Following the Path of the Lionheart: the De ortu Walwanii and the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi’

Abstract

The De Ortu Walwanii is a Latin prose romance, surviving in a single early fourteenth century manuscript, BM Cotton MS. Faustina B VI. The original date of composition is uncertain, and its main interest to scholars has been that it gives an account of the birth and childhood of Gawain, nephew of King Arthur. However, the work is clearly not simply a reworking of a French Arthurian romance: in particular, the long central episode in the story which describes the relief of the land of Jerusalem does not appear in any other known Arthurian romance. This article argues that the source of this long central episode is the journey of King Richard the Lionheart to the East in the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi: 'the events described are so similar that they could not have been conceived independently'. If this is the case, then the de Ortu must date from after 1222, when the Itinerarium Peregrinorum reached its present form.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.