| | References added: 21, 24, 29
"Nennius: early Welsh like Gildas, whimsical like Geoffrey, historical like Bede."
Nennius did someting interesting: declaring that "the scholars of Britain have no skill," instead of writing his own history, this Welsh monk "made a heap of all that I have found, both from the Annals of the Romans and from the Chronicles of the Holy Fathers, and from the writings of the Irish and English, and out of the traditions of our elders." He then put it in Latin, arranged it into some semblance of order and published it--by which I mean that copies got made.
Some of these traditions make for interesting reading, especially in his origins of people on the Isles, which includes Aeneas, Brutus, boats from Spain and a mysterious and deadly fortress of glass in the sea. He takes great pains to arrange things in a chronology, giving the history of the world six "ages," and basing much of his dating on Roman cycles.
Clearly, Nennius isn't too discriminating--or at least, he isn't adverse to including stories that he likes. He tells about Satan inducing Vortigern to fall in love with the English leader Hengist's daughter, for instance, and thus complete the sell-out of his own people.
As far as Arthurian legend goes, a soft spot for the learned Welsh monk, we see how far we've come from Gildas (see entry 29) and how we're approaching Geoffrey (entry 24) when Gildas' ex-Roman war leader Ambrosious takes the role, in Nennius, of the wise boy who prophecies to Vortigern and would become Geoffrey's Merlin. Then later in Nennius, Arthur pops out of somewhere, fights the English a dozen times, and kills 960 of them by himself in a single charge at Badon Hill.
Aside from these main fireworks, Nennius spends some time recounting the lives of a few saints (Germanus and Patrick in particular) and on sorting out the genealogies of the various English kingdoms of his time. He also includes a weird and wild little tour guide of the cities and wonders of Britain.
The Phillimore edition I have, volume eight of their "Arthurian Sources" series, translated by John Morris, also includes the Welsh Annals, the earliest copy of which was tacked on to the end of a manuscript copy of Nennius. Mainly taken, I take it, from early Irish records, with later British/English interpolations, and without year numbers but supposedly arranged in a year-by-year sequence, the Annals pretend to give dates for King Arthur's battles and life, among other things (the Arthurian ones are the earlier interpolations), which has led to a lot of silly arguing and speculation about Arthur as a historical figure. I say silly because, well, it just plain is silly to base a historical argument on clearly at least very exaggerated accounts coming four hundred years and more after the supposed fact, when accounts much more contemporary (Gildas) don't even mention the supposed savior of the race.
Anyway, aside from the genealogies Nennius is a pretty interesting read, and a unique source for these early myths and legends. He shared some sources with the earlier Bede (see entry 21) but was not quite as discriminating in his interpretations, and came at things from the Welsh/British side rather than Bede's more Anglo-Saxon side, and thus provides a fascinating counterpoint to Bedes more comprehensive and organized work. Nennius is history in the rough--he took it as he found it, unapologetically, and thank goodness, because he was sitting on some pretty cool stuff. |
|
|