Le Morte D'Arthur (Volume 1) by Sir Thomas Malory

*contains spoilers*


As with an awful lot of Medieval texts, Malory’s incredible collection of tales of knight errantry, Le Morte D’Arthur, is heavily indebted to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (or A History of the Kings of Britain), which also features, I might add, the Leir which Shakespeare eventually took as his own, troubled, titular King Lear. But more than anything else, Malory’s key inspiration was quite possibly his incarceration in London’s Newgate Prison for some rather violent and lurid crimes, during which time he wrote the tales in light of his own situation as a “knight prisoner” (his own words, there). Well, this is part speculation. There are several Malorys of this period who could also have written this expansive collection, but this incarcerated Malory is the one that seems to hold most water among many historians of British Medieval literature.


The version I read is one based on William Caxton’s only-remaining printed edition published in 1484, and was the result of Caxton’s efforts to normalise Malory’s combination of British alliterative and French romantic sources into one, flowing, and cohesive whole. The result, to our contemporary eyes (and possibly ears), is a nicely sewed and yet discernibly patched tapestry, but Caxton did his work admirably, as is attested with the recently discovered Winchester College manuscript. There are moments when Caxton finds it impossible to veer from the alliterative (“there are two brethren beyond the sea, and they be kings both…and that one hight King Ban of Benwick…”), and likewise the French syntax (“This meanwhile Sir La Cote Male Taile sank right down upon the earth, what forwounded and what forbled he might not stand…”) of the original source materials, but it was enriching to experience these echoes along the way.


This volume is of course only half the story, but its breadth is breathtaking. We are guided through Arthur’s lineage and its already shaky and incestuous grounds, and the end is implied before the first book (of nine in this volume) is even completed. We have, as well as Arthur, the tales of Merlin, Gawain, Guenever, Tristram, Isoud, Launcelot, Palomides, Uwain, Morgan Le Fay, Kay, et al to savour and judge. It really is such a treat. Volume 2 is on its way!

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