(7) ARTHURIAN LEGEND:

THOMAS MALORY – LE MORTE D’ARTHUR

(PETER ACKROYD – THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR 2010)

 

For mine is the grail quest –

round table & siege perilous

fisher king & waste land

bleeding lance & dolorous stroke

adventurous bed & questing beast

 

In my Top 10 Mythologies, I nominate one strand of Celtic mythology as foremost in familiarity and fascination for me – the legend of King Arthur, as part of the so-called Matter of Britain or legendary history of the Kings of Britain.

And one source of that legend stands foremost among them all – Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (or Mallory) in the fifteenth century, as “the definitive version of Arthurian legend in popular culture, at least for the English-speaking world”, or dare I say it, the once and future king…of Arthurian legend.

That’s pretty impressive for a version written about a millennium or so after the legendary historical setting of its subject in sub-Roman Britain. In large part that was because it was effectively a codification – what TV Tropes calls an adaptation distillation – of the works of its “many, many literary predecessors, including multiple layers of retcons and crossovers”.

Among those predecessors were the various French texts, from which surprisingly many elements we now associate with Arthurian legend originated – and which I’m sure is the Arthurian in-joke behind the obnoxious French soldiers in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

That might account for the gratuitous French title – or more precisely medieval Anglo-Norman French title – translating to The Death of Arthur. Despite that title, the books otherwise “in a form of Late Middle English virtually indistinguishable from Early Modern English (if you modernize the spelling, what you get is virtually indistinguishable from the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare’s day)” – although pronounced very differently due to the great vowel shifts between medieval and modern English.

In turn, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has been almost endlessly adapted since, although my favorite adaption remains cinematic rather than literary – the 1981 film Excalibur, just narrowly ahead of the aforementioned Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which funnily enough still remains one of the most faithful adaptations to Arthurian legend).

So once again of course I rank Arthurian legend in general and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur in particular as special mention by subject for my Top 10 Mythology Books. Books on the subject already feature as entries in my top ten or special mentions by book. There’s the second volume of Bulfinch’s Mythology for the Age of Chivalry. More generally, Barbara Walker’s Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets as well as the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols have numerous entries on subjects of Norse mythology.

And yes – I don’t claim to have read Malory in his Late Middle English but instead prefer the adaptations to Modern English, of which there is a long list. Just to name my personal favorites – Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.

Hence also the keynote entry for this special mention – Peter Ackroyd’s The Death of King Arthur.

 

RATING:
A-TIER (TOP TIER)