All references to Le Roman de Brut will be taken from Judith Weiss, ed. Wace’s 1 Roman de Brut: A History of the British: Text and Translation (Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1999). My analysis has benefited greatly from the introduction and notes Weiss provides along with her text and translation. In order to explain why I refer to Wace’s language or dialect as ‘Norman French’ 2 rather than ‘Anglo-Norman,’ I quote from Dr. Weiss’ letter to me of September 13, 2004: “The crucial thing is that Wace was not ‘Anglo-Norman’ but Norman, and he wrote in Norman dialect. In the first half of the twelfth century this hardly differed from what was written in French in England, but as we reach the end of the twelfth century, things are beginning to diverge. But as Wace’s earliest manuscripts are no earlier than late twelfth century, they are in ‘Anglo-Norman,’ thus giving a slightly false picture of RE-EXAMINING WACE’S ROUND TABLE Lori J. Walters This essay re-examines Wace’s so-called ‘invention’ of the Round Table, the generally accepted notion that Wace’s description of Arthur’s Round Table in the Roman de Brut was one of his major additions to his source, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum brittaniae. My demonstration has three parts. In 1 the first, I present my hypothesis that Wace appropriated a round table associated with Charlemagne for his portrait of Arthur. In the second part, I give evidence supporting the idea that Wace drew upon Charlemagne’s earliest biographies, Einhard’s Vita Caroli and Notger’s De Carolo Magno, in developing his concept of the Round Table. In the third and final part, I show how Wace evinces an underlying allegiance to the ‘ideology of France’ that monks at the royal abbey of St-Denis had been articulating in the vernacular during the years immediately preceding his composition of Brut and Le Roman de Rou. The latter was a chronicle of the Norman dukes designed, together with Brut’s history of the Bretons, to promote Henry II’s Plantagenet dynasty. I conclude that Wace drew his idea of the Round Table from Einhard’s description, in his ninth-century Vita Caroli, of the tables that Charlemagne had bequeathed to his heirs. Wace’s Round Table is tributary to a pan- Christian ideology, whose ideal ruler could be represented variously as Arthur, Charlemagne, Alexander, etc., in different times and places for different political reasons. In Wace’s time St-Denis was increasingly acknowledged to be the primary spokesperson for that pan-Christian ideology. The Normans’ connections to St-Denis have their part in explaining why Henry II had asked Wace to write his Brut and Rou in Norman French. Wace assists Henry in 2