Brutus of Troy: And the Quest for the Ancestry of the British

Just who did the British think they were? For much of the last 1,500 years, when the British looked back to their origins they saw the looming mythological figure of Brutus of Troy. A great-great-grandson of the love goddess Aphrodite through her Trojan son Aeneas (the hero of Virgil's Aeneid), Brutus accidentally killed his father and was exiled to Greece. He liberated the descendants of the Trojans who lived there in slavery and led them on an epic voyage to Britain. Landing at Totnes in Devon, Brutus overthrew the giants who lived in Britain, laid the foundations of Oxford University and London and sired a long line of kings, including King Arthur and the ancestors of the present Royal Family.Invented to give Britain a place in the overarching mythologies of the Classical world and the Bible, Brutus's story long underpinned the British identity and played a crucial role in royal propaganda and foreign policy. His story inspired generations of poets and playwrights, including Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Dickens and Blake, whose hymn 'Jerusalem' was a direct response to the story of Brutus founding London as the New Troy in the west. Leading genealogist Anthony Adolph traces Brutus's story from Roman times onwards, charting his immense popularity and subsequent fall from grace, along with his lasting legacy in fiction, pseudo-history and the arcane mythology surrounding some of London's best-known landmarks, in this groundbreaking biography of the mythological founder of Britain

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On his last book, In Search of Our Ancient Ancestors, Anthony Adolph gave us a long view of genealogy, exploring the pedigree of the human race, and the British in particular, since primeval times. This book is a sequel in a sense, but now moves away from what science and history have told us into more mythological territory, to explore what might be described as the ‘psychological ancestry’ of the British. Here the story begins with the legendary figure of Brutus, whom the 9th century chronicler Nennius claimed gave his name to our islands. His account, as with so much of our earliest ‘history’, was then much embellished by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century. The result is a fascinating account of how the British people have mythologised themselves as ‘New Trojans’ – although Brutus (whom nobody today claims as a historical figure) is himself generally forgotten today, his legacy is certainly with us, every time we sing Jerusalem or visit a place claimed to be linked to King Arthur. READ IT FOR: A unique exploration of the ancient foundations of being British.
Your Family History magazine UK March 2016