The truth is that these Middle Engl

The truth is that these Middle English texts have come into existence by a process which is quite foreign to modern literature. The scholar’s ideal of accuracy in translation, the historian’s ideal of fidelity to a document, and the artist’s ideal of originally, are all alike absent from the minds of Laamon and Johan. In one way they seem enslaved to their originals; it never occurs to them to break these up and melt the slivers down and forge out of them an essentially new work. But in another way their treatment of them is very cavalier. They do not hesitate to supplement them from their own knowledge and, still more, from their own imagination—touching them up, bringing them more fully to life.23