Layamon's Brut and the March of Wales: Merlin, his Prophecies, and the Lex Marchia

This study explores Layamon's engenderment of cultural unification for the explicit purposes of an Anglo-Welsh cultural resistance to the Norman overlords in the March of Wales. In essence, I examine some of the most important cultural signifiers in medieval English and Welsh culture and the methods by which the poet adapts and grafts them together to form a culturally amalgamated text—neither explicitly English nor Welsh but yet simultaneously both - and the political implications of this amalgamation. Though Laymon's methodology emanates from multiple aspects of the text, I have concentrated here on what I feel are the most explicit manifestations of this theme: Merlin, his prophecies, and the Law of the March.