About the same time that Robert de Boron introduced the sword and the stone into the Arthurian mythos, the English poet Layamon used a different means to mark out the young Arthur for kingship.¹ He had shadowy aluen (elves) attend the future king’s birth and portend his reign. The elves resurface at two other key points in Layamon’s telling of the Arthurian story. They haunt the eerily preternatural Loch Lomond, where Arthur pursues and then pardons the Scottish rebels. Finally, they dwell on the Island of Avalon, where the dying Arthur is carried to be healed of his wounds, and from which his eventual return is prophesied. Layamon’s elves, as peripheral figures, transcend the definite categories otherwise so prevalent throughout his Brut. Yet, despite their peripherality, the elves are inextricably woven into the narrative of the text’s most central figure. Arthur has one foot in the concrete world of military power, and the other in a realm of preternatural outsiders. Previous scholarship has used this duality as a basis for psychoanalytic readings of the text.² In this essay, I propose a different approach.

Eric Stanley has noted that Layamon “exemplifies what good and bad kings are and do, but he does not assess kingship theoretically.”³ Arthur’s involvement with the elves, however, reveals Layamon developing a sophisticated critique of kingship in which the ideal king lies at the periphery rather than at the centre of society. In what follows, I argue that Layamon uses Arthur to undermine contemporary models of kingship and paradigms of kingly power. The preternatural Arthur is mythologised—consigned to a consciously literary sphere. This Arthur promises a restored society. The military Arthur, by contrast, succumbs to the patterns of violence and brutality that characterise both his predecessors and his successors. Previous scholarship has argued that the Brut looks to a golden future, and uses the prophecies of Arthur’s return to inspire hope, action, and change.⁴ I argue that Layamon’s project is as much concerned with the present as it is with the future. The text associates its ideal king with the peripheral realm of folklore, thereby liberating him from temporal and historical processes. The text’s power lies in its reconfiguration of the present moment of its original readers. Arthur, as a literary figure, is as much present now as he ever has been or ever will be. The text is, therefore, more than consolation for present misfortune. It refigures the marginalised English audience, imbuing them with a social agency and responsibility that derives from vernacular literary and narrative traditions rather than from the power of the king.

Priest, Poet, and Paradox: Layamon’s Contradictions

Layamon’s Brut is an epic born from the interstices. It emerges from a nexus of cultural, linguistic, and political intersections. Its author was a priest of Anglo-Saxon descent, and yet it demonises the Saxon conquerors of Britain. Its immediate source was French courtly verse, but its audience was made up of the lower, marginalised classes. It was written in Worcestershire, in Norman England, close to the Welsh Marches, but its language and style are resolutely English and its heroes Celtic. It draws stylistically from a poetic tradition that survived only orally (if it survived at all), and uses a dialect that must have been nearly obsolete at the time, intelligible only within the near vicinity of its composition.⁵ It is an enormous text, spanning some 16,096 lines; and yet, someone went to the incredible expense and effort of preserving it in at least three manuscripts.⁶ It steps into a void, lacking any contemporary English literary context or precedent. Jane Roberts pithily encapsulates the situation: “[s]uddenly, as if from nowhere, there appears the first great telling of the story of Britain in English.”⁷ The Brut is, in short, a text rife with contradictions—a text that has stimulated and vexed scholars ever since Frederic Madden rendered it widely accessible to the modern world in his edition of 1847.⁸

The Brut is largely an early Middle English translation of Wace’s Roman de Brut, which was itself an Anglo-Norman verse rendition of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Brittaniae. All three texts naturally share much in common. They tell how Aneas’ great-grandson, Brutus, leads a contingent of Trojan survivors to the Island of Britain (then known as Albion) to establish a new civilisation. Numerous kings come and go from that time on, conquering and being conquered, overthrowing and being overthrown. The high point in the story is the reign of King Arthur. Geoffrey was the first writer to provide a beginning-to-end account of Arthur’s life and rule, which caught the imagination of both continental and insular writers for centuries to come. Wace’s Arthuriad is more or less faithful to Geoffrey’s, but with some significant additions, one of the most notable being the Round Table.⁹ Layamon expands further upon Wace, usually introducing dialogue and dramatising scenes that Geoffrey and Wace were both content to summarise.

One of the central problems posed by the Brut is how to reconcile the rigid but conflicting categories that so thoroughly suffuse the text. While Marie-Françoise Alamichel observes that “[t]he universe of the Brut is all in black and white, with the pagans and evil on the one hand and the Christians and good on the other,” the very existence of the text itself relentlessly frustrates such rigid classification.¹⁰ The most obvious contradiction is the difference between the author’s cultural identity and the identity of the text’s heroes. The Celtic Britons are celebrated as the rightful rulers of the Island of Britain; by contrast, Layamon’s Saxon ancestors are reduced to savage, treacherous, uncivilised conquerors. Further, the language and style of the text are rooted in the Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, despite the text’s uncompromising denigration of the people who produced that tradition. The poet’s modus operandi is to establish ostensibly fixed categories within the narrative while simultaneously disrupting them by writing the narrative.

More recent readings of the Brut have yielded a portrait of its author as a critical, careful thinker whose work exposes the complex underpinnings of cultural exchange and appropriation in something approximating a postcolonial society. The narrative Layamon retells had already acquired a substantial political charge as a counterpoise to the dominant Anglo-Norman historiography of the early twelfth century. Anglo-Norman historians interpreted the Conquest of 1066 as the latest in a series of divinely ordained punishments of Britain.¹¹ Kenneth Tiller has argued that Geoffrey, in flagrant opposition to his contemporaries, substitutes military power for divine providence as the driving force in his Historia. Victory in battle was therefore no longer demonstrative of divine approbation. In Geoffrey’s telling, “history itself becomes absorbed into the power-plays of rulers and their conquests.”¹²

The subversiveness of Geoffrey’s text was somewhat mitigated by its composition in Latin and its dedication to members of the Norman nobility. Layamon’s vernacular adaptation of Geoffrey’s narrative, however, invited the subjugated English to embrace a model of history that potentially delegitimised Norman rule. Tiller consequently argues that the Brut is nothing less than “the first post-Colonial historical text in English.”¹³ Kelley Wickham-Crowley similarly finds Layamon to be an “anthropologist, a sympathetic translator and recorder of British/Welsh myth and history.”¹⁴ Daniel Helbert even goes so far as to compare the poet with Karl Marx, inasmuch as both Layamon and Marx share an “intention to not merely interpret the world, but to change it.”¹⁵ All these observations underscore an important paradox. Layamon’s framing of opposite categories—Briton and Saxon, pagan and Christian—reveals an acute sensitivity to the dynamics of intercultural encounters. The poet is keenly attentive to boundaries and what lies between them.

Readings such as these have typically focused on the Brut either as historiography or as political prophecy—two genres from which it draws extensively. Critics, however, have said less about the generic fusion that emerges from the intersection of the mundane with the marvellous. Much that is typical of the romance is present in Layamon’s sources, such as the giants who inhabit Albion before the Trojans, and the giant of Mont St Michel. Nevertheless, one of Layamon’s most striking (and strikingly understudied) innovations is the addition of what Cyril Edwards describes as “a deliberately constructed elfin framework” to the Arthurian narrative.¹⁶ In the cases considered thus far, Layamon’s text disrupts the categories that his narrative establishes. The elves, however, are different. The elves, as peripheral figures, channel Layamon’s disruptiveness into the narrative fabric of the Brut itself.

Layamon is notoriously vague about the nature of his aluen. For over half a century, scholars have debated whether the elves amount to evidence that Layamon used Celtic or Germanic sources that Geoffrey and Wace did not. The debates have proved inconclusive. Barron and Weinberg maintain that the word aluen itself is simply too generic to yield any details, used as it was to denote classical creatures such as dryads, nymphs, and the like.¹⁷ Edwards identifies the similarity between the elves at Arthur’s birth and the fairy godmother characters so ubiquitous in folklore.¹⁸ Françoise le Saux notes that such creatures are common enough in the folklore of the day, and thus the elves in the Brut, “whatever their exact origin, were part of general medieval culture.”¹⁹ The elves’ significance for the Brut, then, lies in their status as peripheral figures, rather than in their origin in any single cultural folkloric tradition.

Medieval elves and fairies are quintessential outsiders. Helen Cooper notes that they are “unassimilable” since they “occupy that dangerous borderland that cannot be controlled by human will and is not susceptible to the normal operations of prayer.”²⁰ C. S. Lewis similarly describes them as “marginal, fugitive creatures” that “intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into” the medieval universe.²¹ The elves are out of place; they are at home neither in Christian theology nor the practical politics of kingship and military power.²² Elves and fairies are typical of the romance as a genre, whether or not their existence was believed.²³ Tiller notes that Layamon’s inclusion of them “fuses motifs associated with history and romance.”²⁴ Edwards likewise concludes that Layamon is “grafting on to the Historia some motifs which by the late twelfth and early thirteenth century had become common.”²⁵ Layamon’s appropriation of the elves, however, is more than the simple interpolation of elements from contemporary heroic tales into the Arthurian narrative. The juxtaposition of historical and folkloric, realistic and romantic modes reinterprets Arthur’s role in the Galfridian narrative of British history, and reshapes the significance of that history for its readers. Comparison of the three elfin episodes in the Brut with their sources in Wace’s Roman de Brut and Geoffrey’s Historia reveals Layamon’s simultaneous valorisation of Arthur as myth and denigration of Arthur as man.

Elfin Episodes: Geoffrey, Wace, and Layamon

Arthur’s story, stretching from his notoriously sordid conception at Tintagel to his eventual departure for the Island of Avalon, constitutes almost a quarter of Geoffrey’s Historia. Kristen Lee Over argues that Geoffrey’s Arthuriad is a microcosm of the Historia as a whole. In particular, “Arthur’s conception … reiterates that success and glory in Britain’s cyclic history follow, if not stem directly from, betrayal and deception.”²⁶ Even during Arthur’s reign, force and violence are the rule of the day. In Over’s words, “wealth and pomp can only simulate what Geoffrey prioritises both narratively and descriptively as proper political power—military victory.”²⁷ Wace closely follows Geoffrey’s text. Layamon’s Brut also retains the infamous story of Arthur’s conception. Merlin uses a spell to disguise Uther as Igraine’s husband Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall. Uther sneaks into the fortress at Tintagel and sleeps with Igraine. Layamon’s account of Arthur’s birth, however, indicates that this Arthur is not subject to the same dark cycle his inauspicious origins might suggest.

Geoffrey and Wace both let Arthur’s birth go by with barely a mention. Geoffrey recounts it after Uther’s troops have successfully taken Tintagel. Uther and Igraine “progenueruntque filium et filiam. Fuit autem nomen filii Arturus, filiae uero Anna” [“brought forth a son and a daughter. The name of the son was Arthur, and the name of the daughter was Anna”].²⁸ Wace is similarly brief, writing of Igraine: “La nuit ot un fiz cunceü / E al terme ad un fiz cü, / Artur ot nun; de sa bunté / Ad grant parole puis esté. / Emprés Artur fu Anna nee” [“She had conceived a son that night and in due course bore him. His name was Arthur: his greatness has been celebrated ever since. After Arthur, Anna was born”].²⁹ Layamon takes a decidedly different approach: “Þe time com þe wes icoren; þa wes Arður iboren. / Sone swa he com an eorðe; aluen hine iuengen. / heo bigolen þat child; mid galdere swiðe stronge.” [“When the chosen time had come, Arthur was born. As soon as he came upon the earth, the elves took him. They enchanted the child with very strong magic”] (ll.9608–9610).³⁰ Arthur, the central figure in the text, receives the kingly virtues of nobility, strength, generosity, and longevity from the most shadowy and vague of peripheral figures.

The elves also obscure Arthur’s relations with his own family. At the syntactic level, the passive “þa wes Arður iboren” avoids mention of both his father Uther and mother Igraine. This is followed by eight lines of elven intervention before we are finally told that “[æ]fter Arður wes iboren; þeo ædie burde / heo wes ihaten Æne. þat ædien maiden” [“After Arthur, a noble lady was born. She was named Anna, the noble maiden.”] (ll. 9617–18). Details of their relation are omitted; only the temporal sequence of their births appears. Grammar, as much as narrative, extricates Arthur from his family and anchors him among preternatural outsiders.

The intervention of the elves “[s]one swa he com an eorðe” effectively severs Arthur from his father’s deception and treachery. Arthur’s reign, although permeated with violence, is not simply business as usual for the Island of Britain. Concerning Arthur’s kingdom, “ne mihte nauere nan man; bi-þenchen of blissen. / þat weoren in æi þeode. mare þan i þisse. / ne mihte nauere mon-cunne; nan swa muchel wunne. / swa wes mid Arðure; & mid his folke here” [“Never could anyone imagine that there was joy in any nation greater than there was here. Nor could anyone comprehend how much happiness there was amidst Arthur and his people”] (ll. 11342–45). The elves disrupt the patterns of kingship that have prevailed up to this point.

Nevertheless, there is a distinct duality in Arthur’s persona. Alamichel accordingly describes Layamon’s king as “an ambivalent being with conflicting traits.”