Thoughts on Mallory's "Le Morte d'Arthur"

Somewhere in the midst of the vast word-castle that is Le Morte d'Arthur, one of our questing knights is told, "Here lies the Forest of Strange Adventures. But beware, for within ye may well encounter Strange Adventures." 

Which perfectly captures, for me, the mood of the vast bulk of this book: whimsical, somewhat childish, but with a brave determination to squeeze the by-then vast tradition of Arthur and his court for every ounce of entertainment. Arthur famously refused to sit down to feast until some adventure should happen, and Malory is like him; he demands a strange and thrilling tale on every page, preferably with multiple deaths and many pretty damsels.

I started listening to this vast book because I was in the field for a whole week hundreds of miles from home, necessitating many hours of driving, and thus something of epic length to listen to; plus, my youngest daughter was assigned part of it in her first pre-modern English lit class, and I was somewhat ashamed never to have read it. 

Malory finished the manuscript of this work around 1470; it was published by Caxton in 1485, making it one of the first non-religious, non-classical works printed in England. The identity of the author is obscure, since there were at least six different Sir Thomas Malorys in 15th-century England. Caxton provides a clue by informing us that the book was written in prison. This once pointed experts to Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel, Warwickshire, who was imprisoned several times for crimes that included attempting to murder the first Duke of Buckingham, sacking and pillaging a monastery, and multiple rapes; he also escaped from prison several times. This was the time of the nasty politics we call The Wars of the Roses, so it is hard to tell from our perspective to what extent Malory was a plain criminal and two what extent a hired political henchman. But then records were found that seemed to indicate that Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was born in 1393, which would have made him awfully old by 1470, and so that consensus evaporated, and we are left with uncertainty and doubt. 

Whoever he was, our Malory must have whiled away his years in prison retelling the stories of Arthur and his knights. He freely confesses that he copied them from French books, and many of his sources have been identified. Arthurian chivalry was by his time centuries old, and Malory's goal was to pass on this lore, not change it.

My overwhelming reaction to this book is to marvel at how much tastes in entertainment have changed since Mallory's time. The top Arthurian knights are superheroes able to defeat whole fields of lesser men, but they lack the sort of strange traits and tragic backstories that distinguish modern superheroes. On the contrary they are all pretty much the same – they fight the same way, dress the same way, and they have the same virtues (courage, loyalty, courtesy) and the same vices (pride, anger). All fight scenes are described in exactly the same way. I skipped several chapters of this questing and fighting, thinking I had heard enough.

The two pieces of the story that are somewhat different come at the beginning and the end: at the beginning, the birth of Arthur, Merlin's meddling, and the Sword in the Stone thing, and at the end, the fall of Camelot. Mallory relates Arthur's boyhood in pretty much the way you remember it. But Arthur's fall is an utter mess of a story. In this version Arthur basically lets Gawain bully him into a pointless war with Lancelot – pointless because it starts when Lancelot is accused of being the lover of Queen Guinevere, but it isn't true, so it's all just a dumb mistake that leads us into fifty more fights between knights, each exactly like all the others, and the fall of Arthur and Camelot for nothing. Mordred doesn't even come across as much of a traitor. 

Listening to this folly I felt my boredom warring with my frustration.

My recommendation is that if you have any interest in Arthur you stick to modern versions that conform better to our idea of what a story is supposed to be.