There’s one important detail in Wace that doesn’t show up in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and that one detail may tell us something about where the Arthurian stories came from.
Wace, as I said, was translating Geoffrey’s History. But in those days a translation was a good bit less the slave of the original than it is today. Translators felt free to expand, paraphrase, summarize, and augment where they thought they could improve their sources. Wace in particular added one detail not found at all in Geoffrey, but one that would forever after be linked with King Arthur and his knights. After describing how Arthur brought all the greatest knights in the world to Camelot, Wace tells us that
For all these noble lords he brought
(Each one himself the better thought;
Each held himself to be the first,
And no one could say which was worst),
The king established that Round Table
Heard of in many a Breton fable.
Wace is usually credited with inventing the Round Table—but he claims no such credit for himself. On the contrary, he implies quite clearly that the Round Table is already well known:
The king established that Round Table
Heard of in many a Breton fable.
Here the Round Table is directly attributed to our prime suspects, the Bretons. We really have no reason to assume that Wace isn’t telling the truth: it was of no benefit to him to make a false attribution. (It’s true that “fable” is a good rhyme for “table,” in Old French as well as in English, but it would be easy to work in the word “fable” any number of ways without attributing the fables to the Bretons.)
The fact that the idea appears no earlier in the surviving literature does not mean that the idea was a new invention. So much of what was written down has been lost, and so much more was never written down at all, that we can only say that we don’t know of any earlier source. But if what Wace says is true, the Round Table was a well-known part of the setting in many of the Breton “lays”—short tales in song—about Arthur’s court.
So was there really a Round Table? Could that actually be a true historical tradition preserved by the Bretons?
King Arthur’s Round Table is one of the highlights of a visit to Winchester, but of course everyone knows that it’s a late-medieval forgery. As we often find, however, the truth is a bit more complicated than what everyone knows.
