‘Blisse wes on londe’: The Feeling of Peace in LaƷamon’s Brut

Abstract

LaƷamon’s Brut, a Worcestershire poem in English of about 16,000 lines, probably dates from the early thirteenth century, but strongly recalls late Anglo-Saxon in its vocabulary, rhythms and sound patterns.¹ It is an energetic adaptation of Wace’s mid-twelfth-century Roman de Brut, which in turn drew its material from a version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136). Much of the poem’s material is about civil war, enemy invasion, foreign conquest, and violent breakdown of the social order, but LaƷamon, more than Geoffrey or Wace, is also interested in peace, not just as an interlude between war episodes, but for its own sake. In a well-known speech by Gawain, amplified and deepened beyond its nature in Wace, the poem states:

for god is grið and god is frið pe freoliche per haldeð wið.

and Godd sulf hit makede purh his Godd-cunde.

for grið makeð godne mon gode workes wurchen.

for alle monnen bið pa bet pat lond bið pa murgre. (lines 12456–459)

[for peace and quiet are good if they are willingly kept, and God himself made peace through his divine nature, for peace makes a good man do good deeds; because all men benefit the land is the happier.]²

My object of study here is the poetic construction of the feeling of peace in LaƷamon. I start with Gawain’s speech because it brings together concisely several of the elements that matter when LaƷamon introduces a peace. They include: set terms like ‘grið’ and ‘frið’ (‘peace’/‘protection’ and ‘quiet’/‘freedom from trouble’); the notion that peace must be freely ‘held’ or ‘kept’; peace as a general condition of happiness and good in the people and the ‘land’; and peace’s connection with the divine.