Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
looking at a topic that, you know, it feels like
it should be familiar. It's about knights and
wizards and kings. But as soon as you peel back
that first layer, you realize you're actually
looking at one of the biggest literary mysteries
in history. It really is. It's a mystery wrapped
in a history book, wrapped in, well, a fantasy
novel. We are talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Now, for anyone listening who might not know
the name, Geoffrey is the guy who essentially
gave us King Arthur. He is. If you've ever pictured
Arthur pulling a sword from a stone or Merlin
casting a spell or the Knights of the Round Table
gathering for a feast, you are effectively living
inside Geoffrey of Monmouth's imagination. Wow.
He didn't just write a book. He built an entire
world. But here is the hook that really grabbed
me when I was going through the research packet.
This guy wrote a book called the Historia Regum
Britannia, the history of the kings of Britain
in the, what, the 1130s? That's right. And for
literally hundreds of years, people thought it
was true. It was the history book. It was. Absolutely.
For centuries, it was accepted as the standard
historical record. But today, historians look
at it and just say, this is a forgery. Or at
least this is mostly fiction. So you have this
incredible tension. Was Jeffrey a historian who
had access to some kind of lost records? Or was
he maybe the greatest con artist in literary
history? That is the fundamental question. And
I think to answer it, we have to move past that
simple binary of liar or truth teller. Yeah.
Jeffrey is something I think. Much more complicated.
Okay. He's an architect of mythology. And what
we're going to do today is look at how he built
that mythology, where he came from, and crucially
knew. research that suggests he might have been,
well, telling the truth a little more than we
realized. Yeah, we are absolutely going to dig
into the Lost Voices of Celtic Britain project
later, which is just fascinating stuff. It is.
But let's start with the man himself, because
I realized reading the prep notes, I have this,
you know, this image of a medieval monk scribbling
in a candlelit room, but I don't actually know
who Geoffrey was. Well, the biographical picture
is a bit like a mosaic with a lot of missing
tiles. We have to infer a lot. But we know he
was born roughly between say, 1090 and 1100.
Okay, so let's place that in time. That is just
a generation after 1066, the Norman conquest.
Exactly. This is the post -conquest generation.
The Normans, the French -speaking invaders, have
taken control of England. The old Anglo -Saxon
order is completely gone. The whole social hierarchy
has been reset. Right. So Jeffrey's growing up
in a world that is still very much in flux. And
where is he growing up? His name is Jeffrey of
Monmouth, so I'm assuming he's from Monmouth.
All the evidence suggests he was likely born
there or at least raised there. And this is vital
for understanding him. Monmouth isn't deep in
England, and it isn't deep in the Welsh mountains.
It's in the Welsh marches. The marches. I've
heard that term, but can you maybe paint a picture
of what that actually means in the 12th century?
Sure. It's a frontier zone. It's the borderlands
between what was then Norman -controlled England
and independent Wales. It was a highly militarized
society ruled by these incredibly powerful Norman
marcher lords who had a lot of autonomy to, well.
to fate the welsh princes so it's a war zone
basically it could be but it was also a melting
pot you have to imagine you would have heard
welsh spoken in the streets probably english
spoken by the local peasantry and then definitely
french spoken by the ruling elite in the castles
so jeffrey is a product of this This cultural
collision. He's a border creature. He understands
the other, the Welsh, but he operates entirely
within the Norman power structure. We know that
later in his life, between about 1129 and 1151,
he's in the Oxford area. Oxford, okay. And we
see his name appearing as a witness on charters.
When you say witnessing charters, that's legal
work, right? It's official. Yes. A charter is
essentially a deed or a grant of rights or land.
For his name to appear on that witness list,
it means he was a person of some standing. And
he's often styled as Majesty. Jeffrey. Magister.
Master. Which implies he was a teacher. An academic.
It implies he had a high level of education,
yeah. Probably from one of the big cathedral
schools, or, and this is a likely theory, he
was teaching at St. George's College. which is
right inside Oxford Castle. He was what's known
as a secular canon. Help me out with secular
canon. Does that mean he wasn't a monk shut away
in a monastery? Correct. A monk lives in a monastery,
cloistered from the world, following a strict
rule like the Benedictine rule. A secular canon
is a member of the clergy, but they live in the
world. They might live in a house, own property,
move in social circles. They are the intellectuals
and the administrators of the church, not the
hermits. Okay, so he's an ambitious academic.
He's hanging out in Oxford. Now, I want to ask
about his name. We call him Geoffrey of Monmouth.
But in the notes, there's this fascinating detail
that he is sometimes listed in documents as Galfritus
Arturus, Geoffrey Arthur. This is a delicious
little detail, isn't it? I mean, it feels too
on the nose. The guy who writes the definitive
King Arthur legend is named Arthur. What do we
make of that? Well, there's a vigorous debate
about this. The most, let's say, boring answer.
is usually the right one in history. Right. Arthur
was likely his father's name. In the Welsh naming
convention, the patronymics, you would be Geoffrey,
son of Arthur, or in Welsh, Gruffydd ap Arthur.
Okay, that makes perfect sense. It's a patronym.
It does, but historians love to speculate. And
there is another theory that Arthur wasn't his
father's name at all, but a nickname. A nickname,
like a handle. Exactly. Imagine Geoffrey at Oxford.
in the dining hall, constantly bending everyone's
ear about these obscure British legends talking
about this hero Arthur non -stop. Oh, I see.
It's entirely possible his colleagues started
calling him Jeffrey Arthur, in the same way you
might call someone you know Scar Wars Steve,
if they never ever stopped talking about the
movies. That humanizes him so much. It paints
him as this obsessed scholar even before he puts
pen to paper. It suggests his whole identity
was wrapped up in this figure. But this leads
us to the bigger, more critical question of his
identity. Was he Welsh? I just assumed he was.
He's from Monmouth. He's writing about ancient
British kings. Isn't he basically a Welsh patriot?
That was the standard assumption for a very long
time. For centuries, people read the Historia
as a kind of nationalist text. A proud Welshman
telling the Norman conquerors, hey, we used to
rule this entire island and our kings were better
than yours. But... The more recent research suggests
otherwise. It's complicated. If you look at his
linguistic skills, for instance, his knowledge
of the Welsh language seems to be, well, patchy
at best. Really? Yeah, he makes mistakes with
Welsh place names, with etymologies. He just
doesn't seem to have the deep native grasp of
the language that you would expect from a genuine
Welsh scholar of that era. So if he's not Welsh,
then what is he? The leading counter theory,
and it's a very compelling one, is the Breton
theory. OK, break that down for us. Who were
the Bretons in this context? The Bretons were
people from Brittany, which is that peninsula
in northwest France. Now, originally, their ancestors
were Britons who fled England during the Anglo
-Saxon invasions centuries earlier. So they were
Celts, culturally related to the Welsh. They
even spoke a language that was very similar to
Welsh. But they were French. Politically, they
were from France. Geographically and politically,
yes. And crucially, they were major allies of
William the Conqueror. A huge contingent of the
army that invaded England in 1066 was Breton.
Okay. And after the conquest, many of these Breton
lords were given huge tracts of land in, you
guessed it, the Walsh Marches. Ah, so Monmouth
itself is actually run by Bretons. The lords
of Monmouth were a Breton family. And what's
more, the names Gelfridus, Geoffrey, and Arthur
were actually quite common in Brittany at the
time, much more so than they were in Wales. Wow.
This flips the script entirely. If he's Breton,
he's not an underdog fighting for the oppressed
Welsh. He's part of the conquering elite. Precisely.
And that changes the entire motivation for his
book. If he is Breton, he's not writing a history
to subvert. the Normans. He's writing a history
of the ancient Britons to flatter his own people,
the Bretons, and to show the Normans, look, we
Bretons are your equals. Our ancestors were magnificent
kings like Arthur. So the whole book becomes
a tool for social climbing within the Anglo -Norman
court rather than some kind of subversive Welsh
text. Exactly. It's about securing a place for
his people at the high table of the new Norman
kingdom. And that makes so much sense given what
happens to him later in life. He does eventually
get a big promotion, right? He becomes a bishop.
That's a very establishment role. He does. In
1152, right at the end of his life, he is consecrated
as the Bishop of St. Asaph. And St. Asaph is
in North Wales. It is. But here is the tragic
or perhaps just ironic twist in Jeffrey's life
story. We have absolutely no evidence that he
ever set foot in his own diocese. Wait, what?
He's the bishop of a place he never even goes
to? It happens more often than you'd think in
the medieval church. But for Geoffrey, it was
really a matter of personal safety. At that time,
North Wales was under the control of Owain Gwynedd,
a very powerful and very fierce Welsh prince
who was at war with the English crown. So if
Geoffrey, who is an appointee of the English
king, had ridden into St. Asaph... He likely
would have been killed or at the very least captured
and held for a massive ransom. So he holds the
title, he gets the prestige and probably some
of the income, but he stays safely in London
and Oxford. He is an absentee bishop. Yes. And
it just reinforces that idea that while he wrote
about Wales, he wasn't really of Wales in a political
sense. He was always an outsider looking in.
So let's turn to the work that made him famous,
the Historia Regum Britannia. You said it was
popular, but this book was a genuine blockbuster.
It is hard to overstate how popular this book
was. I mean, remember, this is the days before
the printing press. Every single book had to
be hand copied onto expensive vellum. It was
slow, laborious, and incredibly expensive. And
yet we have nearly 200 surviving manuscripts
from the medieval period alone. That is an astronomical
number for any text from that era. It was the
Harry Potter of the 12th century. It was Harry
Potter meets Hamilton. It was thrilling entertainment,
but it was also profound national myth -making.
And the book covers this massive span of time,
something like 2 ,000 years. And it all starts
way, way back with Brutus of Troy. I've always
found this part completely fascinating. He claims
Britain was founded by Trojans. Yes. He creates
this whole narrative where Brutus, who he says
is a great -grandson of Aeneas, the famous Trojan
hero who fled the burning city of Troy and went
on to found the line of Rome, was exiled from
Italy. Okay. And after many adventures, he and
his followers land on this island, which was
then called Albion, and was only inhabited by
a few giants. He defeats the giants and renames
the island Britain after himself, Brutus. And
his followers become the Britons. Why do that?
Why go to all that trouble to connect Britain
to Troy? What's the point? It's all about status.
It's about prestige. In the medieval mind, Rome
was the absolute peak of civilization. Every
emerging European power wanted to claim some
kind of connection to the classical world. So
it's a way of looking legitimate. It's a massive
diplomatic flex by saying, our founder comes
from Troy. Geoffrey is telling the world, the
Britons are cousins to the Romans. We aren't
just some barbarians at the foggy edge of the
world. We have a classical pedigree. It puts
the British kings on the same level as the Caesars.
And then the book just powers through all these
other kings. I saw King Lear in there, which
is Shakespeare's King Lear. It is. Shakespeare
got the story directly from a translation of
Geoffrey, Cymbeline too. Right. And eventually
this grand history leads up to the main event.
Arthur. Arthur completely dominates the central
section of the book. And you have to understand,
the Arthur that Geoffrey presents is not just
a local warlord fending off Saxons. He is an
emperor, a world -conquering hero. Right, we
mentioned this before. In Geoffrey's version,
Arthur invades Europe. He doesn't just invade,
he conquers. He takes Gaul, which is modern France.
He defeats the Roman armies sent against him.
He's on his way to be crowned emperor in Rome
itself when he gets the news that his nephew,
Mordred, has betrayed him back home. It's just
an epic fantasy of dominance. For an audience
in the 12th century, seeing a British king totally
humble the Roman Empire must have been incredibly
satisfying to read. Oh, absolutely. It's a validation
narrative. But this brings us to the elephant
in the room. The ancient book. Because in the
preface, Geoffrey tells us exactly where he got
all of this incredible information. He does.
And this is probably the most debated sentence
in the entire history of Arthurian scholarship.
Geoffrey claims that his friend and superior,
Walter, the archdeacon of Oxford, gave him a
certain most ancient book in the British language.
The British language, meaning Welsh or something
like it? Yes. And he says this book set out the
history of all these kings, from Brutus to Cadwallader,
in perfect chronological order. And Jeffrey claims
his role is just as the translator. He's saying,
don't look at me. I'm just translating Walter's
book. That's his defense. I have merely turned
it into Latin at Archdeacon Walter's request.
So the million dollar question. Did this ancient
book actually exist? The short answer from pretty
much every modern historian is no. Almost certainly
not. Why are we so sure, though? I mean. Books
get lost all the time. Libraries burn down. Is
it totally impossible that there was a Welsh
manuscript history that we just don't have anymore?
It's not physically impossible that a book could
be lost, but it is textually and historically
highly, highly suspicious. First, the narrative
Jeffrey produces fits the political and cultural
concerns of the 12th century a little too perfectly.
It addresses exactly the questions the Anglo
-Normans were interested in. It's suspiciously
convenient. Very. Secondly, no one else ever
mentions seeing this book. No other Welsh scholar,
no other English historian ever references this
foundational text of British history. It appears
in Geoffrey's preface and then vanishes from
history. It's a bit like the my girlfriend goes
to another school situation. Chuckles. That is
a perfect analogy. You wouldn't know her. She
lives in Canada. Yeah. The found manuscript is
a classic literary trope. It's a device to give
your work authority. It says, this isn't my invention,
this is ancient wisdom that I have uncovered.
Okay, but here is where I get a little stuck.
Walter the Archdeacon was a real guy. A very
respected, powerful figure. Very real. Yes. He
was Jeffrey's superior in the church hierarchy.
They witnessed charters together. Their names
are on the same documents. So if I write a book
and I say in the preface, my boss gave me the
secret files and I'm just completely lying. Isn't
my boss going to say something? Isn't Walter
going to call him out and say, Jeffrey, I never
gave you that book. And that is the crucial nuance.
You're absolutely right. Jeffrey couldn't have
lied completely. If he had just invented the
entire story about Walter out of thin air, Walter
would have and should have exposed him as a fraud.
So what's the middle ground? The middle ground
and the theory most scholars lean towards is
that Walter did give him something. Just not
the one ancient book. Exactly. The theory is
that Walter, who was an educated man with connections,
probably gave Jeffrey a collection of materials.
Maybe some Walsh genealogies, a few king lists,
perhaps some scraps of oral poetry that had been
written down. A disorganized pile of stuff. And
Jeffrey took that pile of raw material and spun
it into gold. He took the skeleton. that Walter
provided, and he fleshed it out. He added the
epic battles, the long speeches, the dramatic
moments. He borrowed from Roman historians like
Livy to describe battles. He essentially took
a dozen different fragmented sources and wove
them into one single seamless epic narrative.
So the ancient book was a kind of polite fiction,
a shield. It's a brilliant move. It allows him
to have it both ways. He gets all the credit
for the beautiful Latin style and the exciting
story. But if anyone criticizes the historical
content, he can just shrug and say, well, that's
what was in the book Walter gave me. He blames
his source material. It's a perfect defense.
Speaking of criticism, not everyone bought this
story, did they? Even back in the 1100s, there
were some serious skeptics. Oh, the academic
shade thrown at Jeffrey was intense. You have
to remember, there were other very serious historians
working at this time. men like William of Malmesbury
and later William of Newburgh. And they were
working from credible sources like the Venerable
Bede or Roman accounts. And Jeffrey's story didn't
line up? Not at all. William of Newburgh, writing
around 1190, just did not hold back. He basically
said, and I'm paraphrasing, it is vividly clear
that everything this man wrote about Arthur and
his successors is a lie, made up either by himself
or by others. Wow. He pointed out, very logically,
that if Arthur had really conquered most of Europe
and defeated the Romans, surely some French or
Roman or Italian writer would have mentioned
it. That is a very solid point. It's hard to
hide an emperor conquering your country. It is.
But my absolute favorite critic is Gerald of
Wales. We mentioned him earlier. Gerald was a
prolific writer, a bit of a gossip, and he clearly
had this love -hate relationship with Geoffrey's
work. He tells an anecdote that is just. It's
the 12th century equivalent of a savagely viral
tweet. This is the demon story. I was hoping
we'd get to this. It is. So Gerald tells us about
a Welshman named Mylar who lived in the city
of Caroleon. And Mylar was possessed by demons.
As one is. Naturally. But these demons gave him
a very specific and unusual power. They made
him a human lie detector. He could see them apparently
sitting on the shoulders of liars. Okay. And
if he was in the presence of a lie or a book
containing lies, the demons would get all excited
and dance and celebrate. Right. But Gerald says
if you place the Gospel of John on Mylar's chest,
the demons would scream in agony and flee. They
couldn't stand the absolute truth of the scripture.
They would just vanish like birds. Standard exorcism
rules. Holy book equals no demons. Got it. But
then they decided to run an experiment. They
took the gospel away and they replaced it with
Geoffrey Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain.
I love where this is going. Gerald writes that
the demons didn't just return, they swarmed.
They came back in greater numbers than ever before,
covering not just Myler's body but the book itself,
hanging off it, sitting on it, rejoicing for
longer and with more celebration than ever. That
is absolutely brutal. It is the ultimate literary
burn. He is saying, no uncertain terms, that
Geoffrey's book is the anti -gospel. It is so
full of lies that it acts as a magnet for the
forces of hell. And yet, despite the demons,
despite the academic critics, the book survived.
It didn't just survive. It thrived. Because the
people in power, the Norman and later Plantagenet
kings of England, loved it. It gave them a historical
precedent for ruling over the whole island of
Britain. It became the official preferred version
of history. So it was politically useful. Enormously.
And it wasn't really until the Renaissance. with
the rise of new humanist scholarship, that the
bubble finally burst and people started to seriously
say, OK, maybe Brutus of Troy wasn't a real person.
So for 400 years, give or take, fiction became
fact. Yes, for a very long time. But this brings
us to the modern era. And usually this is the
part of the deep dive where we say, so modern
science and archaeology have proved it was all
fake. But we have a twist. We do. And that twist
is the Lost Voices of Celtic Britain project.
This was a study from 2017 led by an archaeologist
named Miles Russell at Bournemouth University.
And their findings are fascinating because they
suggest that Jeffrey wasn't just, you know, hallucinating
in his study in Oxford. He was doing something
more technical. Russell argues that Jeffrey was
acting as a compiler. He wasn't just inventing
names and events out of thin air. He was taking
very old, very garbled, mostly oral traditions
and trying to stitch them together into a coherent
story. How did they even begin to figure that
out? How can you prove something like that? They
did a kind of forensic analysis. They took the
names and events in Geoffrey's history, specifically
from the pre -Roman section, and they compared
them to the archaeological record of the British
Iron Age. And they found some incredible matches.
Give us an example. What matched up? Well, Geoffrey
talks about a whole series of kings who supposedly
ruled Britain long before the Romans ever showed
up. For centuries, historians just assumed these
names were completely made up, pure fantasy.
But Russell's team compared Geoffrey's list of
kings to the names that have been found stamped
on Iron Age coins that archaeologists have dug
up in southern England. Wait, actual physical
coins from the first century BC? Yes, exactly.
And the names matched. Geoffrey lists kings of
the Kituvalani and the Trunavantes tribes. Let's
pause on those tribes. Who were they? They sound
important. They were the superpowers of pre -Roman
Britain. They controlled most of the southeast,
what is now modern -day London, Hertfordshire,
Essex. These were the powerful kingdoms that
actually fought Julius Caesar when he invaded.
But after the full Roman conquest in 43 AD, their
specific history, their king lists, were largely
forgotten and overwritten by Roman history. But
somehow, Geoffrey knew their names a thousand
years later. He did. Which means he must have
had access to sources, most likely oral traditions,
bardic poems passed down for generations that
preserve those names. That is an incredible,
almost unbelievable thread of continuity. So
Jeffrey was right. The book is true. Well, this
is the crucial part. He was right about the names,
but he was completely wrong about the time. And
this is the key to understanding Geoffrey's method.
He had all the puzzle pieces, but he didn't have
the picture on the box lid. He didn't know the
chronology. He didn't know what order they came
in. Exactly. He has a story about a King Casalan
who fights Julius Caesar. That matches perfectly
with the historical Casalanus, who we know from
Caesar's own writings, fought him. So, check.
But then he has stories about other kings that
archaeologists know, from coin distributions,
belong in the 1st century AD or the 3rd century
AD. He doesn't know where they fit. So what does
he do with these names without a timeline? He
smooths it. That's the term Russell uses. Jeffrey
acts like a modern film editor with hours and
hours of disjointed footage. He cuts and pastes.
If he has a 50 -year gap in his timeline and
he has a random King story that doesn't have
a date attached to it, he just slots that King
into the gap to make the story flow. He remixes
history to create a single linear narrative.
Precisely. He creates a kind of Frankenstein's
monster of history. The limbs are real. They're
based on real historical figures. But he has
sewn them together in an order and a shape that
never actually existed in reality. This completely
changes how I see him. He's not a liar in that
case. He's a preserver. I mean, if he hadn't
done this smoothing, if he hadn't turned it into
this epic blockbuster story, those names, the
Ketuvallani Kings, they would have been lost
forever, wouldn't they? That is the great paradox
of Geoffrey of Monmouth. By corrupting the history,
he saved it. A dry, confusing list of names would
have been copied maybe once and then rotted in
a library. A grand, sweeping saga about King
Arthur and Merlin gets copied 200 times and translated
into every language in Europe. Let's talk about
one specific character where we can really see
this remixing happening in real time. Merlin.
Ah, Merlin. This is arguably Jeffrey's greatest
singular creation. Before Jeffrey, there wasn't
really a unified character called Merlin. There
were Welsh legends about a prophet named Merlin,
and there were other legends about wild men of
the woods, but Jeffrey is the one who combines
them. And he didn't just write about him in one
book. He actually wrote three different works,
and Merlin is central to at least two of them.
That's right. He wrote the Prophetiae Merlini,
the Prophecies of Merlin first, probably before
1135. And he often inserted this book right into
the middle of his main history. And what are
these prophecies like? They are wild. They are
just a series of obscure, cryptic, almost psychedelic
images. The boar of Cornwall shall give his aid.
The dragon of the West shall rise and bite the
tail of the bear. That kind of thing. So like
a Nostradamus prediction, vague enough to mean
anything. Exactly like a political horoscope.
They were incredibly popular because they were
so vague you could apply them to any current
event you wanted. But then years later, around
1150, Jeffrey writes a long poem called the Vita
Merlini, The Life of Merlin. OK. And the Merlin
in this poem is a completely different person
from the Merlin in the King Arthur story. Right.
In the Arthur story, the Historia, Merlin is
the court wizard. He's the political advisor,
the master strategist, the magical engineer who
builds Stonehenge. Yes. He's a high status political
operator. He's at the center of power. But in
the Vita Merlini. The character is called Merlinus
Silvestris Merlin of the Woods. The wild man.
The wild man. He's a crazed, grief -stricken
old man who lives as an outcast in the Caledonian
forest in Scotland. He's not building castles.
He's talking to wolves and weeping about the
futility of war. He has basically gone mad from
the trauma of what he's seen on the battlefield.
That is a much darker, much more human character.
Why the discrepancy? Why would he write two completely
different versions? It seems that in the years
between writing the Historia and the Vita, Geoffrey
discovered new source material. He likely came
across the separate northern British traditions
of a wild prophet named Laeloken or Merdenweldt
in Welsh. And he realized his first version was
incomplete. He realized, uh -oh, there is this
whole other major tradition about a prophet,
but it doesn't match the powerful court wizard
I wrote about in my bestseller. He found a continuity
error in his own literary universe. Exactly.
So the Vita Merlini is his attempt to fix it.
It's a synchronization effort. He writes this
new story where he tries to explain that the
wild man of the woods is just the court wizard
later in his life after he suffered a breakdown.
He's retconning the folklore to make it all fit
into one single biography. It shows he really
cared about the canon. He wasn't just throwing
random stories at the wall. He was trying to
create a unified field theory of British legend.
He wanted it to be consistent. And he succeeded
in the long run. The Merlin we have today, the
one in T .H. White's The Once and Future King,
the one in Disney's The Sword in the Stone, is
a blend of Jeffrey's two distinct versions, the
wise political tutor and the eccentric nature
-loving wizard. Speaking of pop culture, the
legacy here is just immense. We've touched on
it, but it's worth restating it clearly. Without
Geoffrey of Monmouth, do we even have King Arthur?
Not in any form we would recognize. We might
have had a few obscure references to a soldier
or warlord named Arthur in some old Welsh poetry,
but we would not have the king. We wouldn't have
the grand court, the European conquest, the epic
romance. He provides the entire narrative framework.
And the chain reaction from that is just incredible.
Geoffrey writes his Latin history. Then a poet
named Weiss translates it into Norman French
and adds the round table. Right. The round table
isn't even in Geoffrey's original. Then another
poet, Leamon, translates that into Middle English.
Then centuries later, Sir Thomas Mallory compiles
all these stories into Le Morte d 'Arthur. Then
in the 20th century, T. E .H. White writes The
Once and Future King. It is a direct literary
lineage, and you can argue it goes even further.
A show like Game of Thrones, the whole idea of
a complex pseudo -historical struggle for a throne
that involves magic, prophecies, and dragons,
that narrative DNA goes straight back to Geoffrey
of Monmouth. There is even a brilliant little
nod to him in the BBC series Merlin from a few
years back, isn't there? Yes. The character Geoffrey
of Monmouth is the court librarian and historian
in Camelot. It's a lovely, very clever meta joke
by the writers, acknowledging that he is, in
essence, the keeper of all these stories. So
as we wrap this up, I'm left thinking about the
nature of history itself. We started this deep
dive by asking if he was a liar or a historian.
And I think we found he is a bit of both and
maybe something else entirely. He's a storyteller.
I mean, we live in an age now where we have access
to so much data. We can look up the carbon dating
of an Iron Age hill fort. We can see the truth
in its driest, most fragmented form. We can.
We know the raw facts better than Jeffrey ever
could have. But Jeffrey offered something that
raw facts can't offer. He offered a narrative.
He connected the dots and created a single, powerful
story. That is the enduring power of the Historia.
A list of dates is just data. A story about a
noble king who rises, unites his people, conquers
his enemies, and then tragically falls. That
is meaning. Geoffrey understood that nations
need meaning. They need a story to tell themselves
about where they come from, even if that origin
story is partly invented. He gave Britain a soul,
in a way, even if he had to borrow that soul
from ancient Troy. He held up a mirror to the
people of 12th century Britain. And even though
the reflection was enhanced, you know, made taller,
stronger, more heroic than reality, they looked
into it and they liked what they saw. They decided
to believe the story because the story made them
feel like they mattered on the world stage. So
the final provocative thought for you to take
away today is this. In your own life, or in how
you view the world, how much do you value the
messy, broken, unconnected facts? And how much
do you crave that smooth narrative? the story
that makes sense of it all, even if, like Jeffrey's
ancient book, some of the connections are a little
bit creative. It's the age -old choice between
the truth and the legend. As they say in that
old John Ford Western, the man who shot Liberty
Valance, when legend becomes fact, print the
legend. Jeffrey of Monmouth printed the legend.
He certainly did. Thanks for diving deep with
us today. My pleasure. We'll catch you on the
next one.