The Gesta Regum Britanniae is a Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

 written at some time between 1235 and 1254, and attributed to a Breton monk, William of Rennes.

The Gesta is fundamentally a versification of Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey of Monmouth was a cleric and one of the major figures in the development of British historiography and the popularity of tales of King Arthur...

's Historia Regum Britanniae

Historia Regum Britanniae

The Historia Regum Britanniae is a pseudohistorical account of British history, written c. 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It chronicles the lives of the kings of the Britons in a chronological narrative spanning a time of two thousand years, beginning with the Trojans founding the British nation...

in Latin epic hexameter

Hexameter

Hexameter is a metrical line of verse consisting of six feet. It was the standard epic metre in classical Greek and Latin literature, such as in the Iliad and Aeneid. Its use in other genres of composition include Horace's satires, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. According to Greek mythology, hexameter...

s. It retains Geoffrey's overall sequence and structure, but expands upon those elements and stories which had the greatest dramatic potential, while treating other sections more cursorily. William omits the Prophecies of Merlin section of the Historia, as Wace

Wace

Wace was a Norman poet, who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy , ending his career as Canon of Bayeux.-Life:...

 did in his earlier Roman de Brut

Roman de Brut

Roman de Brut or Brut is a verse literary history of Britain by the poet Wace. Written in the Norman language, it consists of 14,866 lines....

. William may have read Geoffrey's Vita Merlini

Vita Merlini

Vita Merlini, or The Life of Merlin, is a work by the Norman-Welsh author Geoffrey of Monmouth, composed in Latin around AD 1150. It retells incidents from the life of the Brythonic seer Merlin, and is based on traditional material about him....

, but otherwise does not intrude any elements of the (by then very copious) Arthurian legend into his adaptation of the Historia.

The form of the Gesta was inspired by Walter of Châtillon

Walter of Chatillon

Walter of Châtillon was a 12th-century French writer and theologian who wrote in the Latin language. He studied under Stephen of Beauvais and at the University of Paris. It was probably during his student years that he wrote a number of Latin poems in the Goliardic manner that found their way...

's Alexandreis

Alexandreis

Alexandreis is a medieval Latin epic poem by Walter of Châtillon, a 12th-century French writer and theologian. A version of the Alexander romance, it gives an account of the life of Alexander the Great, based on Quintus Curtius Rufus' Historia Alexandri Magni...

. It is divided into ten books, each of which is prefaced by a terse summary of its contents, also in verse. The entire poem is 4,923 lines long, each book being about 500 lines in length.

External links

• Gesta regum Britanniae, edition by Francisque Michel
  Francisque Xavier Michel
  Francisque Xavier Michel was a French historian and philologist.- Life :He became known for his editions of French works of the Middle Ages, and the French Government, recognizing their value, sent him to England and Scotland to continue his research there...