The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 03, 2025


PREVIEW： Epochs #222 ｜ Geoffrey of Monmouth

Topics
Geoffrey of Monmouth dissertation
Hosted by
Callum Edmunds Carl Benjamin Connor Tomlinson Harry Robinson John Wheatley Joshua Ferme Edward McLaren Elizabeth Heverin
Mentioned
Geoffrey King Arthur Britons Brutus Walter Mapp Historia Recyne Brittany Joffrey St Charles Omar Elizabeth Hatherin Tintagel Castle Empress Matilda Gareth Knight Miles Russell Jacob Castro Owen Grenard Robin Hood Constantine Shakespeare Arthurian Fortigan and 8 more
PREVIEW： Chronicles #8 ｜ Lysistrata By Aristophanes PREVIEW： Realpolitik #7 ｜ Money and Geopolitics with Albert Marco

Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

150.15

Word count

2,593

Sentence count

221

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of Epochs, I am joined by Elizabeth Hatherin to discuss the history of King Arthur and the early kings of England, Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Early Kings of England and King Arthur.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this episode of Epochs where we shall be talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth,
00:00:18.280 the history of the early kings of England and King Arthur and I am joined by returning guest
00:00:22.680 Elizabeth Hatherin. How are you? Hello I'm doing well thank you. Good good. So first of all how did
00:00:28.420 you first come across Geoffrey of Monmouth? I visited Tintagel Castle in Cornwall with my
00:00:34.480 grandparents which is the birthplace of King Arthur. Allegedly. According to legend. When you're there
00:00:43.060 you feel that there's something extremely enchanting about it and it has that same appeal that places
00:00:49.620 like Stonehenge and Stone Circles have and in Glastonbury for example but I went into the
00:00:56.520 bookstore. My granddad pointed out a book and it was the history of the kings of Britain and he
00:01:01.200 said this is the man that popularized the legends of King Arthur but most people think he just made
00:01:07.080 it up and so I bought his book and I wrote my dissertation at university on Historia Recyne
00:01:14.140 Brittany talking about how I believe it was a moral exemplar created by well written down by Geoffrey of
00:01:25.460 Monmouth in order to warn his Anglo-Norman Contributes about the dangers of infighting.
00:01:32.140 Right okay. Yeah. That's interesting. I've never asked you what did you do at uni then? Did you do medieval history or?
00:01:37.460 History and politics. Oh right. I ended up specializing in medieval history. Oh right. Okay, cool.
00:01:42.140 Yeah. Interesting because most people, if you haven't studied it, even history nerds may well not even have heard of Geoffrey of Monmouth I think.
00:01:49.460 Quite a lot of people would never have heard of him. So okay, before we get stuck into the Arthurian legend because I think that's the best bit isn't it?
00:01:58.460 It's the most interesting bit, certainly the most famous bit. Let's just talk about him and the book in general a bit first.
00:02:06.140 So I think it's fair to say, I wonder if you disagree and if you do to what extent, to say that it's a pseudo history.
00:02:15.140 It's not firm history in the sense of, I don't know, St Charles Omar or something or even Bede or something like that.
00:02:25.140 It's a pseudo history. I mean, people do argue about it and disagree whether it's largely reliable or complete fiction.
00:02:34.140 I was listening to someone the other day that described it as a tissue of fables, they called it.
00:02:42.140 So I think it's clearly, when you read it, to me anyway, it's clearly a mixture of real things, verifiable things and things that just aren't true or aren't correct.
00:02:54.140 They cannot be. So it's a mixture of the two. What's your thoughts and feelings about it?
00:02:59.140 I think it comes from a misunderstanding of how early medieval writers feud history.
00:03:05.140 So just to stop you there, for anyone who doesn't know, Geoffrey of Monmouth states are, it's the 12th century, right?
00:03:10.140 He's writing at some point between the 1130s to 1150s, sometime in there. So 12th century, first half of the 12th century.
00:03:16.140 He completes his book in 1136 AD.
00:03:19.140 Right. Okay. So that's in the middle of the anarchy, isn't it?
00:03:21.140 Yeah. Yeah, it is. Which is why the book is so important.
00:03:25.140 Because he's writing it to Robert, the bastard son of Henry the first. 0.80
00:03:32.140 Jacob Custer. 0.99
00:03:33.140 Yeah. And the half sister, sorry, half brother to Matilda.
00:03:40.140 But people, we view history today as objective, as a factual truth of the past.
00:03:49.140 But the way that medieval, early medieval historians viewed it was as a moral exemplar.
00:03:54.140 I've got some quotes here, but by writers such as Henry of Huntington and William of Marsbury, who wrote during the same time as Geoffrey.
00:04:04.140 And also dedicated their works to the same audience, such as Henry of Huntington to Matilda.
00:04:10.140 He writes, the purpose of this work is so that the attentive reader will find what to emit and what to reject.
00:04:18.140 And if by God's help, he became a better person for this, that will be for me the reward I most desire.
00:04:24.140 So it was the way that early medieval historians viewed history was to provide us moral lessons.
00:04:32.140 But when it comes to Geoffrey, what he's doing is he's putting on paper the oral traditions of the Britons, which has been passed down via the word of mouth.
00:04:46.140 And he talks about this mysterious book he's found and he's given, which historians don't know what it is.
00:04:52.140 Maybe it's Nennius' work.
00:04:54.140 Well, his work is filled with tons of references to Nennius, what Nennius wrote in his work in the ninth century.
00:05:02.140 And it's also filled with tons of references to St. Gildas, who's also known as the, his book is also known as the complaining book,
00:05:11.140 because it's this sermon talking about how the Britons have fallen from their glory and God has punished them for their sins.
00:05:17.140 And Gareth Knight in his book, I've got his book here, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend,
00:05:27.140 which goes into the esoteric knowledge of King Arthur. He makes the point about Geoffrey, which I agree with,
00:05:33.140 is that his work was translating stories that would have been told around the fireplace,
00:05:39.140 would have been told in courts by bards of our early founding history, such as Brutus of Troy, which Nennius also makes reference to. 0.86
00:05:48.140 So I believe that when people say that Geoffrey is making up his history,
00:05:54.140 their misunderstanding that the history of the Britons was all a tradition and that therefore it was made mystical by them.
00:06:02.140 They would have exaggerated their stories. They would have added esoteric elements,
00:06:07.140 which you later see with the French adaptions of King Arthur when they had the Holy Grail and the sword and the stone and the lady of the lake.
00:06:13.140 We'll get to that.
00:06:15.140 So in a way, I like to think that Geoffrey of Monimus' work is really for medieval audiences what The Lord of the Rings is for us today.
00:06:27.140 Interesting.
00:06:29.140 But he believes, and I don't think there's any reasonable grounds to say that he's making things up.
00:06:36.140 I think he is putting down on paper that which the Britons have told one another.
00:06:43.140 Right. But I mean, the oral tradition is unreliable.
00:06:46.140 I used to talk about, like, Lord of the Rings, I think more like Homer.
00:06:50.140 So if you take a firm, solid historian like Thucydides and you compare him to, say, Homer, one is a history and one is oral tradition.
00:07:02.140 So take it for what it is.
00:07:05.140 I mean, for example, for example, there's one bit where he mentions Constantine's mother, Helena,
00:07:12.140 and that she was British, like a British noble.
00:07:15.140 I mean, that's just flatly wrong. That's just incorrect.
00:07:18.140 So just one tiny, tiny example.
00:07:21.140 Or the idea of Rotus of Troy.
00:07:24.140 I mean, that's not firm history, right?
00:07:27.140 It's supposed to be the grandson of Aeneas or something.
00:07:31.140 So much more Iliad than Thucydides, right?
00:07:36.140 Yeah, but the oral tradition also tells us how the Britons thought about themselves.
00:07:40.140 Oh, yeah. I'm not saying it's not of any use.
00:07:42.140 Yeah.
00:07:43.140 I'm not saying it's not of any value.
00:07:44.140 Yeah.
00:07:45.140 I'm just saying it's not a firm historical fact, right?
00:07:48.140 Yeah.
00:07:49.140 They're two very different things.
00:07:51.140 It's like something like the history of Robin Hood or something.
00:07:56.140 It's wrong to say it's of no value or that it didn't mean something to people at the time, but it's not a firm historical foundation, right?
00:08:07.140 Mm-hm.
00:08:08.140 So there's things like that.
00:08:09.140 I mean, well, so you mentioned the book.
00:08:14.140 So the story goes that Walter Mapp came to him, the Archdeacon of Oxford, wasn't he?
00:08:20.140 Walter Mapp.
00:08:21.140 And he said, I found this book.
00:08:23.140 I think he claimed he found it somewhere in France.
00:08:26.140 But anyway, Walter Mapp comes to him.
00:08:28.140 He says, I've got this book and it's in ancient Britonic.
00:08:32.140 It's in an ancient Briton tongue.
00:08:35.140 And I want you to translate it into Latin.
00:08:38.140 Mm-hm.
00:08:39.140 So Geoffrey of Monmouth is really more of a compiler or a translator rather than a historian for a start, but anyway.
00:08:45.140 So it's not necessarily on him.
00:08:47.140 He's just claims to just translate this book he was given.
00:08:50.140 But now that book, that manuscript is lost to us, right?
00:08:55.140 It doesn't survive.
00:08:56.140 So we only have to go on what Geoffrey has said.
00:09:02.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:03.140 You know, there's no way to verify if that manuscript was ever real.
00:09:06.140 I think most serious scholars believe it was real.
00:09:09.140 That's not made up out of whole cloth.
00:09:11.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:12.140 That's not a lie or anything.
00:09:13.140 But we can't examine that.
00:09:15.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:16.140 We don't know what the sources for that were.
00:09:18.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:19.140 Or anything like that.
00:09:20.140 So the trail often ends or very nearly ends with, or begins, right?
00:09:25.140 With Geoffrey of Monmouth, right?
00:09:27.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:28.140 So a bit like the story begins with Herodotus, say.
00:09:31.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:32.140 So you can't go back any further and really say where he got that from.
00:09:36.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:37.140 Because that thread has been lost.
00:09:39.140 Mm-hm.
00:09:40.140 So, like, he'll say something like, he'll mention some king from before the Roman conquest.
00:09:46.140 And it's just a name to us.
00:09:48.140 We can't really marry it up with any archaeology or anything.
00:09:51.140 And there's no other source to go by it.
00:09:55.140 So it may or may not be true.
00:09:58.140 But that's also the sad reality of the Britons, is there wasn't any sources apart from Nennius.
00:10:03.140 Yeah.
00:10:04.140 But when you compare, like, Geoffrey's work to Nennius, it's telling the same history,
00:10:08.140 particularly when it comes to Brutus of Troy, which is mentioned in Nennius when it comes to Fortigan, King Arthur.
00:10:14.140 So, yeah, we know he borrows from Nennius, Gildas, Bede.
00:10:19.140 Mm-hm.
00:10:20.140 Yeah.
00:10:21.140 Right.
00:10:22.140 But Bede, for example, doesn't talk about Arthur.
00:10:24.140 Mm-hm.
00:10:25.140 Doesn't talk about...
00:10:26.140 He's talking about the history of the English people.
00:10:28.140 And that's what Geoffrey talks about in his prologue.
00:10:31.140 He says, I've written this because the Britons don't have their own book of their history.
00:10:36.140 The English do. 0.89
00:10:37.140 And the Normans have their own understanding of their past.
00:10:42.140 But the Britons have nothing apart from the oral tradition and a couple of sources.
00:10:47.140 And there's a really good book that I recommend that everyone reads.
00:10:50.140 And it's called Arthur and the Kings of Britain by Miles Russell.
00:10:53.140 And he's analysing the historical truth behind the myths.
00:10:56.140 And it's an interesting chapter where he compares what Geoffrey writes about Caesar's invasion to Caesar's own account.
00:11:06.140 Julius Caesar.
00:11:07.140 Yeah.
00:11:08.140 So he reckons that he had...
00:11:10.140 He may have had...
00:11:11.140 A lot of what he's writing down would have came from the Britons themselves.
00:11:16.140 But he may have actually had access to what Caesar also wrote down, which isn't mentioned in this prologue either.
00:11:22.140 And also, before the Romans come and he mentions all the kings and queens of Britain, historians reckon that he had access to maybe a table of all these names which he wrote together.
00:11:35.140 And that's the skill of Monomyth, is he weaves all the history together and fills in the gaps and makes it into one whole.
00:11:48.140 While also, and this is my own theory, is the reason he wrote the work at the time he did, when Henry the First's legitimate son dies in the white ship, the Sosta,
00:12:04.140 and tensions break out because there's no one to replace him apart from Matilda.
00:12:12.140 He writes it as a warning to Anglo-Norman contemporaries about the dangers of infighting in his time.
00:12:19.140 And the prophecies of Merlin is an example of that.
00:12:25.140 And he writes that he was originally planning to publish his story before he published the prophecies of Merlin.
00:12:31.140 But he says that rumours of Merlin started coming up from the Welsh and people started talking about what he said.
00:12:40.140 So he decided to publish the prophecies of Merlin first.
00:12:43.140 And the reason he did that was because the prophecies of Merlin is this massive warning to Normans that, hey, if you guys infight then the Britons will rise up and reclaim their land again.
00:13:00.140 I've got a great quote. He actually, he actually says, Normandy will lose both islands and be stripped of its former honour.
00:13:08.140 Then the natives will return to the island for strife. 1.00
00:13:11.140 Roll a wise among the foreigners. 1.00
00:13:12.140 Callidus will summon Canerius and make Scotland his ally. 0.99
00:13:16.140 Then the foreigners will be slaughtered. 1.00
00:13:18.140 The rivers flow with blood and the hills of Brittany burst forth and be crowned with Brutus's dominion.
00:13:24.140 Wales will be filled with rejoicing and the Cornish Oaks will flourish once more.
00:13:28.140 The island shall be called by Brutus's name and the foreign term will disappear.
00:13:32.140 And through that prophecy, he uses loads of coded language.
00:13:36.140 And people reckon that when he talks about the Lion of Justice, he's referring to Henry the First.
00:13:43.140 And he also...
00:13:45.140 The Lion of Justice.
00:13:46.140 Yeah, he also refers to the white ship, the Sostre, in the prophecy.
00:13:50.140 And at the time of the anarchy, it looked very likely that Scotland was...
00:13:57.140 Well, they were already sort of invading.
00:14:00.140 They launched an invasion in 1136.
00:14:07.140 And it looked like Owen Grenard was also going to reclaim parts of Wales.
00:14:12.140 So there was those two threats during that time.
00:14:16.140 And he makes reference to Scotland as well.
00:14:18.140 He writes, Albany will grow angry and calling her supporters, she will devote herself to bloodshed.
00:14:24.140 And he also references Empress Matilda, in which he writes,
00:14:27.140 The eagle of the broken covent shall gild it and rejoice in their fared nesting,
00:14:32.140 which is an allusion to the Civil War.
00:14:34.140 Right.
00:14:35.140 And it's not just the prophecies of Maryland.
00:14:38.140 Within Historia as a whole, what it actually represents is the cyclical history of the Britons.
00:14:47.140 They're constantly having moments of their golden age to then fall back into a civilizational winter throughout the history.
00:14:54.140 So Brutus of Troy, for example, represents the golden age of the Britons. 0.99
00:15:00.140 And he's this man of great virtue who finds the island and wipes out the giants.
00:15:05.140 And then after him, there's constant betrayal between the kings.
00:15:13.140 In one case, Joffrey mentions that one of the kings commits sodomy and is therefore a man of vice.
00:15:22.140 And the story of King Lear, which Shakespeare writes about, that represents the betrayal of his daughters.
00:15:34.140 The only daughter that loved him is expelled to France.
00:15:39.140 And then the Romans come. 0.99
00:15:41.140 And during Caesar's first invasion, the Britons defeat him.
00:15:51.140 And he goes back to Rome.
00:15:53.140 There's a great quote, actually, that I think represents the British character really well.
00:15:59.140 He writes,
00:16:01.140 And it shows how mighty that British spirit is.
00:16:13.140 It was in praise of them that the poet Lincoln described how Caesar in terror turned his back upon the Britons he had come to attack.
00:16:20.140 And it shows how mighty that British spirit is.
00:16:25.140 But the reason, and Joffrey argues that the reason the Britons actually fall and eventually defeated by Caesar is because after the victory of Caesar, they hold this mighty feast.
00:16:40.140 And someone's head is cut off in a duel.
00:16:45.140 And the king banishes the uncle of this person who's cut off this man's head.
00:16:52.140 And in anger, he goes to the Romans and sides with them and ambushes the tribe. 0.90
00:17:00.140 And that's how the Romans defeat the Britons. 0.98
00:17:04.140 And so it shows that through their own vices of envy, they lead to their own downfall.
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