Wace (fl. c. 1160 / 1174)

Roman de Rou

Wace, born in Jersey in c. 1100, studied in Caen and Paris. Under the Anglo-Norman kings he had the role of "clerc lisant" [reader cleric] from 1135 to 1170. King Henri II Plantagenet even granted him a prebend in Bayeux in c. 1165.

Wace attracted the attention of the royal court by publishing a number of works in the vernacular, especially a Vie de sainte Marguerite, [Life of St Marguerite], a Vie de saint Nicolas [Life of St Nicholas] and a Conception Notre-Dame [Conception of Our Lady]. In 1155 he published his Roman de Brut which he dedicated to Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine: this is a transposition into the Romance language (hence the term roman) of the work which Geoffrey of Monmouth had just published in Latin, the Historia regum Britanniae. Wace narrates the history of Great Britain, from the arrival of one Brutus (the eponymous hero of Brittany), a descendant of the Trojan Aeneas, up to the disappearance of King Arthur: this is the first work in French devoted to the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table.

In 1160 Wace undertook the composition of the Roman de Rou at the request of King Henri II. This "roman" of some 16,930 verses narrates the misdeeds of the Viking leader Hasting, the foundation of the Duchy of Normandy by Rollo / Rou and the story of the first Dukes up to the battle of Tinchebray in 1106. Wace frequently modified his project which he was ultimately unable to complete. It appears that King Henri II withdrew from him his confidence and suggested that Benoît de Sainte-Maure took on the task of composing the epic of the Dukes of Normandy. Wace transposed into French the Latin sources narrating the history of the Normans. For the first dukes he took his information from the Historia Normannorum by Dudon de Saint-Quentin and the Gesta Normannorum Ducum by Guillaume de Jumièges. For the history of William the Conqueror and the conquest of England, to which he devoted 6,400 verses, he drew his inspiration from Guillaume de Poitiers, Orderic Vital and William of Malmesbury. Wace sought to be both a historian faithful to his sources and also a poet conferring upon his narrative a more dramatic and story-like quality. The Roman de Rou is also an exceptional linguistic testament to the vernacular spoken in western France in the mid-12^th century.

Pierre Bouet
ouen - Office universitaire d'études normandes
Université de Caen

 

EDITIONS

- Vie de sainte Marguerite : E.A. Francis, Paris, 1932.
- Vie de saint Nicolas : E. Ronjö, Lund-Copenhague, 1972.
- Roman de Brut : I. Arnold, 2 vol., Paris, 1938-1940.
- Roman de Rou : J.A. Holden, 3 vol., Paris, 1970-1973 ; (extraits) R. Lepelley, Guillaume le duc, Guillaume le roi, Caen, 1987.

STUDIES

- Holmes, U.T. " Norman Literature and Wace ", Medieval Secular Literature. Four Essays, Berkeley et Los Angeles, 1965.
- Bennett, M. " Poetry as History ? The ‘Roman de Rou’ of Wace as a source for the Norman Conquest ", Anglo-Norman Studies 5, 1982, Woodbridge, 1983, p. 21-39.
- Van Houts, E. " The Adaptation of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum by Wace and Benoît ", Melanges W. Noomen, Groningue, 1984, p. 115-124.
- Delbouille, M. " Le témoignage de Wace sur la légende arthurienne ", Romania,1953, p. 172 sq.