SOURCE: “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd,” in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, edited by Rachel Bromwich et al., University of Wales Press, 1991, pp. 97-116.

In the following essay, Roberts considers the conception, planning, and design of The History of the Kings of Britain.

The early history of the Britons appears to have been Geoffrey of Monmouth's sole literary or ‘scholarly’ interest, inasmuch that the two, perhaps three, works associated with his name are narratives of pre-Saxon Britain and of the English conquest. His earliest book was probably the Prophetiae Merlini which seems to have been issued a few years before his major work, Historia Regum Britanniae. The Prophetiae are incorporated into the Historia as Book VII, but as this section retains its own dedication to Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, to whom no copies of the complete...