If Troy was destroyed around 1240 BC and Cadwallader died in 689 AD, then our lad Geoffrey bites off quite a mouthful. Geoffrey’s is a winding but not wandering account of the history of Britain’s kings from its fictional founder Brutus (son of Silvius, the son of Ascanius, the son of Aeneas) down to Cadwallader. For some reason, that adjustment of expectations made a world of difference. History does, as Thorpe writes, occasionally “peep” through the fiction, but the sweep of the story certainly feels more fictional-both epic and romantic–to me than it does historic. I kept reading because of the recommendation of Geoffrey’s translator Lewis Thorpe that those those skeptical of Geoffrey’s utility approach the work as they do the Aeneid and Odyssey, not at history, but epic.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, BNF Latin 8501A fol.
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