Layamon

At sixteen-thousand lines long, Layamon's Brut, written c.1200-1220, is the second longest poem in the English language. This national epic celebrates a myth, largely invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Historia (1138) and elaborated by the Jerseyman Wace (1155), of a Britain founded by Trojan refugees, repeatedly beset by foreign invasions and internal treachery across the centuries, triumphantly unified under such heroes as Uther Pendragon and Arthur. It marks the revival of English literature, breaking the virtual silence which followed the last entries in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, and the beginnings of an Arthurian tradition which was to lead to Malory, to Tennyson and on to our own age. Here, for the first time in eight centuries, the poem is published complete and fully edited with modern punctuation and paragraphing. The text is accompanied by textual notes and commentary which take account of the most recent scholarship, and is presented in parallel with a close, literal translation. Unique to this edition, textual divisions expose the thematic structure of the work.

Layamon's Brut (ca. 1190-1215), also known as The Chronicle of Britain, is a Middle English poem compiled and recast by the English priest Layamon.

"This version of Brut is a rendering into modern English, in verse format, of the Middle English story of Britain, from its founding by the legendary Brutus, a supposed descendant of the Trojans, to the final loss of land and prestige when the Saxons took over Britain. Lawman, a priest in the Welsh Marches in the diocese of Worcester, was translating from the twelfth-century French octosyllabic couplets of Wace, who came from Jersey and was himself translating Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin prose. Lawman's narrative poem, probably written in the first quarter of the thirteenth-century, is a compound of chronicle, romance, saint's life and sermon." -- Book jacket flap.