Historia Regum Britanniae - Sources

Sources

See also: Brut y Brenhinedd#Brut Tysilio and Geoffrey's putative British source

Geoffrey claimed to have translated the Historia into Latin from "a very ancient book in the British tongue", given to him by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. However, few modern scholars take this claim seriously. Much of the work appears to be derived from Gildas's 6th century polemic The Ruin of Britain, Bede's 8th century Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the 9th century History of the Britons ascribed to Nennius, the 10th century Welsh Annals, medieval Welsh genealogies (such as the Harleian Genealogies) and king-lists, the poems of Taliesin, the Welsh tale Culhwch and Olwen, and some of the medieval Welsh Saint's Lives, expanded and turned into a continuous narrative by Geoffrey's own imagination.

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