SOURCE: Rider, Jeff. “The Fictional Margin: The Merlin of the Brut.” Modern Philology, 87, no. 1 (August 1989): 1-12.

In the following essay, Rider contrasts the treatment of Merlin in Wace's and Layamon's versions of Le Roman de Brut.

Wace's Roman de Brut and Layamon's adaptation of it have been closely compared a number of times, and “canonical” characterizations of the two texts and the two poets were established as early as 1906. Wace was quintessentially Norman, a professional writer who enjoyed royal patronage. Layamon was “a thorough mediæval Saxon,” a rustic priest who wrote to please himself, perhaps out of a sense of patriotism.¹

Layamon's thorough, even militant, “Englishness” has long been observed in his textual practice—his language, poetic form, and figures—and in his imaginative reworking of certain characters and episodes.² Dorothy Everett and E. G. Stanley have also explained how a militant Anglo-Saxon could have moral and...