Linking medieval and modern Arthurian traditions stands Sir Thomas Malory. Varied medieval literary traditions are gathered in his Morte Darthur (1485), drawing on French and English work, and once more combining many romance narratives inside the saga frame. He starts by condensing the post-Vulgate Merlin but follows it, as no French source does, with the story of Arthur’s war on Rome taken from the English alliterative Morte, without its tragic ending. Then he fills the massive middle of his book with a very short Lancelot romance out of the huge French prose Lancelot, apparently invents a Gareth romance, and then drifts into the Tristram story. After many pages he abandons this to start a powerful final sequence. The Grail story asserts the Christian virtues as in its source, the Queste (perhaps linking with, even explaining, Malory’s choice of the highly Christian post-Vulgate Merlin to begin), but it also elevates Lancelot who, though a moral failure, is still “the best earthly knight.” The last two sequences are the “Lancelot and Guinevere,” a skillfully assembled and invented sequence that shows the steady darkening of events around the lovers, though also maintaining their inherent nobility, then “The Death of Arthur” retells the familiar story with some fine new speeches in which characters reflect on their situation. The whole culminates in a calm—and so highly memorable—account of the mysterious passing of Arthur and, staying with Lancelot to the end, shows how he and Guinevere atone for their sins.
Both a very late manuscript and a very early printed book, with a driving coordinate narrative style that can also pause for subordinated subtlety, especially in the late speeches that Malory adds, his hugely influential Arthuriad is not a single unity, nor is it simply didactic in its meanings. Its creative multiplicity has given it enormous impact over time, though there was a fallow period as Malory, like Arthur, became somewhat recessive from the time that the Renaissance scholar Polydore Vergil rejected the historical claims of Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Puritan Roger Ascham found Malory contained “bold bawdry and open manslaughter.”
World History
