History
De Ortu Waluuanii survives in a single early-14th-century Medieval Latin manuscript believed to be a copy of an earlier work. J. D. Bruce and Roger Sherman Loomis suggested that the romance dates to the 13th century, though details of costume and ship construction suggest an earlier date. However, it was written after Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae of the mid-12th century, as it borrows passages and plots from that work.
Catalog tradition, as recorded by John Bale, lists the author as Robert of Torigny, abbot of Mont Saint-Michel from 1154 to 1186. However, no other evidence supports this assertion, though the real author must have been an educated man and was likely a cleric. The author composed another Latin romance, the Historia Meriadoci or The Story of Meriadoc.
While the primary basis for John Bale's suggestion that Robert of Torigni might have been the author of these two romances was the signature of the author—a single letter "R"—Peter Larkin has suggested several reasons why the anonymous author was more likely to have been Ranulf Higden. Higden, an early fourteenth century monk and chronicler, is chronologically far more plausible a candidate and also he was known to sign his works with a single letter "R" while Robert of Torigni was not.
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