Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
Shichtman and Finke characterize Geoffrey’s use of the word as unequivocally enthusiastic: “Geoffrey glosses over the limitations of Merlin’s ingenium,” they argue, “just as he glosses over the limitations of his own” (34). But Geoffrey’s efforts to distance himself from the pleasures of the text he “translates,” the dedications that identify Merlin’s skills with Bishop Alexander’s power rather than with Geoffrey’s own, all hint at anxieties about his own ingenium. When he positions himself as the medium and not the source of the pleasures of his own text, Geoffrey’s dedications—read as “fulsome” and “sycophantic in the extreme” by some29—suggest an artistic and historiographic agency constrained by pleasures other than his own. He is, in the textual variants that include these dedications, overcome by the wishes of his patrons; their dictates and their pleasures may likewise overwhelm his text.
Such a reading suggests Geoffrey’s political canniness; it suggests as well that Geoffrey may have been trying to point out that histories were always written for politicians with political axes to grind. In light of this we can now consider the ambiguities of the Merlin Prophecies, a central, and perhaps the most imaginatively excessive, section of the Historia. Geoffrey’s representation of Merlin’s power for Vortigern may indicate sobering testimony to what massive things sovereigns can do with soothsayers like Merlin at their service. Yet Geoffrey also places in Merlin’s mouth radically prophetic words powerful enough to jolt an imperial king like Vortigern out of his sovereign complacency. Merlin’s prophecies warn of a horrific British future:
For Britain’s mountains and valleys shall be leveled, and the streams in its valleys shall run with blood.…
The race that is oppressed shall prevail in the end, for it will resist the savagery of the invaders.…
The island shall be called by the name of Brutus and the title given to it by foreigners shall be done away with….
Three generations will witness all that I have mentioned, and then the kings buried in the town of London will be disinterred….
London shall mourn the death of twenty thousand and the Thames will be turned into blood.
The Daneian Forest shall be wakened from its sleep and, bursting into human speech, it shall shout: “Kambria, come here! Bring Cornwall at your side! Say to Winchester: ‘The earth will swallow you up. Move the see of your shepherd to where the ships come in to harbour. Then make sure that the limbs which remain follow the head! The day approaches when your citizens will perish for their crimes of perjury…. Woe to the perjured people, for their famous city shall come toppling down because of them.’” (Thorpe 171, 175, 176, 178; VII, 3, 4)
The prophecies warn of injury, death, devastation, and a vengeful repayment for “the savagery of invaders.” As Rupert Taylor points out, Merlin’s prophecies resonate with Biblical indictments from apocalyptic literature of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Revelation (27). Those prophetic books, identified by Biblical scholars as “crisis literature,” narrate the captivity of a conquered, yet holy, people, and of their messianic hopes for deliverance. Embedded, in the vulgate version, within Monmouth’s larger text, Merlin’s prophecies launch a sharp critique of conquest, prophesying death to London, a scene of such geological tumult that Wales (“Kambria”) and Cornwall shout curses upon Westminster. London shall mourn; the Thames will be turned to blood; the Kings of London will be disinterred after three generations. Statements like these allude to promises of divine wrath meted out upon oppressors.
The prophetic traditions that fueled Merlin’s apocalyptic tone, moreover, were borrowed from Welsh vaticinative tradition. The Merlin Prophecies and the story of the Red and White Dragons battling beneath Vortigern’s tower were, according to A. O. H. Jarman, “lifted bodily … from the ninth-century collection of early British and Welsh saga material and semi-historical traditions known as the Historia Brittonum” (131). These prophetic and symbolic Welsh traditions date from “memories of the struggle of the Britons and the English for supremacy in the fifth and sixth centuries,” when the figure of the Red Dragon represented the Welsh who “will arise, and valiantly throw the English people across the sea,” while the White Dragon represented “the people who have seized many peoples and countries in Britain” (Historia Brittonum, as cited by Jarman, 136). The Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr, dated c. 930, prophesies Welsh efforts to vanquish foreign invaders; it mentions Vortigern and Merlin as well. Jarman argues through linguistic and textual evidence that Geoffrey was“clearly aware” of Welsh vaticinatory tradition, and used “the [general] nature and purpose of vaticination”—that is, a critique of conquest and invasion—borrowed from Welsh tradition to craft Merlin’s prophecies.30
Developed from this Welsh tradition, the Merlin Prophecies encode an early version of what postcolonial scholars term “oppositional discourse.” Postcolonial cultural studies, a field marked by a commitment to the agency of conquered peoples, has reminded scholars in all disciplines of the importance of acknowledging the historical agency of such groups. In the words of critic Benita Parry, oppositional works attest “to the counter-hegemonic strategies” of a people under siege as they struggle to resist or to accommodate the vicissitudes of their experience. As I noted in the introduction to this study, oppositional discourse has come to define “postcolonial” itself. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, editors of The Postcolonial Studies Reader, define “postcolonial” as “the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being” (117).31 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin among others imply that the “post” prefix in “postcolonial” signifies “against,” rather than “after,” colonialism. In this view, the “post” of “postcolonial” becomes, as K. Anthony Appiah puts it, “the post of the space-clearing gesture” (348). Such insights remain specifically resonant for scholars working in early periods. We can, I would argue, deploy “postcolonial” to signal a concern with agency and oppositional texts, even as we appreciate the historical specificity (the similarities and differences) of twentieth-century or medieval scenes of conquest.
The oppositional discourses of Welsh vaticinative poetry could, in this way, be viewed as a “postcolonial” collection. Yet the complicated textual status and linguistic nature of these traditions might also offer a crucial qualification to standard definitions of “opposition.” On the one hand, early vaticination, as E. M. Griffiths established, characteristically links the restoration of insular rule to the Britons through figures like Arthur. Yet the texts that survive (as the Historia Brittonum to which Jarman refers) are themselves notoriously complicated, combining elements of Latin clerical and Welsh “native” cultures.32 This difficult situation means that these “oppositional” texts are not romantically “pure.” Such complications have sometimes produced scholarly diffidence on questions of Welsh oppositional agency, particularly with regard to Arthur. Yet evidence of oppositional traditions in texts “contaminated” by substantial interlinguistic, cultural, and historical complexity registers, I would argue, not the absolute absence of resistance so much as the absence of resistance as a “pure” process or event. These texts testify to the complexity of “native” culture and resistance in Wales, a locale that combines conquest and difference with a long history of intimate exchange. Viewed as complicated, mixed sets of texts, these “oppositional discourses” themselves emerge as an extraordinary kind of creative agency, to recall Patterson’s formulation, an imaginative makyng in the face of constraint. Furthermore, I would argue that so long as we understand the “post” of “postcolonial” to refer solely to the time after the withdrawal of colonial rule, we will likely miss that such poignant complications suggest not a complicity with conquest that must be deplored, but the difficulty of oppositional strategies. And this, again I would argue, is exactly the case with the scholarly reception of Geoffrey’s Historia.
The importance and power—the historical agency—of the oppositional traditions Geoffrey deploys have been traditionally under appreciated in favor of an overemphasis upon the genealogical interests of Geoffrey’s Anglo-Norman patrons and audience. As a result many readers have emphasized what they see as Monmouth’s collusion with Anglo-Norman colonial desires for things Welsh, arguing that Geoffrey appropriates, even “colonizes,” Welsh material for his