SOURCE: “On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” Medium Aevum, Vol. 51, No. 2, 1982, pp. 152-62.

In the following essay, Crawford examines evidence indicating that Geoffrey did not read Welsh and was unfamiliar with Breton, but that, rather, his history was based on remembered oral tales, embellished with imagination.

There is a striking disagreement among students of the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth about his ability to speak the Welsh language. A propos of his breaking off the composition of the Historia Regum Britanniae in order to translate the ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, Parry and Caldwell declare, ‘There is no evidence that at this time he had any command of that language [Welsh], but he would have had little difficulty in learning the style and something of the substance of this material from those who did’.¹ This amounts to claiming that Geoffrey composed the Historia up to this point (i...