Penguins on Parade: Gerald of Wales!

Some Penguin Classics ought to engender only hatred, and surely the 1185 Topographia Hibernia of our old friend Gerald of Wales should be at the top of that infamous list. "Giraldus Cambrensis" was born around 1146, the scion of one of the most influential Norman families of the century. His mother was the celebrated 'Helen of Wales,' a beautiful woman named Angharad who eventually married Gerald de Windsor, the castellan of Pembroke, and started churning out little fitzGeralds, including Maurice, the murderous thug who helped Henry II invade and conquer Ireland.

Gerald was given a more gentle education and fitted out for a career in the Church, although his lifelong quest of appointment to the see of St. David's went unfulfilled. He first went to Ireland in 1183 accompanying Henry II's son Prince John and a large body of armed men, and while his uncle and his brother were busy spiking the locals, he took an interest in indigenous folklore. During that first visit and a subsequent on in 1185, he collected a large amount of, eh, information that the locals were only too happy to foist on an Englishman of apparently bottomless gullibility, and Gerald studiously set all this information down in a book which he called The History and Topography of Ireland, even though it contains virtually no accurate Irish topography and no accurate Irish history at all.



By the modest and admittedly cumbersome standards of the day, the book became a hit. This is understandable: not only was Ireland in 1185 a wild chunk of terra incognita most Normans had never seen, but as such, it presented unbeatable opportunities for the kind of moralizing that was then at the peak of its popularity with the book-buying clergy.

We should hate this book, since it's a picture-perfect illustration of history being written by the victors. Most of it is race propaganda of the vilest kind, like the innumerable tracts about native 'savages' that flooded the East Coast stationery stores in the early 19th century - and with the same purpose: to dehumanize the people you were in the process of dispossessing. It should be cast out, and Penguin Classics should no more print an edition of it than they would of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Except ... time, especially vast expanses of it like the vast expanse that now separates the sun in the sky every day from the 12th century, takes the sting out of things. I'm sure the editors of Penguin Classics didn't think about Irish crofters burned alive in front of their children when they bought John O'Meara's clean, fluid 1951 translation of the Topographia Hibernia and added it to the Classics backlist in 1982.

And perhaps that's OK. Those bishops weren't only enjoying the moralizing, after all; Gerald of Wales was an undeniably catchy storyteller, as his Journey Through Wales amply demonstrates. And O'Meara isn't for a moment blind to the defects of the work he's so skillfully translating:

The reader will be able to judge for himself the amount of credit to be placed in Giraldus' statements, and the motives by which he was actuated. He will see the single-minded vanity of the ambitious flatterer, the haughty contempt for one who came with his family to reform and invade, and the apparent credulity which must have delighted the hearts of the Irish.

And the truth is, aside from this one slim volume, we have very little surviving written records of any aspect of Irish life at the time. Economists, sociologists, climatologists, biologists ... many categories of people aside from military historians have ransacked this book, hungrily looking for the odd fact or tidbit that might be added to the historical picture. Gerald's sermons are mined for factual details:

There are many birds here of twofold nature. They are called ospreys. They are smaller than the eagle, but larger than the hawk. One of their feet is armed with talons, open and ready to snatch; but the other is closed and peaceful and suitable only for swimming. It is a wonderful instance of nature's pranks.

There is a remarkable thing about these birds, and I have often witnessed it for myself. They hover quietly on their wings high up in the air over the waves of the sea. In this way they can more easily see down into the depths below.

(O'Meara and the good folks at the Penguin art department fill this volume with illustrations from a 15th century manuscript of the work)

Likewise his frequent recourse to saints' lives can still yield items of temporal interest, like the pair of interesting assumptions buried in this little tale:

There is a district called Ferneginan in Leinster. It is separated from Wexford by the river Slaney only. From there the larger mice that are commonly called rats were entirely expelled by the curse of the bishop, Saint Yvor, whose books they had happened to eat. They cannot be bred nor can they live there, if brought in.

Of course, studying and sifting through the text like this requires often turn a blind eye to the aforementioned race hatred, which crops up on almost every page in some shape or other - sometimes buried in innuendo, many other times sadly explicit:

They [the Irish, naturally] are a wild and inhospitable people. They live on beasts only, and live like beasts. They have not progressed at all from the primitive habits of pastoral living.

Yes indeed. Whereas the Normans in London at this time were using air-cars.

Gerald visited Ireland a few more times before his death in 1223, and he kept revising and enlarging his book for the rest of his life. O'Meara's slim little Penguin Classic is a rendition of the 'first edition' of the book, before its author started making egregious additions and displaying what O'Meara calls "indiscriminate erudition of all kinds." And the book fascinates in spite of itself, a quick, warped look at a people right on the edge of being inhospitabled out of every hill and valley they'd ever called their own.

Penguins on Parade: Geoffrey of Monmouth!

Some Penguin Classics perform a much-needed service, and that certainly applies to Lewis Thorpe's 1966 translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12^th century barn-burner, The History of the Kings of Britain.



This book was immensely popular in its own time – unlike the great bulk of stuff written in and around the 1130s, of which we have today, um, nothing at all, there are manuscripts of Geoffrey's work everywhere; if you stop reading, get up and check your kitchen drawers, chances are you'll find a battered old vellum manuscript of the Historia right next to your worn-out Jeremy Jordan CDs. Time has not been kind to Jeremy Jordan – but The History of the Kings of Britain is just as lively and engaging now as it was 900 years ago. And it casts a long shadow: it was hugely influential on Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, Heldris de Cornualle, and Wolfram von Eschenbach. Without it, Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in their present forms would have been unthinkable, as would Holinshed, whose chronicles had rather a large effect on a certain English playwright. And every knights-errant pastiche that followed (surely knights will be the new vampires, in 2011? Who knows what mopey armored dreamboat is even now slouching toward completion on somebody's iPhone?) is forever in debt to Geoffrey's book. Of course, such popularity will have its detractors … in Geoffrey's own day, his work was slapped all over the Times literary pages by none other than Gerald of Wales, another best-selling author who told anybody who would listen that Geoffrey was a fraud, a charlatan, and perhaps a bigamist.

Gerald of Wales wasn't the only person to make such accusations against Geoffrey, and the bone of contention was always the same: that the mysterious ancient Welsh text “The Prophecies of Merlin” - a book Geoffrey claimed to have borrowed from a friend and used as the basis for much of what is most famous in his own work – was entirely bogus, and that Geoffrey had tarted up quasi-chronicle half-sources, mixed in a liberal amount of lurid fantasizing, and produced a book that was a disgrace to every genre it touched. According to these critics, The History of the Kings of Britain was not just a bad but a dangerous one, because its prattlings could be mistaken for the truth by the semi-literate groundlings who were its most eager consumers. In other words, Geoffrey of Monmouth was the Dan Brown of the 12^th century.

Only Dan Brown never gifted to the world creations quite so durable as the main two Geoffrey gave us (at least, Brown hasn't done it yet – perhaps one gains new spurts of creativity after the $1 billion mark; I'll let you know, if it ever happens to me): it's from The History of the Kings of Britain that we get noble King Arthur and his wizardly adviser Merlin. True, Geoffrey either invents or seductively popularizes a host of other recognizable names, from King Lear to Old King Cole to Cymbeline – but it's his gripping, funny, psychologically acute narrative of King Arthur and his Knights, the battles, the adventures, and Arthur's final wounding at the battle of Camlann (and his voyage to the Isle of Avalon, perhaps to return one day) … it's that stuff that makes him and his book immortal, while the works of Gerald of Wales have fallen into an obscurity so deep only a hopeless crank would know them today.

But immortality can be tricky (don't get me started), and although his reputation and influence were enormous, Geoffrey's actual book went begging for a popular paperback edition until this one by Thorpe came along, and the whole endeavor of it perfectly captures the ethos that has always made Penguin Classics such great and sunny things. Take a strong and important text from the past, put it in the hands of a first-rate scholar/translator whose main goal is for lots of ordinary people to read that text, let him work, and price the end result within the book-buying budget of the poorest college student. Penguin has done this countless times, and it's exactly what happened with this handy little paperback of the Historia. In his Introduction, Thorpe is blessedly no-nonsense about his work:

There has been much debate about the division of the Historia into twelve, eleven, or nine books, and then the breaking down of each book into chapters. Whatever devices the various scribes and editiors have adopted here, it seems reasonably clear that these subdivisions were not made by Geoffrey himself. I have divided my translation into eight main parts, according to the subject-matter, and given a clear title to each part. These titles are repeated as a running-head at the top of my verso pages; and at the top of my recto pages there is a printed indication of the point reached in the narrative; a really full index raissone, the first ever printed of Geoffrey's book, is given at the end of the volume.

And there you have it – a back-breaking amount of work, done expertly and unassumingly, then handed over to a public that ought to be grateful. Probably Gerald of Wales would have called it blasphemous – but then, there's no pleasing some people.

[caption id="attachment_1492" align="aligncenter" width="220" caption="Geoffrey of Monmouth, in happier days"][/caption]