Ultra Sabrinam in Guallias

In the first half of the twelfth century, the princes of Wales considered themselves on the path to political and cultural restoration. David Crouch’s account of the kingdom of Glamorgan, in particular, portrays a sustained revival of Welsh sovereignty beginning in 1136; his maps comparing the contours of Welsh rule in 1130 and 1137 demonstrate vividly the territorial gains made while Geoffrey worked on the Historia.¹ Indeed, the redactor of the chronicle Brut y Tywysogion is effusive about the supremacy of Owain and Cadwaladr in 1136, and identifies the deceased Gruffydd ap Cynan in 1137 as “prince of Gwynedd and head and king and defender and pacifier of all Wales.”² In 1141, Welsh princes fought alongside Robert of Gloucester at Lincoln and defeated Stephen; they remained visible in Robert’s affairs until his death in 1147 and thereafter bolstered the power of Roger of Hereford (also in favor of the Angevin cause of Matilda and her son Henry).³ Throughout Stephen’s reign, then, the Welsh expressed themselves as a resurgent power. One chronicler even claims that in 1164 the Welsh threw off the rule of the French completely.⁴

Between 1136 and 1155, the period during which Welsh recovery was “undoubted,”⁵ Welsh princes frequently claimed parity with their Norman neighbors. Very conceivably the Historia, dedicated to one of those neighbors, offered ancient prophecy of this renewal. Based in part on Welsh tradition,⁶ the Historia could exalt the Britons’ historical liberty as an argument for, and reflection of, the present emancipation. Indeed, between 1138 and 1155 a version of the Historia known as the First Variant was copied frequently, and almost certainly originated in Wales.⁷ Two of the manuscripts contain proper names glossed with their Welsh forms, a copy of the First Variant was added to another only after it arrived in Wales, and a Welsh monk claims responsibility for copying a fourth text.⁸ Although these thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts do not testify directly to twelfth-century copying in Wales, they do show that this Historia circulated there and that it appealed to Welsh readers.

With the publication of Wright’s critical edition of the First Variant, it is now possible to analyze in detail the text’s relation to the Historia. Previously, critics have had only a partial picture, since Jacob Hammer’s edition is based on a text containing both variant and vulgate material. According to Wright, the First Variant clearly “bears the stamp of a mind other than Geoffrey’s”;⁹ locating it in Wales allows us to imagine what kind of mind. This localization does not necessarily indicate a Welsh redactor (or redactors), since by the early twelfth century many areas of Wales (especially developed areas where history might be written) had become home to colonial settlers from the east.¹⁰ Moreover, Leckie has argued that the First Variant occasionally portrays a bias toward the English; Wright substantiates this conclusion by showing how the First Variant substitutes Geoffrey’s reworkings of Gildas with verbatim borrowings from Bede.¹¹ One redactor clearly implies an Anglophone reader with the comment that Kareliucoit is called Lincoln in “our language” (“nostra lingua”) (139);¹² another (or the same) adds praise for Alfred’s English translation of the Molmutine Laws (34). And why would an ethnocentric redactor eliminate the list of Welsh princes who attend Arthur’s crown wearing (150)? As with Geoffrey, a perceived ethnic bias, or even linguistic competency, does not constitute a singular identity. Welsh historiography in fact includes both the Welsh history Geoffrey allotted to Caradoc (Brut y Tywysogyon) and the Saxon history assigned to William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon (Brenhinedd y Saesson).

There are numerous practical explanations for the simultaneity of Welsh and English perspectives in the First Variant, from a Welshman imitating the English to an Anglophone scribe copying a text imported from a Welsh monastic outpost. Even an Englishman in Wales could conceivably adopt a Welsh perspective while continuing to identify linguistically as an Anglophone, perhaps in one of the many priories that lurked in the shadows of colonial castles or at a Cistercian abbey like Strata Florida, where many historical and literary works were produced.¹³ Moreover, Welsh and English views on the Insular colonial past are fundamentally compatible. After the Norman Conquest, both conquered peoples could envision the value of arguments based on liberty rather than territorial possession. And the Welsh could comfortably praise Christian English kings since their dominion over the island had also passed. Whatever the First Variant’s origins (and they are probably several), the simultaneous traces of Welsh and English minds witness a textual product of border culture.

One copy of the First Variant, composed by Brother Madog of Edeirnon, performs vividly the destabilizing effects of colonial contact. In a substantial verse preface, Madog asserts the ancient Britons’ unrivaled greatness. He then explains his intention to recount some of Britain’s difficult battles “briefly” (“breviter”), repeating several lines later that all the facts are “composed with brevity” (“sub brevitate redacta”).¹⁴ Madog’s insistance on brevity accords with another redactor’s conclusion: “Explicit Historia Brittonum correcta et abbreuiata” (Here ends the Briton History corrected and abbreviated).¹⁵ In both cases, the patterns of abridgment amplify Welsh cultural perspectives. In fact, Madog envisions the history itself as a narrative balm for the wounds of lost sovereignty (“nos refovens”), intended to delight rather harm the reader (“Delectura lectorem, non nocitura”). Madog’s text, however, is about half unabbreviated “vulgate” material: as a composite abbreviation, his Historia is as likely to salt as heal cultural wounds. Even the complete First Variant does not always reflect the moral outlook and historical interests of its redactor.¹⁶ Because the First Variant retains elements that conflict with the obvious changes, it reminds readers that this history is possessed by outsiders. Even in translation, Welsh possession of Briton history remains partial, borrowed as it is from foreign conquerors.

The First Variant’s repossession of Insular colonialism begins with the landscape. From the earliest scenes, the redactors dismiss many of the ambivalences that Geoffrey encodes in the descriptio. They suppress, for example, all of the landscape’s aesthetic elements, stating factually that there used to be twenty-eight glorious cities but saying nothing of their demise (1). This enumeration blinds Geoffrey’s imperial gaze: the narrator does not view the landscape like a conqueror, who takes possession through description, but like an indigenous owner. The redactors are perfectly capable of aesthetic description, for they describe Ireland as an opulent landscape, cultivated and adorned with buildings (40–41). (Geoffrey notes only that the new inhabitants multiplied.) Casting a furtive colonial glance west, the redactors thus emphasize the difference between colonial Irish settlement and indigenous Briton occupation. This representational strategy forgets founding violence and implicitly ratifies Welsh resurgence.

The remainder of the First Variant’s opening descriptio narrows the Historia’s historiographical focus, fulfilling Madog’s promise not to “harm” Welsh readers. Summarizing the island’s inhabitants, for example, redactors eliminate reference to the Normans and the Saxons (or just the Saxons, if drawing directly from Bede) (1). Redactors thus restrict the population to the conquering and unconquered Britons, overlooking their conquerors until absolutely necessary. The conclusion, moreover, suppresses Geoffrey’s recognition of the Britons’ eventual subjugation to the Picts and Saxons. Finally, the redactors (drawing from Bede) resurrect the genealogical multiplicity that Geoffrey carefully trimmed, asserting that the Britons originated in Armorica. This dual genealogy reorients all future relations between Britain and Armorica to the benefit of the Britons as indigenous inhabitants.

The First Variant’s account of the origin of Briton dominion thus proceeds nearly untroubled by signs of its end. Once Brutus arrives at the island, the redactors suppress his aesthetic descriptio. Moreover, they organize a linear chronology so that the Trojans destroy the giants (including Goemagog) before naming the land. The description of the wrestling match itself is devoid of Geoffrey’s emotional epithets (as was the first presentation of Corineus, where Geoffrey’s giant-lover turns into a “uir magne uirtutis et audacie” [a large man of strength and daring] [11]). The encounter proceeds, breviter, as an unambivalent description of matched strengths. The suppression of the name given to the site of Goemagog’s demise further attenuates the encounter’s commemorative value (16–17). The redactors’ divestment from the colonizer’s cultural ambivalence surfaces again at Mont Saint-Michel with the repression of the giant’s cannibalism (158). The Trojans thus establish their rule de facto, with little ambivalence about de jure interpretation or the effects of cultural memory. The redactors likewise overlook commemorative purposes when Brutus renames the land: New Troy appears in the present tense and without a prospective etymology: “Nouam Troiam uocat; que postmodum per corruptionem uocabuli Trinouantem dicta est” (He calls it New Troy; later, through corruption, the word is pronounced Trinovantem) (17). Here, postmodum (later) refers to a later Trojan time, not to the later London implied in Geoffrey’s Kaerlud (92). From the beginning, then, redactors limit the narrative perspective to the Britons’ dominion, exorcising the specters of their demise that haunt Geoffrey’s Historia.

Redactors sustain Briton dominion by systematically displacing the cultural signification of a unified landscape. The island’s division by Brutus’s sons, for example, loses its impact as a sign of historiographical structure because the rivers are not named in the descriptio. In Wales, moreover, the partition of land resonates as one of several indigenous inheritance practices: J. Beverley Smith argues that while ordinary property was usually partitioned, dynastic inheritances were not—although multiple heirs often forced divisions (67–70). Smith concludes that while acrimonious conflicts over eligibility have created the impression that Welsh heirs expected partition, the principle of partible inheritance was in fact promoted by the English (74–75). In a Welsh context, then, the partition implies that a practice promoted by the Britons’ conquerors is in fact indigenous. When the redactors subsequently maintain Geoffrey’s attribution of customary primogeniture to the Trojans, the practice again appears indigenous. By appropriating both customs for ancient Britons, the First Variant ratifies the multiple consequences of conquest as if they all originated before colonial contact.

Most important, the unit of inheritance becomes the realm rather than the island: redactors systematically replace Geoffrey’s totius insulae and totam insulam with nonterritorial measurements like regnum and Britannia.¹⁷ Where regnum is already in place, it is sometimes fortified by a third term, so that Cassibellanus obtains “tocius regni monarchia” (49) and Vortiporius “monarchiam totius regni” (174). Redactors prefer regnum so thoroughly that it even displaces the seemingly flexible patria (145). The dismissal of insula, as word and cultural concept, pervades the narrative, generating a new kind of crown for Uther (129), a new route of retreat for the Saxons (142), a new perspective on Guenivere’s beauty (145), and a new path of return for Ivor and Iny (192). At Arthur’s crown wearing, redactors further dilute Insular identification by not naming the regions of the sword bearers (151). Finally, as Cadwallo struggles against the Angles, redactors rework the entire description to avoid mentioning the fines of the realm. Instead, the passage portrays the extension of the foreign people, “totum Saxonum Anglorum genus” (all the Saxon and Anglic people) (184). Through these kinds of revision, the Britons’ regnum proceeds unbroken, although its geographic size fluctuates.

The regnum, a flexible concept of rulership that does not measure land, accords with the notions of power that Wendy Davies detects in the Welsh tradition prior to the twelfth century. Although the historical Welsh, like the historiographic Britons, were strongly identified with their region of origin, by the tenth century the notion of the regnum (gwlad in the vernacular) had a fluid spatial dimension: “Gwlad is not so much ‘country,’ ‘territory,’ ‘political unit,’ a piece of ground and its people; but rather the changeable, expandable, contractible sphere of any ruler’s power” (17). The First Variant redactors obviously found the regnum’s flexibility preferable to the insula’s objective measurement: they could conceive a continuous Briton dominion despite obvious territorial losses. Moreover, as Welsh power expanded in the second quarter of the twelfth century, the restoration of the regnum did not require full Insular dominion.

This same fluid notion of rulership characterizes twelfth- and thirteenth-century Welsh expressions of dominion and explains the violence of Anglo-Welsh relations as the “mutual misunderstanding” of submission, which the Welsh took as an elastic notion of rule (prestige enhancing, even), and the Normans and English as a territorial concession.¹⁸ Llywelyn expressed the Welsh perspective succinctly to Edward I in 1273, in terms that reverberate through the First Variant. Having received a letter instructing him not to build a particular castle, Llywelyn replies that his rights (“iura principatus nostri”) are entirely separate from the king’s (“omnino separata sunt a juribus regni vestri”), although he does hold his realm from the king (“quamvis nos sub regia vestra potestate teneamus nostrum principatum”).¹⁹ The First Variant’s precise descriptions of Arthur’s methods of subjugation seem to reflect similar conceptions of client service and submission (145–46). For the Welsh, then, hegemony did not necessarily mean territorial conquest or even direct territorial control.

The regnum reorders boundary concepts and strategies of spatial manipulation throughout the First Variant. Fundamentally, it weakens the importance of internal boundary markers, such as rivers, roads, and walls: they may divide the island, but they merely shift the contours of the realm. Belinus’s roads lay out the clearest example of weakened boundary concerns. Whereas Geoffrey’s Belinus creates clear limits in stones explicitly to counteract the ambiguity of the edges, the First Variant eliminates nearly all the references to insula in this passage devoted to Insular measurement and explains that the watery landscape itself intrudes on the roads’ stability: “Erat enim terra lutosa et aquosa, utpote insula intra mare sita” (For the land was muddy and watery, since the island is situated within the sea) (34). The ubiquitous, nonnavigable water signifies a diffusion of boundaries, whereas Geoffrey’s navigable waterways trace the paradox of permeable edges. Although this weakening of boundary concepts runs counter to some aspects of Welsh culture, where God can be called “Lord of all boundaries,”²⁰ flexible unities represent an equally strong current of Welsh cultural thought.

Architectural projects in general resonate very differently in the realm than on the island. Whereas Geoffrey’s buildings separate dominion from the land and thus signify increased political stability (often to the Britons’ detriment), architecture in the regnum evokes traditional Welsh defense strategies as well as Norman colonization techniques.²¹ First Variant castles thus signify both the realm’s defense and its domination: in Wales, the historical Britons appear powerful in the same architectural mode as contemporary Normans. Hengist, the arch-Saxon colonizer, exemplifies the complexity of architectural signification. He begins by explaining his need for a castle in Welsh defensive terms, conducting himself as a submissive sub-king rather than as an audacious colonizer. Addressing Vortigern as “My lord king” (“Domine mi rex”), he asks politely to speak rather than enumerating his services rendered (89). The redactors then omit his request for a title as well as Vortigern’s rejection on ethnic and religious grounds. Instead, after recognizing Vortigern’s previous gifts, Hengist explains that neither his life nor his possessions are safe because Vortigern’s enemies hate him; he needs a castle in case they attack (90). Hengist goes on to underscore his defensive needs rather than his fidelity to Vortigern. From this perspective, Hengist’s proposal sounds like the reasonable request of a devoted defender; his methods of land measurement seem innovative but not treacherous. At the same time, the Castle of the Thong clearly signifies the beginning of Saxon dominion. Hengist’s defensive justification for the castle thus resembles Welsh uses of castellation, while his settlement technique and his actual fortification look Norman. This double perspective emerges from the complicity of Welsh and English perspectives in the First Variant: Hengist looks both “like us” and “like them”—as indeed the conquered English may have looked to the Welsh in the twelfth century. This same mixed perspective characterizes the conquest of the Giant’s Ring, which first purveys Briton mastery of colonial history as in the Historia (122–26), and then its passage to Saxon possession in Stanheng, “Saxonica lingua” (175).

The dynamics of conquest are themselves reordered through the regnum. Maximianus, for example, conquers his neighbors without the excesses of emotion and desire that Geoffrey attributes to him (159). Instead of aestheticizing the Armorican landscape, he quantifies value objectively: he refers to the fertile “terra” instead of “patria,” and replaces “nemora perpulchra, et saltus ubique amoeni” (beautiful woodlands and forests with pleasant places) with “nemora et saltus uenatibus apta” (woodlands and forests suited for hunting) (76). In Welsh tradition, in fact, Maximianus does not appear as a guilty usurper but as a noble Roman ancestor who legitimates Briton imperial ambition.²² Conanus’s subsequent settlement of Armorica legitimately returns the Britons to their origin, identified in the opening descriptio. Armorica’s colonization thus reestablishes an anterior, already indigenous, dominion. Later, when Constantine of Armorica restores the “crown of the realm” (“dyadema regni”) (82), he continues his ancestors’ sovereignty rather than performing the first displacement of the insula.

From Gormund’s conquest to the narrative’s end, the redactors carve up Geoffrey’s text extensively, attenuating the signification of dividing boundaries. They create this effect by redrawing the narrative’s internal bounds. As the Britons flee to Wales and Armorica, for example, redactors excise the moralizing apostrophe that attributes their loss of dignity to internal division and discord. At the same time, redactors double the Briton perspective with an English view. This split takes the place of Geoffrey’s fragmented partialities. As the Saxons take control of the entire region (“totam regionem”) (significantly, not Geoffrey’s “totam insulam” [282]), redactors limit their dominion by specifying (where Geoffrey did not) that the Saxons, who hold Loegria, are now called Angles and their land Anglia (177). Despite the loss of this particular region, then, the Britons remain sovereign in their regnum.

The political structure of the English realm, however, remains vague. Redactors pass over historical division to focus on Ethelbert’s role in English conversion (a process Geoffrey barely develops) (178). The expanded, and positive, depiction of Ethelbert (probably drawn from Bede [72–78]) strengthens the narrative’s dualism. The latter part of the First Variant thus oscillates between the Britons and the Angles. Indeed, redactors seem to establish English dominion with Ethelbert in the sixth century. Likewise, they seem to make Aethelstan a contemporary of Cadwallader, painting a laudable image of English honor and civil order as the Britons sail into exile (190). As Leckie and Wright have both observed, this account reconciles Geoffrey’s Historia with Bede’s at the same time that it seems to mistake Aethelstan as a seventh-century ruler.²³ Because the redactors go on to speak of Cadwallader and the Britons’ future, the revision also maintains the integrity of the Briton realm after the coming of the Angles. Of course, the redactors may understand perfectly well that Aethelstan belongs to the tenth century: the effect of chronological conflation may arise from their separation of the folded strands of Geoffrey’s chronology (similar revisions reorder the preparations for Arthur’s Roman war [154–55]). In any case, the Briton realm clearly endures despite territorial losses.

By unraveling the Historia’s conclusion, the First Variant redactors repossess a portion of the English history appropriated by Geoffrey for the Britons. At the same time, they maintain the possibility of Briton continuity. They use the new structure to limit the Britons’ loss of sovereignty, specifying that the Britons lost only Loegria (192) instead of Geoffrey’s comprehensive “monarchy of the island” (“monarchiam insulae”) (303). Despite subjugation, then, Kambria remains a recognizable regnum until the end. By foregrounding the realm instead of the island, the First Variant redactors grant the Britons continuous dominion.

The First Variant’s regnum attenuates the Historia’s link between territory and genealogy significantly. Encounters that provoke genealogical arguments in Geoffrey’s Historia often mobilize claims of inherent freedom in the First Variant. The redactors’ genealogical maneuvers thus protect the Britons from the memory of colonial intermingling. The logic of freedom does not mean that genealogies hold no interest for the Welsh. In fact, they are famous for composing genealogical lists (examples of which preface three First Variant manuscripts).²⁴ Moreover, kinship ties form strong bonds of identity and obligation in Welsh culture, most prominently in relation to land title and kingship.²⁵ Redactors express ardent concern for ethnic integrity by accentuating the distinction that R. R. Davies identifies in Welsh law between us and them, Cymro and alltud (alien).²⁶ The details of the Britons’ historic kinship relations thus matter less than their overall autonomy, itself bolstered by a heightened Christian tone that casts them as a chosen people.²⁷

Brutus inaugurates the ethic of liberty by asking Pandrasus for permission to leave “cum pace liberi” (with peaceful liberty) instead of “cum diligentia tua” (with your approval).²⁸ And when the Romans first demand Briton submission, libertate replaces the pater: Caesar never mentions Priam, and Cassibellanus never refers to Aeneas. Moreover, Cassibellanus’s letter and the Britons’ discussion include references to liberty not found in Geoffrey’s text (48–49). The account of Constantine’s rise to imperial power pursues the ethic of liberty further by focusing on his liberation of the oppressed Romans rather than his global monarchy, and by not mentioning his family ties to Rome (71). Finally, when Cadwallo seeks assistance from the Armorican Britons, redactors suppress his lengthy oral history of the two groups’ common ancestry (182). These notions of liberty, like the regnum, weaken the territorialization of identity.

Although the redactors do not change the Historia’s marriage patterns themselves, they do intervene sharply in marital discourses. They report Caradocus’s recommendation that Octavius marry his daughter to Maximianus of Rome, for example, in indirect discourse and have him explain Maximianus’s Briton heritage without cataloging the other marriage options; after a single sentence reporting the voyage to Rome and Maximianus’s arrival in Britain, the redactors eliminate Caradocus’s second speech promoting the endogamous strategy (73–74). Later, when Conanus requests Briton women for Armorica, redactors eliminate his warning against becoming commixti with the Armoricans (77). These revisions and excisions insulate identity and overlook differences whenever possible.

Whereas Geoffrey’s speeches about identity patrol the boundaries of ethnic difference, the First Variant isolates the Britons from the differences that emerge in colonial contact. By weakening comparisons, redactors augment the Britons’ autonomous glory. Most directly, the apostrophe “O admirabile genus Britonum” (O admirable Briton people) does not include Geoffrey’s “tunc” (formerly) (56). Redactors thus excise retrospection and imply the Britons’ enduring admirability. At the end of the apostrophe, redactors reject alien judgments (even when they are positive) by suppressing Geoffrey’s citation of Lucan. And after the Roman withdrawal, they eliminate all references to the Britons’ degeneracy, including the archbishop’s speech to the plebes who must learn to be warriors, the narrator’s lament of the Britons’ former glory, and the archbishop’s reminder to Aldroenus that Britain’s warriors deserted the island to establish his realm in Armorica (79–81). Finally, the epilogue does not mention future Saxon history (192). In the First Variant, then, the Britons are simply overwhelmed by the multitudes of the enemy; they never lose their status as a prestigious ethnic group.

In fact, not even immense armies could overpower the admirable Britons without divine intervention. Although the redactors attenuate the Pagan/Christian dichotomy in the early encounters with Hengist in order to enhance Briton glory,²⁹ they construct an extensive Christian reasoning for Uther’s defeat of Octa and Essa. Whereas Geoffrey simply explains a strategy for taking the Saxons by surprise, in the First Variant Gorlois adds that the strategy will succeed because the Saxons are idolaters (“ydolorum cultores”); since the Britons’ sins have also offended God, they should confess before the battle (130–31). After recalling that the Britons fight for life and liberty (“pro uita et libertate”), Gorlois concludes: “nam si Deus pro nobis, quis contra nos?” (If God is for us, who can be against us?) (131). Subsequently, Octa and Essa are captured “per uirtutem Iesu Christi” (by virtue of Jesus Christ) (131). In preparation for the Britons’ defeat, the redactors begin to thematize the Britons’ sins and the efficacy of divine intervention. Gorlois’s moving conclusion thus presages the consequences of having God as an enemy and explains already the Britons’ eventual defeat as God’s punishment.

The First Variant’s representation of Christian identity ultimately profits the Britons’ future sovereignty by divorcing their defeat from territorial losses or cultural inferiority. Their final departure from Britain firmly establishes their identity as a chosen, and punished, people. The narrator commiserates with their suffering by interjecting: “miserabile ac pauendum spectaculum!” (miserable and terrifying spectacle!) (188). Whereas Geoffrey focused on the Britons’ prior greatness by listing all the people who had never conquered them, in the First Variant Cadwallader evokes only the Britons’ shame before God. And while Geoffrey has Cadwallader recognize God’s responsibility indirectly, in the First Variant he addresses his mourning (“lugubres uoces”) directly to God (“ad Deum”) (188). Geoffrey’s ironic direct address to the enemies becomes indirect, as Cadwallader recognizes before God that He has given the island to the invaders (189).³⁰ Finally, the redactors make Cadwallader’s own body the vehicle of memory by amending “reliquis eius” (their relics) to “reliquiis corporis sui” (the relics of his body). All of these revisions localize Briton glory in ethnic and corporeal integrity. The same maneuvers divorce legitimacy from territorial control. In the end, Cadwallader’s durable body preserves the memory of Briton dominion as a nomadic and holy concept.

Briton identity in the First Variant thus turns on an almost immutable split between us and them, free and unfree, saint and sinner. These boundaries obscure direct ties to land or kin, and to historical precedent; they represent the most urgent and useful lines of difference for a conquered people. Irrespective of their territorial control, the Britons can remain inherently free. The boundary between the free and the unfree is a quintessentially colonial effect, turned here against colonial history—and in a period when the Welsh were in fact reversing colonial dominion.

Elsewhere, the First Variant overturns colonial subjugation through representations of language and etymology. Most of these imply a Britonspeaking reader who does not need to be told that Habren or Kaerperis are Briton names (20, 72). Thus if Geoffrey’s claim to translate a Briton source suggests a colonial project, the First Variant suggests the beginnings of post-colonial translation—but only the beginnings. Since the text is still in Latin and since it preserves many of the Historia’s forms verbatim, it perpetuates their colonial effects in the midst of denials. These conflicts mark the First Variant as a border text.

The most telling example of colonial dissonance in linguistic identity is the closing etymology of the Welsh. Redactors reduce Geoffrey’s three long sentences to two short ones by eliminating all references to the Saxons’ achievements (the narration of their future has been moved back to Cadwallader’s departure from the island). This structural revision removes one blatant reminder of colonial subjugation. Second, redactors suppress Geoffrey’s opening reference to the strengthening “barbarians,” temporarily forgetting the foreign origins of the English. Nonetheless, the passage preserves the possibility that the name Welsh derives from the people’s barbarism (192): the English language and the Anglo-Saxon conquest still occupy the Welsh. In fact, all three of the etymological possibilities derive from foreign occupation, for the “Welsh” themselves preferred the term Brytaniaid through most of the twelfth century.³¹ The etymology thus preserves the foreign origins of Briton history and identity, manifesting colonial subjugation alongside post-colonial resistance.

The same doubleness surfaces in the epilogue, where redactors ventriloquize in Geoffrey’s historiographical voice:

Regum autem eorum acta qui ab illo tempore in Guualliis successerunt et fortunas successoribus meis scribendas dimitto ego, Galfridus Arthurus Monemutensis, qui hanc hystoriam Britonum de eorum lingua in nostram transferre curaui. (192)

[But the acts of their kings who from that time in Wales succeeded and the fortunes of their successors I renounce in my writings—I, Geoffrey Arthur of Monmouth, who took pains to transfer this history of the Britons from their language into ours.]

The impersonation of authorship grants the text the authority of the original, while also identifying its alien origin. Imitation, in fact, identifies the narrator as a colonial subject, much like Vortigern speaking Saxon. “From their language” (“de eorum lingua”) purveys the perspective of a stranger to Wales, a stranger who took on Welsh history but who renounces their future. The narrator’s mimicry of Geoffrey’s historiographical conquest thus claims indigenous ownership of a memory formed elsewhere. In this sense, mimicry disrupts colonial power on behalf of the colonized while also recognizing colonial subjugation. In these closing statements of origin, then, the ghosts of colonial ambivalence rise again.

Meanwhile, however, the narration of an orderly, post-colonial chronology has proceeded apace. From the very beginning, the First Variant’s redactors cast their Historia as an account of the Britons’ continuous dominion. To Geoffrey’s promise of a continuous account of all the Britons’ acts, they add the claim that these acts have been “textualized” (“texuerunt”) in order (“ex ordine”). The First Variant indeed presents an orderly text, one that performs the integrity of Briton sovereignty by repeatedly straightening out Geoffrey’s folded chronologies (even at the sentence level). The resultant “smoother or more coherent narrative”³² textualizes a mastery of historical memory that correlates with a vision of sustained cultural dominion. As the narrative moves from one point in the past to another with minimal references beyond the immediate horizon, redactors exorcise the ghosts of the Britons’ defeated future. The (mostly) linear pattern implies a finite, knowable past; it ratifies Geoffrey’s conquest of Saxon history while promising a return to power for the Britons. Although the specters of the text’s foreign origins do occasionally haunt this view, the First Variant generally portrays paradoxes without recognizing them, that is, without observing the boundary itself.

The redactors excise the future in many small ways, too numerous to catalog. The description of Arthur’s crown wearing at Caerleon, however, exemplifies the narrowing of temporal parameters. When Geoffrey names the kings participating in the procession, he identifies the twelfth-century names of their realms, so that we understand that Albania is now called Scotia (243). The First Variant’s redactors, by contrast, suppress all of these prospections (except Demetia, “this is South Wales”) and roll back the clock on Bedver’s realm (making him duke of Nuestria instead of Normandy) (150). The narrator establishes a topography consistent with the historical moment by “forgetting” the colonial occupations that later imposed new names. The passage thus maintains an (almost) consistent focus on the historical moment of the procession.

In this historiographic environment, the Historia’s synchronisms and annalistic dates no longer disrupt a genealogical measurement of time (itself weakened by the ethic of liberty). Instead, these temporal references anchor the narrative in objective linear time. The First Variant even extends annalistic measurement by specifying the date of Caesar’s arrival in Britain: Roman year 693, sixty years before the birth of Christ (47). God’s calendar guarantees a linear progress toward redemption, for the Britons and for humanity in general. Ultimately, the First Variant’s deployment of temporal structures resists the time of colonization and imagines history from before conquest. The First Variant’s reconquest of the Briton past thus subtly sustains the political conquest of Welsh sovereignty in the present. These post-colonial efforts hold out the promise of colonial reversal, in both narrative and politics.

The First Variant’s historiographical resistances converge on Arthur, the icon of popular Welsh resistance in the twelfth century. Redactors focus on Arthur as a physically powerful native hero who defends liberty, conquers oppressors, and lives beyond time. In the process, they substantially attenuate Geoffrey’s ambivalences about the legitimacy of forceful conquest. Instead, Arthur performs the Britons’ sovereign right unequivocally and with relatively little symbolic support.

From the moment of Arthur’s conception, the narrator portrays him as sovereign of the world, “qui postquam adultus est probitate sua toto orbe enituit” (who after he is an adult brightens the whole world with his probity) (134). At his birth, redactors transform Geoffrey’s factual statement of his name (“nomen filii Arturus”) (225) into a laudatory “Arthurum famosum” (135). Arthur’s fame rests on his superlative strength and his legendary immortality, both of which diminish his dependence on legal principles. Arthur of course does not accede to a territorially defined monarchy (“totius insulae monarchiam”) (Geoffrey 229) but to the realm (“tocius regni”), like his predecessors and successors (138). And while Geoffrey goes on to emphasize that Arthur exercises authority by right of inheritance (“hereditario jure”), the First Variant immediately describes his preparations for a de facto demonstration in battle (137–38). The battle itself exacts revenge for damaged kin: Arthur attacks the Saxons “per quos et pater et patruus eius dolo perierant, per quos etiam tota terra turbata erat” (because they deceitfully betrayed his father and uncle, and because all the land was disturbed) (138). With the elimination of further speeches (which explain the battle’s royal and Christian justifications in Geoffrey’s Historia), family vengeance alone justifies the war. These revisions support the logic of counterconquest, wherein a subjugated people like the Welsh justifiably make war against those who steal their ancestral lands.

Revisions to the battle narrative itself emphasize Arthur’s superlative strength while weakening the role of external legitimation. The arming portrait, for example, prepares him to succeed primarily on his own strength by reducing references to divine and magical presences: the shield represents Mary but not “Mary mother of God”; Caliburn is not Optimo; fabrication in Avalon may be hearsay (“ut aiunt”); Arthur handles his lance (“muniuit”) rather than being decorated by it (141). Each of these revisions locates the responsibility for superior performance in battle more in Arthur’s hand than in his weapons or God’s will. Finally, the lance’s description may subtly contribute to a legitimation of forceful conquest: Wright argues that its phrasing echoes Virgil’s Aeneid.³³ The echo not only retrenches the Historia’s relation to Trojan history, it ties Arthur’s spear to both Aeneas (book 1) and Turnus, whose defeat founds Aeneas’s dominion (book 12). Aeneas—like Brutus, Arthur, and the twelfth-century Welsh—forcefully overturns the jurisdictional claims of the land’s current occupants. By restoring Virgil to the pattern of history (beginning, in fact, with Brutus’s genealogy),³⁴ redactors once again alleviate the tendentious ambivalence of Geoffrey’s historiography. Unabashedly, they reclaim the Britons’ prestigious Trojan-Roman origins.

Arthur’s arming represents a vision of sovereignty in which superior force legitimates rule. The idea that victory justifies authority, which only a demonstration of greater force can counter, accords with R. R. Davies’s conclusion that Welsh royal power depends first and foremost on military might.³⁵ And indeed, the First Variant’s Saxons never pose a significant threat to Arthur. Redactors not only abridge the battle narrative, they recast Arthur’s motivation for and means of success. While Geoffrey’s Arthur begins his attack in anger after watching his men fail, in the First Variant Arthur courageously climbs the hill immediately after the description of the Saxons’ defensive position (141). He exhibits no emotion, and the narrator does not mention any prior skirmishes. Arthur then shouts general encouragement to his men without mentioning God or Mary, and achieves victory quickly through the strength of his right hand (“dextra”) instead of with Caliburn. By substituting Arthur’s body for the sword, redactors create a powerful giant-hero, equal in himself to an entire army.

The combat between Arthur and Frollo also underscores Arthur’s efficacy over Caliburn’s. Unlike Geoffrey, the narrator specifies that Caliburn is a sword (“ense Caliburno”): the name by itself does not represent the force of authority. Moreover, redactors imply a distance between the hero and the sword in the narrative’s very syntax: describing the fatal stroke, they place Caliburn as far as possible from the verb impressit: “ense Caliburno totis uiribus per galeam in capud Frollonis impressit” (148). By contrast, forms of the sword completely surround the fatal verb in Geoffrey’s text: “erecto totis uiribus Caliburno impressit eum per galeam infra caput Frollonis” (241). Where Geoffrey’s syntax indicates the sword’s closeness to the action, in the First Variant Arthur’s strength comes between the sword and the strike. Typologically, Arthur’s victory presents readers in Wales with an attractive image of counterconquest against the Normans. Arthur not only subjugates the French (from whom the Normans hold their continental lands), he installs Bedver and Kai as dukes of Normandy and Anjou (148–49). When these two Celtic heroes accede to power in the realms of Welsh oppressors, Arthur appears more strongly than ever as a figure for resurgent Briton sovereignty. His success here with Caliburn feeds a Welsh fantasy of reverse conquest, a fantasy that may have seemed quite realistic in the second quarter of the twelfth century.

Arthur’s confrontation with the Romans culminates the extension of Briton cultural sovereignty. When the Romans arrive, they convoke Arthur in less legalistic terms than in Geoffrey’s text: while Geoffrey has Lucius speak of rectitudinem, sententiae, and justitia (248), the First Variant redactors refer to “Roman dignity” and “satisfaction” (“Romanam dignitatem,” “satisfacias”) (152). At the same time, redactors augment the threat of forceful settlement with precise descriptions of the path of invasion and the threat of Arthur’s forced removal to Rome as a hostage (152). Cador, moreover, does not laugh as the advisers retire; rather, he begins his speech amid an apparently heavy silence (153). Arthur’s speech then displaces Geoffrey’s condemnation of the Romans’ “irrational case” with the ethic of liberty, riling the Britons by recalling the Romans’ aggression: “Audistis Romanorum superbam legacionem, audistis quoque in eorum peticionibus nostram depressionem” (You heard the arrogant Roman legation, you heard also in their petition our disparagement) (153). Following several further revisions, Arthur concludes with a new, emphatic statement of the Romans’ unjust desire to conquer (“subactus”) free Britons (“liberis Britonibus”) and drive them back into servitude (“in seruitutem redegerunt”) (154). Redactors proceed to eliminate Hoel’s reply and return the messengers directly to Rome. On the Briton scene, Auguselus makes a speech as he promises his service, in which redactors eliminate his rapturous praise of war while augmenting his praise of Arthur, the values of freedom, and the injustice of the Roman claim (156). The preparations for war thus express scant ambivalence or paradox: especially in the absence of Hoel’s speech, the lesson seems simply that freedom must be defended when threatened.

Once the two sides meet in full-scale battle, redactors again make Arthur personally responsible for forceful victory. Not only do Arthur’s men not achieve immediate success, they have in fact begun to retreat when he draws Caliburn to exhort them: redactors continue to avoid the superlative judgment optimo and pursue their Virgilian texture by using ense instead of the more common gladio to designate the sword (170). Redactors subsequently eliminate all of the rhythmic repetition from Arthur’s speech. The retreat of the Arthurian army compels a drastic reworking of the opening sequence, which now reads: “Utquid fugitis? Quid pertimescitis? Ne abscedat ullus uestrum!” (Why are you fleeing? Why are you frightened? Don’t let any get away from you!). Arthur proceeds to locate himself at the rhetorical center of the motivational powers of speech, referring to himself (“Ecce dux uester”) instead of his ancestors (170). Without recourse to the anaphor of memory (mementote), Arthur proposes personal force rather than history as the basis of successful, justified action.

After brief mentions of strong right hands and liberty, Arthur himself springs into lethal action. Whereas Geoffrey uses this moment to narrate the sword at its most powerful, in the autonomous nominative case, First Variant redactors make no mention of the sword at all; instead, Arthur is compared to a famished lion (170). Arthur’s heroism thus becomes naturalistically physical. From this point on, redactors eliminate all descriptions of the Romans’ efforts. Geoffrey had suggested that the outcome remained in doubt for some time: “quandoque Britones quandoque Romani versa vice praevalebant” (at one moment the Britons prevailed, at another the Romans) (273). In the First Variant, however, Arthur intervenes decisively: “resistunt Romani quantum possunt” (the Romans resisted as long as they could) (170). Redactors thus considerably reduce the effect of equivocation, and move the Britons inexorably to victory once Arthur enters the fray.

Arthur’s triumph of course does not last long. Redactors underscore the sexual treachery that occupies Britain’s center by specifying that Mordred and Guenivere’s transgression has taken place in the royal bedchamber (“thalamo”) (172). They eliminate Geoffrey’s reference to his patron as well as the passage alluding to truthful sources. Instead, they move directly to Arthur’s reaction to the “fama, ymmo infamia” (the news, or rather, the infamy) (172). The absence of further comment during these final scenes diminishes the loss: Arthur’s demise ends his reign, but not the Britons’ honor. Likewise, the sword’s absence from the final battle resonates less strongly as an anti-imperial judgment since the emphasis all along has been on Arthur’s personal strength. Founded, defended, and extended by force, Arthur’s dominion thus rests on the legitimate success of force, independent from legal and symbolic argument. Here, force legitimates de facto control and defends threats to liberty. Force in fact represents the most effective jurisdictional argument for a colonized people that does not control the law. Indeed, R. R. Davies argues that in thirteenth-century Wales territorial control gradually superseded legal principles.³⁶ In the First Variant, Arthur prosecutes this principle to its brilliant Briton conclusion, performing the recovery the Welsh themselves pursued. At Arthur’s death, Constantine carries the realm forward seamlessly.

The First Variant and the Historia both leave Arthur’s body in suspense in Avalon, where he goes to have his wound healed (“ad sananda [v]ulnera sua”).³⁷ Arthur’s implied personal recovery fueled fantasies that he would return to heal wounded Welsh sovereignty (“nos refovens”). Yet the most direct witness of the link between Arthur and Welsh recovery is not the Historia’s ambiguous account of his fate, but the nearly contemporary Anglo-French “Description of England”:

Apertement le vont disant

Forment nus vont maneçant,

Qu’a la parfin tute l’avrunt

Par Artur la recoverunt,

E cest païs tut ensement

Toldrunt a la romaine gent,

A la terre sun nun rendrunt,

Bretaine la repelerunt.

(Ll. 221–28)

[Openly they go around saying it, strongly they go around threatening us that in the end they’ll have it all, by Arthur they’ll recover it, and thus this country they’ll take away from the Romanic people. To the land they’ll give back its name: Britain they’ll call it again.]

The First Variant actively vivifies these memories of origin and hopes of restoration. As the Welsh actually regained sovereignty in the second quarter of the twelfth century, the First Variant redactors extended sovereignty into the past by taking possession of the Historia. Their attenuation of paradoxes and ambivalences ultimately contests colonized subjectivity, providing an appropriately empowering historiography for a newly empowered Welsh polity.

By the mid-thirteenth century, even Britons ignorant of Latin could read about their noble ancestors and nourish the ghosts of Trojan memory. During this new period of expanding Welsh sovereignty, translators took up the First Variant’s suggestion of historiographic resistance and extended it into the vernacular. These Welsh Brutieu repossess Briton history by returning it to the language of Geoffrey’s ostensible source. Since translation appropriates sources (in a colonial mode) while simultaneously preserving their authority (in a postcolonial mode), the vernacular translation of Briton history in Wales poses especially acute problems of cultural identification.

Although the Welsh were frequently dominated in the thirteenth century,³⁸ Welsh chronicles minimize these effects. Instead, they depict princes with sovereign powers surpassing the twelfth-century achievements of Owain and Cadwaladr. Llywelyn ap Iorworth, for example, married King John’s daughter Joan, led the Welsh princes throughout the barons’ revolt against John, and thwarted Henry Ill’s realization of hegemonic rule in Wales; after Llywelyn’s death, his son Dafydd successfully led the Welsh against Henry in 1245.³⁹ The achievements of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, however, are unrivaled.⁴⁰ In terms resonant with conflicts narrated in the First Variant and the Brutieu, Welsh chronicles report that the princes appealed to Llywelyn in 1256 to lead them against the English, for they preferred death to the loss of liberty.⁴¹ Llywelyn went on to reconquer many lands held by Anglo-Norman lords, and in alliance with the earl of Clare occupied London in 1267.⁴² As a result of this bold success, Henry granted a formal treaty, brokered and sealed by the papal legate and later ratified by the pope: in return for an annual payment of thirty thousand marks, Henry recognized the title Prince of Wales, as well as Llywelyn’s exclusive right to receive the homage of the Welsh princes.⁴³ After 1267, Llywelyn conducted himself as a fully independent sovereign, and withheld his homage from Edward in 1275.⁴⁴ Although they regained peaceful relations in 1277 and Llywelyn married Edward’s cousin Eleanor in 1278, his insistence on sovereign control led to Welsh defeat in 1282. Tellingly, the Welsh chroniclers do not mention the much-cited relics that the Waverly chronicler says were transferred out of Wales to Westminster after Llywelyn’s death.⁴⁵

Welsh historians located Llywelyn himself firmly within the Trojan-Briton lineage. Versions of his lineage are associated with both Trojan and Briton genealogies, and in one case with a copy of a Welsh Brut; his connection to Wales is sometimes enhanced by tracing his lineage to Kamber instead of Locrinus.⁴⁶ Trojan memory in fact played a vital role in the thirteenth-century English conquest of Wales. On the one hand, the Welsh poet Bleddyn Fardd maintained Llywelyn’s Trojan roots in an elegy that compares his wisdom to Priam’s (165). On the other hand, the archbishop Peckham (active in mediating Llywelyn’s relations with Edward)⁴⁷ attacked Trojan memory. When Peckham learned in 1284 that the members of the bishop of Saint Asaph’s congregation (a bastion of Welsh resistance since Geoffrey’s day) believed that they descended from Brutus, he ordered the bishop to exhort the Welsh to unite with the English as all men are united through Christ (“cor unum et anima una”). To achieve this unification, the bishop’s people were to put their faith in evangelical visions “et non de Trojanis devictis et fugatis” (and not those of conquered and fugitive Trojans). Peckam went on to submerge Brutus’s memory in colonial amnesia, asserting that the island was called Albion in the time of the first Germans (Registrum 2:741–42). This letter, along with the elegy, identify the Trojans as actively contested territory within English colonial ambition.

The Brutieu contributed directly to the circulation of Trojan memory in Wales. During the sovereign successes that preceded the 1282 defeat, several translations were made, often directly from the First Variant.⁴⁸ Indeed, Charlotte Ward’s conclusions about the Brut Dingestow, one of the oldest witnesses to Welsh translation,⁴⁹ accord significantly with my interpretations of the First Variant: Ward finds that the translator presents Arthur as an invincible “culture hero” by suppressing details about the strengths of his opponents, eliminating depictions of emotional reactions, diminishing references to barbarians, and weakening the role of magic; the translator eliminates place-names outside of Wales and moralizes more than Geoffrey (384–88). Ward concludes: “[Arthur’s] own fierce prowess admits little collaboration, either from contemporaries or from supernatural sources” (389) — or indeed, from his sword. Moreover, another translator enhances Arthur’s value by interpolating a Latin poem to commemorate his death and adding details to Augustine’s mission that may be indigenous to Wales.⁵⁰ This same translator domesticates native genealogy by making Guenivere the daughter of a giant named Ogvran.⁵¹ These revisions, along with the translation project itself, assert Welsh ownership of Insular time and space. The Brutieu continued to play an important role in Welsh ethnocentrism into the fifteenth century, when the Welsh welcomed Henry Tudor to the throne as a fellow descendent of Brutus.⁵²

At the same time, however, translation witnesses the history of Welsh subjugation. The rather confused dedicatory sentences that open the Brut y Brenhinedd demonstrate succinctly the dissonance of the Welsh conquest of Briton history. Whereas Geoffrey proudly proclaims that he has not used other men’s words (71), the Welsh narrator has translated this book “although I was forced to gather strange words from other men’s gardens” (3), thereby speaking the cultural dependence of Welsh historiography. Moreover, the translator writes in Welsh as if writing in Latin: “I took the trouble to turn and render this Welsh book into Latin” (3–4); the conclusion reiterates that the book has been turned from Welsh into Latin (218). While the vernacular expression of these statements manifests history’s return to its original linguistic form, their semantics attest to the colonial dismissal of Briton origins. Likewise, another translator’s impersonation of Walter of Oxford (Geoffrey’s reputed source for the Briton text) maintains the mediation of foreign domination: “I, Gwallter, Archdeacon of Rydychen, turned this book from kymraec [Welsh] into lladin [Latin]. And in my old age I have turned it the second time from ladin into kymraec.”⁵³ While reclaiming Briton history’s authentic origin, this conclusion recognizes the Latin intermediary and the permanent shadow of foreign origins.

Elsewhere, translators exorcise the ghosts of domination more successfully. In the Brut y Brenhinedd, for example, the translator measures nearly every reign from the Flood, including those that bear no time reference at all in the Historia.⁵⁴ After the birth of Christ, the translator systematically calibrates reigns with the Christian calendar. These regular temporal calculations present a structure of total memory, preserved from the origin of time itself. The translator thus eradicates historiographical uncertainty and asserts a complete, post-colonial possession of the past. As in the First Variant, the annalistic structure promises a linear progress toward redemption.

Similarly, the concluding etymology restores Welsh possession of history. The translator dismisses the Historia’s derogatory suggestion of barbarism and reasserts the Britons’ prestigious Trojan ancestry: “those [who had survived] had been driven to Camber’s part of the island. And they were not called Britons there but Cambrian” (217). Rather than identifying foreign judgment, the change from Brytaniaid to Cymry reflects a relatively recent change of indigenous practice: the Welsh gradually (and reluctantly) gave up their ancient attachment to Brutus in favor of Kamber in the course of the twelfth century.⁵⁵ The new form does refer to a more restricted territory, but it still derives from ancient Briton history. The translator thus effaces the memory of the foreign, English word that turns Welsh into barbarian, ratifying instead an indigenous nomenclature.

Since many aspects of the Welsh translations mirror the First Variant, and since this is the one area where I myself must rely on translations, I will focus here only on the translators’ most notable innovation, the interpolation of Lud (Llud) and Llefelys. Lud appears in the Historia, but his brother Llefelys, king of France, is an entirely new figure. Most translations include their story;⁵⁶ it also appears as an independent tale in the Mabinogi. The story begins with Lud complaining to Llefelys that he is beset by three “oppressions.” In the triad that probably inspired this story, the oppressions are called gormes, which refer in some cases to oppression by an alien race or conqueror.⁵⁷ Lud thus suffers from colonial troubles: each oppression allegorizes threats from would-be colonizers and successful defenses against subjugation. Together, the three oppressions express a cogent allegory of ethnic anxiety and postcolonial fantasies of pure freedom.

The first oppression expresses the fear of living among omnipotent strangers:

One of [the oppressions] was a tribe called the Coranians, and so great was their knowledge that there was not a speech that the wind met with that they did not know when this wind got to them. And for this reason no one could harm them. (65)⁵⁸

The Coranians are unique to Lud and Llefelys’s story and its associated triad. Editors associate the word with fairies, dwarves, or Romans (Cesaryeit).⁵⁹ The tribe’s name also suggests the word for the best-informed persons of Welsh society, the storytellers, kyuarwyddyaid.⁶⁰ In all of these incarnations, the Coranians master social knowledge. Here, it protects them from the Britons’ efforts to defeat their colonizing desires, since they anticipate every strategy of resistance. Llefelys’s solution (spoken through a special horn he builds to enable private conversation) promises to exterminate the foreigners without harming Lud’s own people:

And then Levelis said he would give him a kind of insect and asked him to crush them in water after he got home, and to bring together everybody in the kingdom and to throw this water over the people indiscriminately; and he assured him that the Coranians would die and the Britons would not be harmed. (67)

This genetically discriminating formula for genocide expresses the fantasy of an ethnically pure Insular hegemony. The destruction of an entire group enacts a postcolonial purification that returns the island to its original, “uncontaminated” state.

The second oppression also concerns conquering foreigners, allegorized as a destructive scream:

The second was a scream that was uttered every May Eve over every hearth in the Isle of Britain; and this scream went through the hearts of all, so much that the men lost their color and their strength, and the women their unborn children, and the boys and girls their senses, and the animals and the trees it left barren. (65–66)

The scream, like foreign invasions, disrupts reproduction at all levels, from the biological to the agricultural. Llefelys’s solution promises an infallible defense, so intricate it bears citation in full:

The second oppression . . . is the dragon of your nation and another dragon of the foreign nation who fight every May Eve, and each of them is trying to overcome the other. And when your dragon sees the other winning over her, then in anger she utters the horrible scream that you hear. And this is the way you can know that this is true. When you get home, have the island measured in length and breadth; and where you find the middle point, have a pool dug there, and put in this pool a cauldron full of the best mead that is to be found, and put a covering of brocaded silk over the mouth of the cauldron and watch over it yourself. And you will see them fighting fiercely in the air and casting flaming fire at each other. And after they come to the middle point of the island, neither one will flee from the other and there will be a frightful fight between them. And after they are exhausted they will fall in the form of two pigs on the top of the covering and will pull the covering down with them to the bottom of the cauldron. And then after they perceive it is wet about them, they will drink up the mead and become drunk and go to sleep. And then fold the covering around them, and in the strongest and most deserted place you can find in your kingdom, bury them deep in the earth in a stone tomb. While they remain there no oppression from another country shall land in the Isle of Britain. (67–68)

Llefelys’s interpretation begins by allegorizing the Britons and the foreigners as two dragons: the scream signifies the agony of the island’s subjugation. The solution traces the sources of colonial ambition to the attractive force of the sovereign center (identified as Oxford in some cases).⁶¹ The measurement of the island in fact anticipates Hengist’s colonial cartography: only by identifying the island’s exact center can Lud capture and contain invasive conflict. Mathematical cartography thus promises to establish an impermeable Insular boundary. At the center, Lud contains the ethnic strife that results from invasion. The drunken pigs, entombed at Snowdon (69), protect the island from future invasions because they represent the pacification of competing claims to sovereign control of the political center. Yet even though Lud can control colonial invasions by guarding the sleeping pigs, he cannot kill them: the water will always conduct new invaders to the island’s shores; no one knows how long the pigs will remain quiet.

If the first oppression represents foreigners (and their genocide) and the second represents invasions (and a magically effective border patrol), then the third represents the ghost of the indigenous inhabitants, returning to haunt the Britons’ own royal halls:

The third oppression was that no matter how great were the preparation and provisions of food and drink made ready in royal courts, even though it were the provision of a year, nothing of it was ever had except what was used in the very first night. (66)

The solution, as Llefelys explains, requires Lud himself to reenact the primal scene of colonial contact:

The third oppression is a mighty man of magic who takes away your food and your drink through magic and enchantment, and causes everyone to sleep so long as he is in it. You must therefore, in your own person, watch over your preparation and your supplies. And in order that you may not be overcome by sleep, have a cauldron of cold water beside you, and when sleep oppresses you go to the cauldron of water, and when you see your chance at the man avenge yourself on him if you want to. (68)

Lud can choose to engage the “mighty man,” just as Corineus and Arthur overpower their giant adversaries. Or he can live with the ghosts of the colonial past. In the event, he exacts an oath of submission. Nonetheless, he cannot completely escape the history of coercive domination. Indeed, except for the extermination of the Coranians, the solutions to the oppressions leave the realm’s security in the shadows of doubt. While the solutions appear to delineate a magical program for a Welsh Utopia (an island inhabited by one group in “peaceful peace”), new oppressions always threaten to emerge: the pigs may sober up at any time and turn back into dragons. Welsh possession thus remains fragile in the Brut y Brenhinedd, just as it did in the thirteenth century. The Brutieu themselves possess history with confidence, but in the post-colonial border, possessions remain multiply partial.