuing through the time before and during Roman colonization of Britain. Geoffrey next tells the story of the dynasty of Constantine, interrupting that narrative immediately after the famous episode of Vortigern’s tower, a monumental edifice crumbling (so Merlin advises) because of two dragons, one red and one white, locked in battle beneath it. At this point, in most redactions, Geoffrey’s authorial voice intrudes in dedication.25 In most (but not all) manuscripts his patron is now identified as Alexander Bishop of Lincoln, “a man of the greatest religion and wisdom … waited on by so many noblemen” (170).26 At this point Geoffrey recapitulates his humility, linking himself and Bishop Alexander with Merlin, the prophet:
I [Geoffrey] … pressed my rustic reed-pipe to my lips and, modulating on it in all humility, I translated into Latin this work written in a language which is unknown to you. All the same, I am greatly surprised that you should have deigned to commit the task to so poor a pen as mine, when your all-powerful wand could command the service of so many men more learned and more splendid than I … Leaving on one side all the wise men of this entire island of Britain, I feel no shame at all in maintaining that it is you and you alone who should … declaim it with bold accompaniment, if only the highest honour had not called you away to other preoccupations…. [S]ince it has pleased you that Geoffrey of Monmouth should sound his own pipe in this piece of soothsaying, do not hesitate to show favour to his music-makings. If he produces any sound which is wrong or unpleasant, force him back into correct harmony with your own Muses’ baton. (Thorpe 170–71; VII, 1)
Alexander’s power becomes a magician’s wand; Geoffrey maintains proudly that Alexander “alone should declaim [the prophecies] with bold accomplishment,” despite the fact that their original language is “unknown” to him. In place of Alexander’s “all powerful wand,” Geoffrey offers his own more modest “rustic reed pipe,” a figuration which marks authorial power with tropes of male virility while simultaneously placing Alexander as an imaginary intermediary between Geoffrey and Merlin. This description compliments Alexander’s majesty while distancing Geoffrey’s own artistry from Merlin’s prophetic authorship. Geoffrey is merely the humble medium; he mediates the creations of a fictional magician and the desires of a powerful bishop. Through this dedication Geoffrey displays the usefulness of imaginative ventures like prophetic soothsaying to those in power. Powerful bishops like Alexander, Geoffrey reminds us, have access to their own muses; it is their aesthetic pleasures—their designations of “correct harmony” and “favorable music-makings”—that determine which sounds will gain a fair hearing and which will fall on deaf ears.
Geoffrey’s text displays a crucial fact of patronage.27 Sovereigns and bishops need aesthetic creation (and linguistic techniques) to display their power. In fact, the story of Merlin that Monmouth tells will link linguistic technologies (the powers of storytelling, translation, and prophecy) to a powerful set of material activities. Merlin’s skill in the power of the story, his ability to “foretell the future,” is linked with his knowledge of “mechanical contrivances” (195). Skilled in tales and technologies, Merlin’s prophecies restore stability to Vortigern’s military fortifications: he solves the problem of the crumbling tower by revealing the fighting dragons underneath it. He is able, in explicit contrast to the brute strength of Vortigern’s warriors, to dismantle the Giant’s Ring in Ireland, reerecting it as Stonehenge. Indeed, Merlin’s usefulness to his sovereign is matchless. More important than any army, “his artistry is worth more than any brute strength” (ingenium que uirtuti preualere) (198). And Merlin manages explicitly innovative technologies of sovereign succession, providing the magical means whereby Uther Pendragon and Ygraine beget Arthur. As a prophet and magician, Merlin builds monuments and produces monumental kings.
As Martin Shichtman and Laurie Finke have noted, Merlin’s awesome abilities mark him as more than the average court poet. Shichtman and Finke call him “the possessor of intellectual property a monopoly so absolute and valuable that it almost equalizes the relationship between client and patron” (35).28 And this, as Shichtman and Finke also point out, is one way to read Geoffrey the historian. Geoffrey, like Merlin, mediates influential pleasures to amazing cultural and political effect. In Merlin Geoffrey may well craft a veiled representation of the power of his own ingenium, the word Monmouth