Layamon’s Brut: English Poetry’s First Epic

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What was the first great epic poem in English literature? It’s sometimes claimed that Beowulf should have that title, so my subtitle for this week’s dispatch makes a somewhat contentious claim. It depends on how we view ‘English’, both as an identity and as a language.

But there is an argument to be made that Brut – a relatively obscure Middle English poem written eight hundred years ago – is the first truly ‘English’ epic. Its author is Layamon, sometimes rendered Laghamon though usually spelt Laȝamon or Laȝamonn in his time, and occasionally written as ‘Lawman’ in modern times.

If we view ‘English’ as a language, we have to contend with the fact that reading Layamon’s Brut in its original Middle English is no easy task, and probably not really any easier than attempting to read Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon. Here’s Beowulf:

Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

And here’s Brut:

Þa comen tidende to Arðure þan kinge.

þat seoc wes Howel his mæi þer-fore he wes sari.

i Clud ligginde & þer he hine bilæfde.

That said, ‘kinge’ is obviously recognisable, while ‘Arðure’ takes us to the mythical king whose presence in the Brut provides one of several reasons why Layamon’s poem is of literary importance.

But if we consider the ‘Englishness’ of Beowulf, we must grant that the poem is rooted in the mead-halls of northern Germany and Denmark, and retains a specifically Germanic flavour and character. Brut, however, takes Britain as its great subject and does for England what Spenser would attempt to do in his vast epic poem some four hundred years later.

Indeed, the late medieval scholar J. A. W. Bennett, in his superb chapter on Layamon in Middle English Literature (edited and completed after Bennett’s death by Douglas Gray), points out that Brut is the longest poem in English apart from The Faerie Queene, ‘which in one sense it foreshadows, not only in giving Arthur an English context and an English value, but also in its archaic, not to say archaistic, language and spelling’. Bennett suggests that Layamon’s intention in using deliberately old-fashioned language may have been much the same as Spenser’s: to transport us back into the past and a bygone age.

Layamon’s Brut, a poem written in alliterative verse which is thought to have been composed some time around 1200 (and perhaps even a little earlier, during the reign of Richard the Lionheart), tells of the history of Britain from its (mythical) founding by Brutus of Troy, a descendant of Aeneas (another Trojan who, after defeat in the Trojan War, travelled westward and founded a civilisation, according to legend: Rome in the case of Aeneas, of course).

The story is essentially in three parts. We get the foundation of Britain by Brutus and the begetting of King Arthur, then the story of Arthur’s heyday, and then a concluding (briefer) part detailing the post-Arthurian history of Britain. As G. T. Shepherd noted in his essay on early Middle English literature (in volume 1 of the Sphere History of Literature in the English Language), the Arthur we get in Layamon’s poem is very different from the kindly, chivalric king we find in the slightly later French romances.

Here, Arthur is a war-leader and captain, a toughened soldier and chieftain, who defeats the Roman emperor Lucius in battle and becomes a great national leader for England.

Layamon largely followed the Anglo-Norman poet Wace and his Roman de Brut, which in turn had been inspired by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. But Layamon added to what he borrowed from, and included new material including an account of the birth of Merlin and the origins of the Round Table. The fact that Layamon was reworking others’ material means he is often labelled a remanieur, a term used for one who reshapes existing material. But he enlarges and embellishes as he goes.

The poem also continues references (again, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth) to another mythical king, King Leir, who would become better-known in the early modern era as King Lear, thanks to Shakespeare’s dramatisation of the legend.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a poem written over eight centuries ago, the Brut is not an easy poem to read in its original Middle English, unless you happen to be a medieval scholar. Even in Bennett’s survey of Middle English literature published nearly forty years ago, he glossed the more obscure words when quoting from Layamon’s poetry. Even Chaucer, whose Middle English is a walk in the park compared with Layamon’s, proves too tricky for many readers, hence the plethora of modern translations.

And in fact, even a decent translation is hard to come by. The most recent affordable translation was an Everyman’s Library paperback published in 1993, with a translation by Rosamund Allen, and that’s long out of print.

And these days, Layamon (or Lawman, or Laghamon) is a little-known figure in the development of English literature outside of the world inhabited by medieval scholars. Nobody can even be sure how to pronounce his name: in Britain, ‘LIE-em-en’ is more usual, while in America ‘LAY-em-en’ is preferred. He was probably a priest from Worcestershire, according to clues he provides in the Brut itself.

But Brut is an important development in English poetry, not just in the evolution of the Arthurian cycle but in the idea of the English epic. It has more in common with the later Faerie Queene than with Beowulf, even though chronologically it’s closer to Beowulf in time than to Spenser.

Brut was written around the same time as the anonymous poem The Owl and the Nightingale, and both poems demonstrate that major Middle English poems were being written some two centuries before the great flowering of ‘Ricardian’ poetry in the late fourteenth century (Chaucer, Langland, Gower, the Gawain poet).

There was a time, in the mid-twentieth century, when these early Middle English classics were a core part of the English Literature curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge. But now, the popular narrative is that Middle English poetry begins with Chaucer and Gawain, and these earlier jewels in the crown of Middle English poetry are little-known and little-read. Why?

We might suggest that it’s because Layamon, in reworking the earlier materials of Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth, was a ‘mere’ remanieur, rather than an original poet. But then a fair amount of Chaucer was lifted from Boccaccio and French models, so this can’t tell the full story. Chaucer is undoubtedly the greater poet: a pioneer of iambic pentameter and inventor of the heroic couplet, that essential form of English poetry; Chaucer reflects his own society in all its diversity and richness more than Layamon’s epic narrative does.

So perhaps it’s that. But even so, it’s a pity that there’s no decent modern translation of Layamon’s poem and so few people have heard of it. In Middle English Literature, Bennett devotes a chapter of over twenty pages to it. Can we imagine Brut getting such generous and detailed treatment if such a book were produced today? Can we even imagine such a book being produced today at all?