Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, Line 6460: What Gaimar did with the Books of the Welsh

Abstract

Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (c.1137), the earliest extant Old French chronicle, originally combined translations from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The former section of Gaimar’s text, translating the HRB and conventionally known as the Estoire des Bretuns, is now lost. But the HRB, or at least a translation made for Earl Robert of Gloucester ‘solum les livres as Waleis’ (l. 6451; according to the books of the Welsh), features prominently in the remarkable list of sources given in the epilogue to Gaimar’s Estoire that uniquely survives in the early fourteenth-century London, British Library, Royal MS 13 A XXI. The passage describing Gaimar’s additions to the HRB has long proved problematic. In his excellent edition, Ian Short renders the lines in question as follows: ‘Geffrei Gaimar cel livre escri[s]t / [e] les transsa[n]dances i mist / ke li Waleis ourent leissé’ (ll. 6459–61), which he translates as: ‘Geffrei Gaimar made a written copy of this book and added to it the supplementary material that the Welsh had omitted’. The crucial term, seemingly reading ‘transsadanfes’ in the manuscript (fol. 149v) as seen in Figure 1, is hard to make out due to scribal corrections. Short probably correctly takes f to be the result of a c superimposed onto long s. His further emendation to ‘transsa[n]dances’, translated as ‘supplementary material’, then produces a reading that is in line with previous suppositions of what the term must mean in context. I believe, however, that there may be a more likely reading of the term that does not require further emendation, and which results in a slight shift in meaning that provides a better perspective on the Estoire’s historiographical stance.