Note to GunnLeif Merl I 48VIII
[All]: Cf. DGB 113 (Reeve and Wright 2007, 147.75-6; cf. Wright 1988, 103, prophecy 9): et reliquiae generationis eius decimabuntur. Iugum perpetuae seruitutis ferent matremque suam ligonibus et aratris uulnerabunt ‘And the remnants of its generation will be decimated. They will bear the yoke of unending slavery and wound their mother with hoes and ploughs’ (Reeve and Wright 2007, 146). Under the Conqueror’s rule the leading English landowners, both secular and ecclesiastical, were supplanted by Normans (Stenton 1971, 680-1). This subjugation of the English was a key element in what Curley (1982, 219) terms ‘the supposed progressive unfolding of the spes Britannorum’ (‘hope of the Britons’). Gunnlaugr tones down the maternal imagery and the notion of slavery but plays up the treachery of the white snake, i.e. the Saxon occupiers of Britain.
References
- Bibliography
- Reeve, Michael D., and Neil Wright. 2007. Geoffrey of Monmouth. The History of the Kings of Britain. An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia regum Britanniae]. Woodbridge: Boydell.
- Wright, Neil, ed. 1988. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. II. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
- Stenton, F. M. 1971. Anglo-Saxon England. 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon.
- Curley, Michael J. 1982. ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’. Speculum, 217-49.