Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Joshua Byron Smith

II’s court, found a fruitful partner in French-language literature. In terms of genre and style, influence sometimes flowed from French to Latin, in reverse of the normal medieval pattern.¹⁵³ And Latin literature could easily become a vehicle for romance or for other genres more closely associated with the vernacular.¹⁵⁴ Even though Walter wrote his romances in Latin, they display a consistent and unmistakable engagement with contemporary vernacular literature.

      Reconstructing a Literary Reputation

      Literary reputations are admittedly difficult to reconstruct, with opinions shifting depending on geography, chronology, and audience. Even so, the reputation that the Lancelot-Grail Cycle imagines for Walter—a writer with connections to Wales (thus ancient Britain) and to romance—agrees with several facets of Walter’s own work. He presented himself as an expert on the Welsh, and he wrote romances. These two elements alone would have been enough to make Walter a plausible auctoritas for the Cycle, but another factor doubtlessly helped to cement his inclusion: his presence at the court of Henry II. It may be that Henry II’s patronage of Arthurian literature was in reality less than has been commonly thought, but regardless of the king’s actual involvement (or not) in the literary culture surrounding his court, the numerous references to Henry and Eleanor as patrons of literature show that, in the popular imagination at the very least, they are strongly associated with romance.¹⁵⁵ The compilers of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle believed this association to be important: twice, the Cycle invokes Henry II alongside Walter Map.¹⁵⁶ Thus, for an early thirteenth-century reader, invoking Walter Map could call to mind at least three elements strongly linked to Arthurian literature: Henry II’s court, romance, and Wales.

      Walter Map may not have written a true Arthurian romance—at least one that survives—but that does not mean that he had no interest in ancient Britain. Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate that Walter made use of Welsh literary material and that he could also write imaginative and clever literature set in ancient Britain. However, before exploring these aspects of Walter’s work, this book must address a larger critical problem looming over Walter Map—his reputation for carelessness. Indeed, the incongruity of Walter’s modern reputation as an unfocused author with the extended narrative of the Cycle has been one of the major reasons that critics believe Walter Map to be a poor or ironic choice for an auctoritas. He seems to have lacked the attention to detail necessary to complete such a long work. The next two chapters show that this view of Walter is mistaken.

       Chapter 2

      Works Frozen in Revision

      Walter Map’s De nugis curialium survives in a state of textual disarray. In the midst of sections that seem to have been written in the early 1180s, the work occasionally references events that occurred much later, making the internal chronology difficult to accept. Henry II is alive, then dead, then alive once again. Similarly, the De nugis curialium at one point references two “Bretons, about whom more is told above.”¹ Yet, this passage refers to episodes that occur later in the work and not earlier. The rubricated chapter headings occasionally lapse into descriptions that are dull or vague even for the workaday conventions of medieval headings: in a book full of marvelous, otherworldly creatures and miracle-working saints, headings such as “a wonder” or “another wonder” offer little help to readers searching for specific passages. Moreover, the rubricated chapter headings almost disappear entirely toward the end of the work, with several folios having no chapter headings whatsoever. Curiously, the last chapter of the De nugis curialium ends with what the headings call “a recapitulation of the beginning of this book, differing in expression but not substance.”² This recapitulation, however, does not echo the beginning of the book in an artistic fashion—as does the funereal ending of Beowulf, for example—but appears to be merely a different version of the book’s first several chapters, maybe even their first draft. Several other doublets exist in the work as well, which gives the peculiar effect that Walter is at times plagiarizing himself. But perhaps the greatest oddity is that, set roughly in the middle of the work, distinctio 4 begins with a prologue that its editors think is meant for the entire book, and immediately following this invasive prologue lies an equally invasive epilogue. It, too, seems to have been meant for the whole of the work, according to the editors at least. Strange things are certainly afoot in the textual history of the De nugis curialium.

      It is therefore hard to disagree with the characterization of the De nugis curialium as an “inchoate book,” of its content as “miscellaneous and unedited,” and of its structure as “jumbled and irregular.”³ It is frequently likened to a commonplace book, laden with personal recollections, topical folktales, fiery invective, and whatever else seems to have struck Walter’s fancy at any given point over the span of a decade or two. Indeed, Walter himself seems to confirm the desultory nature of its composition when he writes, “I have written this little book by snatches on loose sheets at the court of King Henry.”⁴ This remark, coupled with the imperfect textual state of the De nugis curialium, has all but cemented the work’s status as the product of a harried courtier who only took the time to craft a relatively unconnected series of short narratives and vignettes, without any consideration of a larger plan. In this account, the De nugis curialium is a piecemeal work for piecemeal reading.

      The confused manuscript of the De nugis curialium has also been taken, unjustly as I hope to show, as evidence for a confused mind. James Hinton, who did much to explain the text, warned against the tendency to equate Walter’s intellect and the sole manuscript of the De nugis curialium, which was written some two centuries after his death: “whether Walter Map had originally a plan, or not, the crudities manifest in the disposition of materials are not due to the author’s slovenliness or mental incoherence so much as to the fact that he never completed his editing, but left his materials fragmentary and unpublished.”⁵ This plea, however, has largely passed unheeded.⁶ Indeed, in reading scholarship on Walter, it takes little time to realize that “dismissive remarks on the nature of Walter’s achievement are the rule.”⁷ Frederick Tupper and Marbury Ogle thought of Walter “as a gentleman, an amateur rather than as a professional author.”⁸ M. R. James believed Walter incapable of organization and driven by impulse: “As to the plan and date of the de Nugis, nothing can be clearer than that there is no plan, and that the work was jotted down at various times, as the fancy struck the author.”⁹ He also believed Walter guilty of a serious literary transgression—“he did not always know very clearly the meaning of the words he used.”¹⁰ Walter’s wide-ranging interests have at times been seen as a fault, rather than the mark of a dynamic mind. He is “an author who struggled to exercise control over his highly varied material.”¹¹ And some of his stories “reveal to us a Map both critical and credulous, divided between reason and irrationality.”¹² Ian Short simply calls him “indescribable.”¹³ David Knowles, who may have felt the sting of Walter’s anti-monastic satire too keenly, was no great fan, saying he “lacked both balance of mind and ethical sobriety.”¹⁴ Walter’s most recent editors also imply that he lacked sobriety, but not of the ethical sort: “The De nugis curialium was the commonplace-book of a great after-dinner speaker; and if one is entirely sober when one reads it, it is easily misunderstood.”¹⁵ Most scholarship on Walter leaves the impression that if he were alive today, he might make a superb blogger: quick with a witty anecdote, an expert aggregator of popular culture, and given to passionate first impressions. The studied discipline of a novelist, however, would elude him.

      This chapter and the next reevaluate both the textual state of the De nugis curialium and Walter’s critical reputation. In this chapter, I show that Walter sometimes revised his earlier work and that he did so with meticulous care. And in the next, I argue that medieval readers, and not Walter Map, are responsible for the idea that the De nugis curialium should be considered a single, unified work. The title of the work and its