w

Wace's Brut is a key text in Arthurian studies, for it is among the earliest works to introduce Celtic matter into French. His principal source, since he could not immediately locate a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, may have been the Britannici sermonis liber vetustissimus (possibly by the archdeacon Walter of Oxford), composed in the early 1130s to ingratiate the Celtic part of the population with the new Norman overlords by stressing the Britons' claim to Britain, tracing its history back to the Trojans, in particular to Aeneas, with the help of early Welsh chronicles and Nennius. According to these sources, Aeneas's great-grandson Brutus led the Trojans out of Greek captivity to Britain « Brytt < Brutus, by popular etymology). It was this text that Geoffrey of Monmouth subse-

quently reworked into his prose Historia (ca. 1138) and that was then expanded by Wace into some 15,000 Old French octosyllabic lines. Wace's text is extant in eighteen complete manuscript copies and several fragments.