Le Morte d'Arthur

I didn't read it so much as scanned each of the chapter headings for the last 400 pages to bypass all the instances of redundant redundancy, such as the two million instances of "and man and horse fell to the earth" or the genius of "much blood they bled both, that all the place there as they fought was overbled with blood." I could never in good conscience recommend this to anyone as something to read for entertainment purposes. Malory destroys souls.

I think I read this over and over when I was a child, and when I came back to it as an adult, I still loved it. These tales are an ingrained part of western culture and are still a weather value for the rough winds of our morality.

Of course Mallory's tales of Arthur are a fifteenth century re-modelling but what glorious new dressing has been added. Each tale is a short story in its own right, and each combines effortlessly to create the picture of heroes and a kingdom in which people mattered, in which civilisation was something to strive for and not something to endure.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for Arthurian tales. They still delight and captivate me (all except the recent film version with Clive Owen and Keira Knightly) and I'm glad show more they do. We all know right and wrong is more complex than in Mallory's tales, but at least he makes living up to even simple choices filled with hurdles and pitfalls. Maybe that's why they work, because every hero wears his failings as openly as he wears his sword and shield. show less

I know Le Mort d'Arthur is supposed to be a great classic and the definitive Arthur, but damn it, I'm 377 pages in and I can't do it anymore. It is just too much of the same flipping story over and over and over and over again. And not just the same story (knight jousts with knight), but almost the same exact wording with each battle.

The only thing to have sparked my interest in about 200 pages was this line: "The King Arthur overtook her [a false lady and sorceress], and with the same sword he smite off her head, and the Lady of the Lake took up her head and hung it up by the hair to her saddle-bow." THAT is pretty damn awesome, but it's also just one line out of all those 200 pages, and it made me long for a Lady of the Lake story, show more not more and more of these knights smacking each other around and talking about how knightly and courtly they are because they are big strong men who can politely knock another guy off a horse.

I am so wonderfully wroth at this book that I'm about to come at all of these damn knights like thunder and smote them down with their own damn lances. (PS. If I never see the words "wroth", "smote", or "came together like thunder" again, it will be too soon.) Seriously, don't these guys have anything better to do than run around the forests or hang out a bridges and joust with each other? Isn't there farming or something to be done? Anything? Please? I mean, I'll read about the wheat in the fields at this point.

Did I also mention that it's over 900 pages? Well, it is, and apparently this is the SHORT version. The other version is in like three volumes or something. Since it's getting the point that I'm starting to hate Arthur and his knights, I need to just put in the towel and read something — anything — else for a while.

Right now, I'm really looking forward to rereading Simon Armitag's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, because I need something to remind me why I used to love Arthurian stories so much. show less

The first time I read this I was a college student immersed in literature. I loved the language and imagery, truly felt transported to another time and place. With this second reading I see James Bond. Arthur roams the countryside, bedding/leaving damsels, fighting/killing whatever gets in his way, getting himself wrapped up in conspiracies and evil plots, all without losing his smirk. OK, maybe Malory doesn't mention the smirk, but you know it's there.

I agree with the reviewer who said this is not for the faint of heart, and few general readers are going to find this a great read. If you're looking for an absorbing, entertaining read with characters you can relate to and root for, you're absolutely, positively in the wrong place. Read instead Arthurian novels such as T.H. White's The Once and Future King or Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy. There are countless other such novels inspired by this material worth reading, and I've read a lot of them.

But I did find it interesting at times going through this, one of the ur-texts as it were of Arthurian legend. There are other, earlier works of Arthurian literature: Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain (1136), Chrétien show more de Troyes's Arthurian Romances in the 12th century and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival in the 13th century are among the most notable. But Malory drew from several sources, so much so he's often described more as the "compiler" than the author of the work. I own a edition in two volumes that comes close to 1,000 pages. So this is an exhaustive resource of all sorts of facets of the legend. The story of Tristram and Iseult is here, for instance.

And this is a medieval work, so it's imbued with its assumptions and attitudes. Obviously a source of outrage to some reviewers, and even by the standards of the time, comparing this to how women are treated in say Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales--well, women don't come off well here. Misogyny abounds. And knights are held up as paragons who commit a lot of heinous acts and just plain WTF. A lot is repetitive and a slog--as one reviewer put it too much is "joust, joust, joust." And this was written about half-way between Chaucer and Shakespeare. With the spelling regularized it's quite readable, much more so than unmodernized Chaucer. But with those that choose to preserve the archaic words, that means wading through words such as "hight" (is called) and "mickle" (much). And there's just so much that can be excused by, well, "it's the times"--I found plenty of medieval writers who were wonderful reads, and just plain more humane: Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer. I can't see Malory as their equal--not remotely. But as a fan of Arthurian literature and someone fascinated by the Middle Ages, this did from time to time have its fascinations. show less

Full disclosure, I did not actually make it through reading this book - I only read to page 235 before I gave up and focused on enjoying Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations. Malory may have been the driving force behind expanding the Arthurian mythos to include more adventures about King Arthur’s knights and in romanticising the ideals of medieval chivalry, but unfortunately that doesn’t make up for the fact that his writing style is completely obtuse and unpleasant to read. It’s amazing what punctuation (especially punctuation and formatting that’s tied to dialogue) will do for readability, and how a lack-there-of presents a barriere which modern readers are not going to enjoy. Malory’s language itself isn’t exactly show more modernized, which is expected in a text coming to us from the 1400s, but in this specific edition which was published in the 1890s (mine is a modern facsimile republication of course) I expected at least a modicum of modernization.

Yet my goal in purchasing this specific edition wasn’t really to read the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, anyways. I’m pretty familiar with the majority of Arthurian lore already, and to a certain extent expected that the readability of this volume wasn’t going to be its shining glory; like most purchasers of this weighty book (I imagine), I got it because it reprinted in its entirety Aubrey Beardsley’s first major collection of literary artwork. Compared to some of Beardsley’s later work, the Arthurian collection does have a few downfalls: its scope is far too large for the young artist, and readers can tell that his creativity was taxed by the sheer number of titling pieces he had to produce. Yet the larger illustrations, even those which don’t depict specific scenes from the tales, are wonderful examples of Beardsley’s mastery of composition, linework, and balance of negative and positive space. Even though the smaller compositions quickly become repetitive and stray from depicting the chapters they’re assigned to that doesn’t stop them from being great examples of Beardsley’s unique style of art and a showcase of his artistic experimentation in book illustration. There’s something intrinsically attractive about books which include titling artwork, so I’m glad that the publisher chose to utilize this method to enhance his publication - even though it wasn’t particularly popular at the time or a guaranteed success when other methods of illustration were undoubtedly more popular. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #56: Le Morte d'Arthur (1485), by Sir Thomas Malory

The story in a nutshell:
Compiled between the 1450s and '70s but not published for the first time until 1485, Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur was this scholar and member of Parliament's attempt to collect together all the various myths that existed at the time concerning King Arthur -- stories that almost definitely started with a very real warrior show more chieftain in southwest England during the end times of the Roman Empire, but that a thousand years of oral history had ended up saddling with a whole series of implausible details, from a main adviser who was a witch to a magical sword given to him by a ghostly woman who lives at the bottom of a lake, even to the idea that he and his generals managed to actually find the "Holy Grail," or in other words the cup that Jesus drank out of the night before his arrest and eventual death. As such, then, and especially with this being put together right at the dawn of movable type, it was this compilation that most influenced the standardization and spread of the King Arthur myth in the 550 years since, both establishing many of its details (such as all the ones mentioned above) and laying the groundwork for more to come (such as the idea of Arthur's wife Guinevere joining a convent after cheating on him, which was introduced to the legend by Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson in the 1880s).

The argument for it being a classic:
Well, obviously there's what I just mentioned, the fact that this volume did more to popularize the King Arthur legend than perhaps anything before or since; and also like I said, along with The Canterbury Tales from these same years, this was one of the very first "bestsellers" in the English language, helping to give the citizens of the Renaissance a better idea of just what a profound thing printed type was destined to be. Unusually for this series, though, perhaps the best argument of all for why this is a classic is that it helped do no less than shape an entire national character; because for those who don't know, back in the 1800s when the countries of Europe started creating national mythologies for themselves for the first time, basically taking these old scraps of Medieval legends and then adding a bunch of new material themselves, it was to King Arthur and the shining Knights of the Round Table that England turned, elevating the half-forgotten stories until they became a metaphor for the very heart of the British Empire itself. (And never mind of course that much of the original legend originated with the French Normans who ruled the British Isles for several hundred years in the Middle Ages; although this did bother JRR Tolkien enough to get him to write Lord of the Rings, his own Europe-free version of a British creation mythology.)

The argument against:
Like many books from this period, the main argument against Le Morte d'Arthur being a classic is simply the arcane nature of its language; for while there's disagreement over whether this should be considered a late form of Middle English or an early form of Modern English, there's no doubt that it's all funny-sounding to modern ears, and constructed not like a three-act narrative tale but more like the "city census meets fairytale" approach of the Christian Bible. ("And then this small king tried to defeat Arthur, but all his armies were slaughtered; and then this small king tried to defeat Arthur, but all his armies were slaughtered; and then this small king…"). Although almost no one denies anymore the immense historical impact that this volume has had, you find plenty of people arguing that it's not worth trying to read yourself, but that you're better picking up a more modern retelling of the myth, such as Tennyson's aforementioned Idylls of the King or Thomas Hughes' 1958 The Once and Future King.

My verdict:
Although I'm glad to have a good dozen or so titles in the CCLaP 100 from before the formation of the modern novel (which is what this essay series in general mostly focuses on), I have to confess that I've so far found most of these pre-Romantic tales a real slog to actually get through, with Le Morte d'Arthur no exception (although I have to confess, it was at least fascinating to see just how closely John Boorman's 1981 blood-and-boobs take on the story, the cheesily transcendent Excalibur, actually hews to this 15th-century original). And that's why I don't have much to say about it, because I only made it through maybe 20 percent of the book before giving up, the same reason I'm not recommending it to a general audience today either. Do yourself a favor and instead pick up one of the thousands of more modern interpretations that have been done of it, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley's feminist take on the legend, 1985's The Mists of Avalon, or the Broadway musical Camelot, whose 1960 premiere is what made the term so synonymous with John Kennedy.

Is it a classic? No

(And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) show less