On the date of the Dialog: a re-examinationof the date of composition of the earliest Arthurian poem in Middle Breton

Abstract

This article re-examines the date of the earliest surviving Arthurian poem in the Breton language, An Dialog etre Arzur, Roe d’an Bretounet, ha Guynglaff (‘The Dialogue between Arthur, King of the Bretons, and Guynglaff’). Traditionally, scholars of the poem have accepted 1450 – the year copied alongside the text in its sole manuscript version – as the Dialog’s date of composition. Hypotheses both that parts of the poem (thought to have existed in some form prior to 1450) were assembled at some stage around the mid- fifteenth century, and that the preserved text is the product of many layers of profound scribal manipulation, have also proved influential. The present article reassesses such theories, and examines the question of the poem’s date in the light of other textual, linguistic, and historical evidence. It concludes that the text was probably written in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion, and argues for an original date of composition at some point during the last decade of the sixteenth, or first few decades of the seventeenth, century.