Two Shorter Accounts of the Trojan War: The Seege of Troye & The Rawlinson Prose Siege of Troy: A Modern Translation

In medieval Britain, the works of Homer were practically unknown. In his absence, the half-remembered story of the Trojan War took on a distinctly Arthurian flavour, with the heroes Achilles and Hector reimagined as armoured knights on horseback, duelling with broadsword and lance.

The earliest known account of the Trojan War in the English language is the Seege of Troye: an anonymous minstrel poem of the early fourteenth century, loosely based on the Excidio Trojae Historia of Dares Phrygius and the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure. Fresh from his 2018 translation of John Lydgate’s 30,000-line epic Troy Book, D. M. Smith now turns his attention to this lighter and more vernacular work, presenting its first translation into Modern English.

Smith provides the full MS. Lincoln’s Inn 150—most complete of the four surviving manuscripts of the Seege of Troye—with supplementary material from the extensively-rewritten MS. Harley 525. Also included is a modern translation of the Rawlinson Prose Siege of Troy—a fifteenth-century redaction of Lydgate’s Troy Book, and the oldest English prose account of the Trojan War—here published for the first time alongside its metrical namesake. Both texts are heavily annotated, with a detailed introduction placing them within the wider “Troy” canon of the Middle Ages and classical antiquity.