On this page, I will publish short entries about my favourite aspects connected with the English language, literature in English and history of the English-speaking countries.
Where does the name ‘Britain’ come from?
You may already know that there is a Britain and a Great Britain. Britain is in France (Bretagne), in the North, and the largest island on the other side of the Channel is that, Great Britain. Typical of the British to say it’s ‘great’. But... who gave them these names?
The straight answer is the Romans did. But the Romans, like with many other things, took the word from the Greeks, who called the group of islands Prettanike, and adapted it to their tongue as Britannia. Yawn, boring.
The interesting answer, which cannot really be contrasted because it’s not fact but myth, is that one of Aeneas’s descendants travelled far into the North and settled on an island over the coast of France. So it says at the beginning of the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy, and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes... it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred who then laid upon them lands, and lords became of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles. When royal Romulus to Rome his road had taken, ... Tirius went to Tuscany and towns founded, Langaberde in Lombardy uplifted halls, and far over the French flood Felix Brutus on many broad bank and brae Britain established full fair, ...
I haven’t looked for this Brutus in Aeneid—in fact, if you look for him, he’s probably there, but as he didn’t play any part in the Trojan war and wasn’t even alive at the time Aeneid is supposed to have taken place, we can assume he wasn’t a major character by any stretch of the imagination. I’m not saying it was simply made up (well... yes, actually, although tracing the creator of such a character would make one heck of a doctoral thesis), but it strikes me as strangely convenient that an obscure Roman hero would be the founder of Britain and would give the island his name. Or maybe not.
The anonymous author of the Gawain poem wasn’t certainly making it up. Wace, a Norman poet born in Jersey (British soil) although living in what's now France for most of his life, composed/compiled Roman de Brut around 1155, some 90 years after the Norman invasion by William the Conqueror. It was written in Norman French (the educated language of the time), but Wace wasn’t making it up either. As a monk, he had access to written records of history (although the concepts of history and story weren’t all that different so long ago), and it’s almost 100% certain that he had access to a volume written in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Brittaniae, which dates back to around 1135. In this book, the founding of Britain by Brutus is told, connecting Britain to the old Roman Empire and classical culture. The myth of Brutus is taken up by mediaeval poet Layamon, who writes a poem (Brut) in purely English tradition about 40 or 50 years after Wace’s retelling and around 60 or 70 years after Geoffrey of Monmouth’s version. From Latin, to French, to English in less than 100 years. Note that.
Call me nerd, call me bookish, but I think this is really interesting. I think it really shows the beginning of some sort of national identity. It also shows some sort of need for old Brits to justify their importance after having been conquered by different peoples (as if they were saying "hey, we’re descendants of Aeneas, the old demigod, we're worth it"), and more importantly, and more interestingly, it shows the slow but steady construction of what is known as the Matter of Britain, whose most famous mythical figure is King Arthur. The origin of King Arthur is by no means clear, but he seemed to be Roman in origin, fighting against the Saxon invaders. He soon became a kind of superhero, fighting monsters as well as soldiers, but as the Anglo-Saxons and the (few) Roman descendants mixed, he became a stock character, who might even fight the Vikings off (this is my own largely unfounded guess). By connecting Brutus with Arthur (something Geoffrey of Monmouth does, and everybody after him), we have an attempt at establishing some sort of continuity. The Britons and the Normans had something in common, which the Anglo-Saxons didn't have: their Roman ancestry.
Full credit is due to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and my old notes from Uni, most of which come from the excellent lectures by Dr Shepherd. The excerpt from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight comes from the eponymous book by JRR Tolkien (while he wasn't making up stories about hobbits he held his own as an authority in Old and Middle English at Oxford University).
Oh, and just as an afterthought it has occurred to me--this Brutus is not the same who killed Julius Caesar.
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