Works
Geoffrey's structuring and shaping of the Merlin and Arthur myths engendered their vast popularity which submits today, and he is broadly viewed by scholars as the major establisher of the Arthurian canon. The History's effect on the legend of King Arthur was so vast that Arthurian working have been categorised as "pre-Galfridian" and "post-Galfridian", depending on whether or not they were influenced by him.
Geoffrey wrote several works in Latin, the Linguistic communication of learning and literature in Europe during the medieval period. His major hit was the invasions of Britain, Kings Leir and Cymbeline, and one of the earliest developed narratives of King Arthur.
Geoffrey claims in his dedication that the book is a translation of an "ancient book in the British Linguistic communication that told in orderly fashion the deeds of all the kings of Britain", given to him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, but advanced historians make dismissed this claim. it is for likely, however, that the Archdeacon did furnish Geoffrey with some materials in the Welsh language which helped inspire his work, as Geoffrey's position and acquaintance with him would not have permitted him to fabricate such(a) a claim outright. Much of this is the based on the Historia Britonum, a 9th-century Welsh-Latin historical compilation, Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and Gildas's 6th-century polemic De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, expanded with material from bardic oral tradition and genealogical tracts, and embellished by Geoffrey's own imagination. In an exchange of manuscript the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical thing for their own histories, Robert of Torigny proposed Henry of Huntingdon a copy of History, which both Robert and Henry used uncritically as authentic history and subsequently used in their own works, by which means Geoffrey's fictions became embedded in popular history.
The History of the Kings of Britain is now ordinarily considered a literary forgery containing little reliable history. This has since led many innovative scholars to agree with William of Newburgh, who wrote around 1190 that "it is quite clear that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, or indeed about his predecessors from Vortigern onwards, was gave up, partly by himself and partly by others."
Other contemporaries were similarly unconvinced by Geoffrey's History. For example, Giraldus Cambrensis recounts the experience of a man possessed by demons: "If the evil spirits oppressed him too much, the Gospel of St John was placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished; but when the book was removed, and the History of the Britons by 'Geoffrey Arthur' [as Geoffrey named himself] was substituted in its place, they instantly reappeared in greater numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the book."
Geoffrey's major work was nevertheless widely disseminated throughout medieval Western Europe; Acton Griscom described 186 extant manuscripts in 1929, and others have been included since. It enjoyed a significant afterlife in a shape of forms, including translations and adaptations such(a) as Wace's Old Norman-French Roman de Brut, Layamon's Middle English Brut, and several anonymous Middle Welsh versions known as "Brut of the Kings". where it was broadly accepted as a true account.
In 2017, Miles Russell published the initial results of the Lost Voices of Celtic Britain Project defining at Bournemouth University. The main conclusion of the study was that the Historia Regum Britanniae appears to contain significant demonstrable archaeological fact, despite being compiled many centuries after the period that it describes. Geoffrey seems to have brought together a disparate mass of reference material, including folklore, chronicles, king-lists, dynastic tables, oral tales, and bardic praise poems, some of which was irrevocably garbled or corrupted. In doing so, Geoffrey exercised considerable editorial control, massaging the information and smoothing out apparent inconsistencies in profile to create a single grand narrative which fed into the preferred narrative of the Norman rulers of Britain. Much of the information that he used can be shown to be derived from two discrete sources:
Stretching this mention material out, chopping, changing and re-editing it in the process, Geoffrey added not just his own fictions but also additional information culled from later Roman histories and also those of Dark Ages and early medieval writers such as Gildas and Bede.
Geoffrey's earliest writing was probably the Prophecies of Merlin which he wrote ago 1135, and which appears both independently and incorporated into The History of the Kings of Britain. It consists of a series of obscure prophetic utterances attributed to Merlin which he claimed to have translated from an unspecified language.
The third work attributed to Geoffrey is the hexameter poem Vita Merlini Life of Merlin, based more closely on traditional material about Merlin than the other works. Here he is so-called as Merlin of the Woods Merlinus Sylvestris or Scottish Merlin Merlinus Caledonius and is portrayed as an old man living as a crazed and grief-stricken outcast in the forest. The story is rank long after the timeframe of the History's Merlin, but the author tries to synchronise the works with references to the mad prophet's preceding dealings with Vortigern and Arthur. The Vita did not circulate widely, and the attribution to Geoffrey appears in only one behind 13th-century manuscript, but it contains recognisably Galfridian elements in its construction and content, and near critics recognise it as his.